I was wondering if anyone here has used Oshpark.com for board fabrication. A couple weeks ago I asked some questions there about if they might offer SMT stencils and/or project sharing and I haven’t received a reply.
As far as I know they don’t, but to be honest, I never tried. I know they don’t share like BatchPCB did. Laen did state that he was going to start though.
I learned about OSHPark from the forum here and have now used them on four boards. Service and turn around have been excellent. I have built SMT but not stencils, so I can’t answer that. I think a generic sharing site would be great but I’m not sure I would want Laen to do it. I’d rather he focused on board service. If Sparkfun would allow, they could create a forum here to share boards. Renderings from OSHPark are easy enough to copy/paste. Board layouts are easy to share and manage through github.
Just my $0.02
That’s not a bad idea.
If we can get Laen to code up something to allow a customer refer someone to one’s own designs, then the rest could be handled from sparkfun.com. Right now that crucial piece of functionality is missing.
I would suggest that Sparkfun put up a sub-forum to share schematics and board designs. I don’t know Laen has any help with OSH Park as I wouldn’t want to burden him with such a task. Would rather him keep focused on the boards.
I will post a request in the site suggestions and questions sub-forum if you guys want to post a reply to back me up…
I use OSH Park for my boards (in fact, BatchPCB merged into them), and [OHARARP for stencils - nice $25 laser-cut kapton.](http://ohararp.com/Stencils.html)
Just a heads up, www.oshstencils.com is live. It follows a similar design concept as OSH Park and is a new alternative to low cost PCB stencils. It’s charged by the square inch, just like OSH Park does for boards.
We are not OSH Park, but we have been working closely with Laen for the last few months and he has been very supportive of us launching this new service.
We’re very excited to be contributing to the maker community and helping people explore their creative freedom with low cost solutions for prototyping and small run batches.
-B
Just a heads up, www.oshstencils.com is live. It follows a similar design concept as OSH Park and is a new alternative to low cost PCB stencils. It’s charged by the square inch, just like OSH Park does for boards.
We are not OSH Park, but we have been working closely with Laen for the last few months and he has been very supportive of us launching this new service.
We’re very excited to be contributing to the maker community and helping people explore their creative freedom with low cost solutions for prototyping and small run batches.
-B
Awesome. I’ve been looking for something like this and the “most affordable” option I could find was well over $20 (compared to your $8.95). Will definitely be placing an order once the design is finalized!
I use OSHPark any time I have small (<2-3" sq) boards I only want 1 or 2 of, or for SMD breakout boards. Above a couple of square inches, and the price starts getting to where I’d rather go with SeeedStudio or IteadStudio. However, the quality is great, the boards come with ENIG finish (gold plated contacts), and the turnaround is the fastest I’ve seen anywhere at the hobby level. The boards do end up with tab burrs from depanelization, but you can sand those down.