I placed an order on December 31st, It still says the order is processing. Is that an unusually long amount of time to not get an order? The boards where pretty small, about a 1sq/in. do smaller boards usually take longer, or have less priority? Just wondering.
Mine sits in “processing” since the 22nd of December. I sent e-mail to support yesterday, hoping to hear from them tomorrow.
I plan on waiting about a month for my orders - which are 2 layer designs. I do wonder sometimes if single sided boards are more popular and turn around faster than 2 layers.
Aren’t the single sided boards sent out on the same pallets as the two layer boards?
We are talking about BatchPCB here, right? I was under the impression that they only do 2-layer and 4-layer boards. So anything single-sided would be treated the same as a 2-layer board.
My understanding is that smaller boards might get placed on a panel sooner than others if they can be used to fill in gaps. Once the panel goes to the manufacturer though, it’s all the same – the whole panel will be sent to BatchPCB in one shipment. The manufacturing process seems to be the part that takes the longest, so I wouldn’t expect smaller boards to get done more than a couple of days sooner than other boards at best. I don’t know of any reason that larger boards would be given priority over smaller boards.
Take a look at the last couple months of BatchPCB news posts. They have noted at least a few times that they are experiencing delays due to the holiday season. The Chinese New Year is included in this, so the “holiday season” lasted longer than a lot of people (i.e. us westerners) realized. So to answer the original question, yes you have been waiting longer than usual, but this is not entirely unexpected given the time of year.
There is hope! There have been a couple of recent news posts stating that things are finally getting back on schedule. In fact, yesterday they received a big shipment of panels. Hooray! (I’ve been waiting too.)
In fact, I just received an email a few hours ago. I placed my order on Jan 12th, so just about a month.
==============================
Dear ,
Your order has been shipped!
Shipping Method:
United States Postal Service PRIORITY
Estimated Transit time: 2 - 3 Days
Delivery Address:
Thank You for placing an order with us!
If you have any questions please email support at support@batchpcb.com
Thank You,
BatchPCB Customer Service
I got mine shipped also.
It shipped yesterday so I should probably get it tomorrow or saturday.
I placed my first order on February 4th, and it’s still sitting on “Paid”… is that normal? Based on the example in the FAQ, I was kind of expecting it to be “Panelized” by now?
Mine took a LONG time too. They were also about 1sq In.
Oh man… I hope I’m not waiting 3 months for mine… ugh.
I would also vote that improving turn-around would be at the top of my list. I think we all want very much for this to succeed, and rather than carping, I would propose offering at least two tiers of service.
If Batch offered a slightly lower price for slow-turnaround and higher-price for faster orders, it could better meet its goal of full orders. By having a larger backlog of price-sensitive requests, Batch could fill a few full panels twice a week.
In particular, Batch could create a higher-volume discount. say a price break at 30 boards, or 30 sqin. but with longer turn around. These boards could become filler for the prototype panels. As it is, I think Batch is encouraging its customers to go native on the production runs.
P.S. I’d also like to be able to throw a few Sparkfun gadgets into the same shipping box.
As an update, my order status changed to “Processing” today - apparently, the last two weeks have been very busy.
I also think it would be awesome to have SparkFun parts in the box when the boards get here. In fact, I’ve got a SparkFun order and a BatchPCB order right now…
SFE has stated that if you want/need a fast turn-around, you should use a different service. If it were me, I would look at this list and make a choice based on the comments from other users in these forums:
http://opencircuits.com/PCB_Manufacturers
My experience has been that BatchPCB typically takes about a month from the time I place the order until I have boards in my mailbox. I plan for this. I usually design a board immediately after the basic prototyping stage, submit the order, and then drop the project to work on something different while I’m waiting.
The Solution – LPKF Plotters
I’ll assume for a moment that you don’t work for the company that produces LPKF Plotters.
The question that you raise is how many boards could I order from an external source with the money that would be required to purchase the LPKF plotter? For the average hobbyist which frequents these forums, that’s a lot of prototype boards!
Nice suggestion, but I don’t think it’s cost effective. It would be better to do the typical photo-resist and etch process at home than to purchase this machine if time is really that much of a problem, imho.