I’m ready to submit my first order here, and I’m finding some odd stuff with no answers. I’m willing to experiment, but with the holiday shutdown, I don’t want to wait a month to see the results…
Is there a min price of 1 sq inch per board? I expected the $2.50/sq in rate to be applied by total area of the order, but 10x tiny boards (0.5 sq in) comes in at $25, not 12.50 (before S&H).
Are the old dimension calc bugs fixed? In the X dimension only, the tool is reporting a wider PCB than Eagle reports. Not a big issue for pricing, but I want the actual dims to match the design. (e.g., 1.0351" reported for a 0.912" board; and 1.4624" instead of 1.224") I got one for 10000x10000, so I suspect these bugs may still lurk.
(1) BatchPCB loads up a PCB into their database in single units. The minimum board size is 1in^2. If you order 10 boards, you are ordering 10 units of the PCB in their database. So, yes $25 for 10 copies of a tiny little board. I guess if you want to spend $12.50, you need to panelize the design yourself and dice the resulting single PCB. Personally, I’d rather they do it and pay the extra. $2.50 for a little board in single, or even 10 units, is a great bargain.
(2) My lastest design has one dimension spot on… The other was too big. Go figure. The design before that had both dimensions too big, but the resulting board was exactly what was specified in my GERBERs. I guess sparky is still tweaking the DRC-bot calculations.
(3) Back when we only had two layers on PCBs, mirroring the backside made sense. Today with multi-layer boards, you could mirror the backside but what to do with the internal layers. As a result, most fabhouses expect all layers to be the same orientation as the front. Sparky is no different. So, do NOT mirror the backside layers.
The boards I’ve gotten back from Sparky are as good as any others I had fabbed at much more expensive houses. The price is hard to beat. Web-store design is average. Web-store feedback is poor to bad. The PCB turnaround is terrible (about a month). As long as you plan for the long turnaround, BatchPCB is no problem.
Agreed, it’s worth having the boards cut. But this does make Sparky less competitive for orders of several tiny boards. I suppose that customer profile may be the exception than the rule, so probably not a big concern.
Ditto your experience with the dimensions - the Y axis was exact in both my examples. Since it makes no difference in cost for this batch and you say the PCBs turn out right, I won’t worry about it.
