Hello, It’s kind of scary this is happening again. I placed an order a while back and out of 3 boards, 2 of them were missing one copper layer completely. The silkscreen was there as well as the soldermask, but no copper layer.
When I tried to contact BatchPCB, surprise, no response to any email or anything. Awesome customer service I guess…
Scary because I placed another other a couple of weeks ago and can’t afford them to show up with missing copper or too much copper. This time I will put a claim with the credit card and maybe take it further. Long times and bad quality… price doesn’t pay for it.
I had this type of short on one of the boards in my last order from GP. Someone else posted this link to Seeed’s PCB service (which is crazy cheap: < $1 per 5cmX5cm board), and I think I’ll try them next:
I’ve placed three orders with ITead Studio, who use the same PCB factory as Seeed, and am very pleased with the boards I received. They typically take two weeks.
Apologies for the bad turnout with boards. We take manufacturing errors seriously. Please lets us know how we can help, contact us at Support@batchpcb.com
Problems here too! I had a board with gaps in the traces. I only noticed it on one board so far, but not until it was built. Did you get any compensation for the bad boards? Discount on reorder or something? I too send an email to support@batchpcb but no response (yet).
Not to say that you shouldn’t be compensated for the boards (which I think you certainly deserved), but you should really always try to avoid using the board house minimum possible specs. I’d guess that those are 8-10 mill traces (8-mil is min for gp and itead) where your ic looks like it has 20-24mil pads on it. I would recommend using a trace as big. This is good for lots of reasons, but when using a very low cost board house one of the best reasons is to simply avoid manufacturing errors.
as a primary note; if its within specs it really shouldn’t ever have issues. I hope you both get the issue resolved. I’ve contacted support before and they have been nothing but helpful and friendly. Hope it all works out.
Thanks for the advise. I’m an Eagle newbie and I used the Sparkfun file that sets the trace width. I will see if I can figure out how to change it. I’ve done several batches of these boards and this is the first time I’ve had any trouble. No compensation forthcoming as far as I can tell… they responded via a very short email that said they don’t offer board test. Nothing else mentioned.
