I searched this forum but didn’t see any threads related to PCB prototyping with Olimex. Has anyone used them here?
I was going to use PCB-Pool but even if I do without silkscreens and solder masks, it’ll cost about 60 euro. Olimex appear to be able to do my board with silkscreen and solder mask for about 30 euro, which is a bit more affordable for a hobby project.
The only thing is I’m a bit stumped by two of their design rules at http://www.olimex.com/pcb/pcb-FAQ.html, and they don’t seem to have a pre-order contact to discuss issues with.
They request that one has a border around the copper layers.
This sounds a bit odd, and clashes with the “Restrict” regions I put around some mounting holes, causing DRC errors. Should I discard the restrict regions (which are there due to paranoia) and keep the borders?
Should the copper borders lie exactly on the dimension marks or inside them?
They ask for text on each layer to help avoid mirrored layers. Fair enough, but do they really mean to put text in drill, soldermask etc?
Thanks for any advice or experience you can share!
I have used them before for some boards and I think the hardest part of using their service is the restrictions they place on drill sizes. Their standard rack is only 6 drill bits, if I recall. If you don’t want to pay an additional fee, you’re basically going to end up modifying every part used in your design to fit those 6 drill bits. In some cases, that could translate to a lot of rework just to use their service.
For your restrict regions, you will probably have to either discard them or see about moving them to another layer that’s not used in producing the gerbers. I think the dimension markings are mostly used to make it clear to them how you want your design panelized. Getting a good PCB from them is all about clear communication, so I wouldn’t want to leave anything in the gerber files that could be misinterpreted.
I’m not sure if it’s possible to have text in the drill file, but it should be possible in the other files. It doesn’t have to be big or fancy so long as you’re text doesn’t look the same forwards and backwards. :?
To be honest I’d not be surprised if the customer service was a little abrupt at those prices! I work for an EDA vendor as an application engineer and am well aware of the cost of providing customer support…
Anyway I’ve done the hard work of updating all my components to suit their standard drill rack (bar one that cannot be changed). Was a bit of work but manageable for my size of board.
They also take Eagle board files as input so I’m hoping that they won’t be able to screw up the layers :?
Especially since converting from assorted imperial drill sizes to metric doesn’t always give a nice comfy fit for the pins, even before jiggling an extra 0.1 mm into the equation.
I thought of using Olimex a few years ago, but didn’t like the idea of faxing my credit card info. They didn’t take PayPal or have any other on-line payment service.
In my experience I didn’t have serious problems with them. I wouldn’t call them jerks, at least!
Yes, I agree that communication can be “not easy” - always VERY short emails - and there is only 1 person speaking proper english if you phone them, but once you get used to this they work well.
Always in time, good quality (just 1 board not working in 2 years of using them) and very competitive price.
For the drill size, if I am right there is a ulp on cadsoft website that fixes all drills for their standard rack.
The guys at Olimex are plain and simple, jerks. I had to deal with them one time and it was so bad I vowed to never deal with them again.
Another +1 to that. I tried to deal with them once and they were rude and did not really want to know about me.
I now just get panels made by GP when I need a board. Under $100 and I get stacks of PCB’s, or $120-130 and you can have as many boards as you want, just panelize them in eagle and your set.
I don’t see why Olimex are considered cheap anyway, last time I looked it was quite expensive for what you get. It used to be $30 or 30 euros for a (eurocard sized I think) board IIRC… not that cheap anymore.
Well, you can’t panelize in the free version of eagle, anyway. It won’t let you do a layout that large.
I’ve looked at the price of the full version and for the home hobbyist, it’s ridiculously expensive. The price doesn’t scale evenly between 1 user and 5 users, so they’re effectively penalizing the hobbyists and lowering the price for companies that have multiple engineers… or at least that’s the way it looks to me. There’s no good reason why one copy should be so much more expensive than 5 copies when you break it down to individual costs.
I used it for over 20 years, and was one of their first customers.
It’s much easier to use than Eagle, and is more affordable for hobbyists and students. The standard autorouter is better than the Eagle one, and you can upgrade to the excellent Pro-Router quite cheaply (it’s actually Electra). It’ll import Eagle designs and libraries.
The demo won’t let you save anything, it’s unlimited otherwise. They really ought to provide a 100 pin demo, like they do with their Pulsonix product. The two are marketed separately, as they are aimed at two different types of user.
I played with the program for a while and couldn’t get into it. While this statement might make some people sputter coffee on their monitor, I found it less intuitive than Eagle. Even the mouse scroll zooming, for example, was chunky and glitchy. The part library was scant. While you usually have to build a part for Eagle on most projects, at least you can count on common microcontrollers, RAM, SMD electrolytics, and many other parts.
Perhaps the awful interface hides amazing power that lets you do boards faster than Eagle, but after actually trying to use the software, I’m more inclined to pay $1000 to Cadsoft than $500 to Number One.
That’s strange, I have always found it much more intuitive and easy to use than Eagle. I haven’t tried the latest version, but the scrolling was always nice and smooth on the previous version I tried.
Well, you can’t panelize in the free version of eagle, anyway. It won’t let you do a layout that large.
Not exactly.
You only need to make a small panel which GP will “step and repeat” onto the larger panel.
So if you have say 5 small boards, arrange them into one larger board and then GP will just do multiples of that board.
Unless of course your boards are quite big, in which case you would probably want to get a whole panel for them as you won’t get too many if in a multi design panel.