Basically, what's your favorite PCB manufacture?
"Best" is subjective, of course, but I specifically mean to say "best" and not "cheapest". I don't necessarily care if the board house is the cheapest or not. I'm asking what the best is, all things considered. Turnaround time, quality and reliability, customer service, ease of use, et cetera.
I know this question has been asked before, and a few times on this forum, but those threads are a few years old. Sometimes the quality of a company goes down hill, or improves, or new companies spring up. So that's why I'm asking, who's the best in 2018?
I've been using OSH Park, and I really like them. But they only offer 1.6mm and 0.8mm board thicknesses, which is no good for NES or SNES carts. I've been looking at Seeed Studio and was thinking about ordering from them, but I thought I'd ask the opinions here first.
Eurocircuits in Europe is pretty good, but prepare to pay some $$$.
I had good results from the ones Ive tried, use pcbshopper.com to find manufacturers.
A few notes, the colors can differ alot between manufacturers, stick to one
some insist on putting their own serialnumber on the boards, if you care about how they look its something to be aware of.
Can't say if they're better than others or the best as I haven't used them personally. But I've heard good things about jlcpcb.com They have good prices & 1.2mm is a standard thickness they offer. AFAIK the only way to get 1.2mm boards with reasonable pricing is going through China.
I've used MyroPCB since 2005 or so, though I've only had a couple designs in (relatively) large quantity. They've always been great, for bare boards, assembly service, answering my questions, everything. One thing I noticed in recent years is they aren't trying to compete with the super-cheap-protos anymore. 10+ years ago you could order an NES board proto from them, including shipping to US for like $75 and I thought that was amazing. Now several places offer a similar deal. If their other customers are like me, they probably haven't had any trouble keeping them around. Myro's setup costs aren't so cheap anymore, but it's fine for production and you get what you pay for. So for small orders (like protos) I've been going with pcbway, the boards really don't look as good but they are (so far) good enough to do the job. I do QA on electronic controls at work, and I've certainly seen worse (I'm the sucker who has to discover and correct all their screw-ups).
I've heard good things about jlcpcb also, haven't tried them yet. pcbshopper is pretty neat, doesn't cover every manufacturer but it's pretty interesting.
You'll probably want to be sure you're getting boards that have been electrically tested. If you're not sure, usually you can just look at the pads. If you see little indentations in them, that's from the testing. Ordering untested boards is a complete waste of time IMHO (unless it's an extremely simple project/design). What seperates the good from the bad manufacturers isn't exactly the lack of screw-ups, but the actual QA and testing that stops the bad ones from even going out the door.
Good point, the best choice also depends on what you're doing. Prototyping, small production run, large production run.
Initiating Nesdev teleportation (tm)... If I was looking to have custom cables made, where would I look?
My first idea was to ask on Aliexpress, sellers doing similar cables might be able to do so, but there's questions of quality if they're just middlemen instead of related to the actual factory.
Try to check Alibaba for those kind of stuff.