This is really cool. I wonder if it would make hand assembly worth it for small runs of products? PCBs are already so cheap that assembly is by far the biggest cost of making anything on a circuit board.
Chinese PCBA services are relatively affordable for short runs. Unless you place a very low value on your time (a reasonable choice if you're doing it for fun) or need a one-off prototype in a hurry, you should probably just use a service like Seeed Fusion.
It's a tradeoff. I hand assemble all my boards. I try to keep minimal finished-goods inventory, so that means build to order if I don't estimate quantities right. The latency of a contract manufacturer would be unacceptable in this case.
What sort of prices and run sizes are we talking about?
Let's say I had a board about as complicated as an Arduino Leonardo, and I wanted 10 prototype boards populated. Roughly how much should I expect to spend?
I ended up doing my last 10 boards by hand because the minimum price is too high now, it starts at $141, no matter how few pads you take.
Two years ago I got 20 boards incl. pcb and parts for $120, each had 46 SMD pads to be soldered! 3 cent per pad, 46 pads per board, 20 boards and $30 minimum fee for soldering. $51.60 in parts (20 atmegas, resistors and caps are free), $20 PCBs, $8.40 shipping. That was fantastic!
Does anybody know a cheaper PCBA service? Seeed and itead were not better than Elecrow...
You can get an instant quote from nine different services at PCB Shopper. For a run of 10, you'd be looking at $12-$17 per board for something like the Leonardo. That falls to about $4 per board for a run of 100 and $1 per board for 1000.
