DirtyPCB has been around for quite a while now, and I gave them a couple of protopack orders way back in 2015. They are a part of Where Labs, LLC and therefore a subsidiary (partner? distant relation?) of Dangerous Prototypes. The DirtyPCB site has developed extensively since then with various manufacturing offers from laser cutting to SLA 3D prints, BOM management and, of course, PCBs.

DirtyPCB really goes out of their way to set your expectations as a customer: you should expect fully functional boards, but not exquisite quality, although sometimes exquisite quality might slip through.

Final cost for a 10 board “Protopack” in the 10cm x 10cm dimension [...]

Smart Prototyping, also known as NOA Labs, is a PCB fabricator and EMS located in Hong Kong and Shenzhen. Like many of their competitors, they provide a market place for the sales of open source hardware developed in-house and sold under the Zio and Qwiic brand names. While it has absolutely nothing to do with manufacturing, I was very happy to see that they actually published the design files and specs for their open source hardware on the Zio Github page.

As another relatively low cost fabricator, Smart Prototyping came in at $9.90 for 10 boards, 0.99USD per unit. This is the same per unit ball park as Shenzhen2U and ALLPCB. However, they charge a whopping $28.79 for [...]

ITEAD Intelligent Systems Co., LTD, also called Sonoff, is a Shenzhen based PCB fabricator and PCBA service provider. As is usual, they offer not only fabrication and assembly services, but also host a market place, the “IMALL” for boards sourced inexpensively in China or designed in-house. They also have a blog with over 450 posts dating back to 2010 that used to contain articles about things like hacking a Saleae Logic Analyzer but now is mostly about smart homes, IoT and stock photos.

The purchase price for whatever it was I purchased (as of the writing of this section, I still haven’t received confirmation that the order was for 1 or 10 boards), was [...]

Seeed Studio used to be known primarily as a retailer of Arduino clones, Raspberry Pi accessories and their line of “Grove” interconnecting breakout boards. They’ve grown out a circuit board fab, electronics assembly service, 3D printing service bureau and CNC Machining capability, and this Seeed Studio PCB Service Review will focus on their Fusion brand, targeted squarely at “global creative technologists”, independent engineers and tinkerers. While their headquarters are based in Shenzhen, they opened an office in San Francisco in 2015 and in 2017, opened offices in Nagoya, so they would seem to be trying to push the Seeed brand regionally through [...]

ALLPCB bills themselves right on their homepage as “World’s Fastest PCB Manufacturing”, and they express that the quality is “A-grade Military Material”. Their factory is located in Guangde, about 200km outside of Shanghai and no where near Shenzhen, which seems unique with so many other fabs and EMS just north of Hong Kong. ALLPCB claim to have independently developed their PCB quotation engine and the backend CRM system, while investing in top-of-the-line production and testing equipment, and hopefully this ALLPCB PCB Prototype Service Review will see if that makes a difference. Crucially, they publish four bold promises on their About Us [...]

I’ve used them for production runs in the past and had good boards spun, so I was hoping to have the same experience sending out the Test Coupon for this Elecrow PCB Review. They are another PCB Manufacturer and EMS located in Shenzhen, so competition for quality and cost is fierce.

Elecrow is at the higher end of the low cost offshore manufacturing spectrum, with a final cost of $35.43. for 10 copies of the Manufacturing Reports Test Coupon. That broke down to $2.09/unit with an additional $20.07 for expedited DHL shipping. There were no additional fees or markups for either the payment processing or [...]

This ShenZhen2U PCB Review focuses on another low cost PCB manufacturing and electronics assembly firm located in China. Their website isn’t the most sophisticated however they offer quite a wide variety of fabrication options under both their standard and premium PCB services.

As a budget PCB fab, I expected my final cost with ShenZhen2U to be on the very affordable side and I wasn’t disappointed when the final price was $9.90/10 copies of the Manufacturing Reports Test Coupon. DHL shipping was an additional $25.53 for an order total of $35.43.

There were no extra shipping or bank fees tacked onto the order, and payment was processed through [...]

PCBWay has been winning the word-of-mouth advertising game for both their PCB Fabrication and Assembly services. Many engineers I’ve spoken with have given glowing assessments of how remarkable it is to be able to order boards for pennies and have them delivered with express shipping, so it was obvious to me it was time to write a PCBWay PCB Review of their prototyping service.

PCBWay is a budget service, coming in only a few dollars more expensive than non-discounted JLCPCB (review of their PCB service here) at $24.00 even. The cost of the boards was $5.00 total for 10 copies of the Manufacturing Reports Test Coupon, and then an additional [...]

JLCPCB, JiaLiChuang PCB, is the low cost king of the prototyping world, coming in at a frankly ridiculous $0.50 per board for 10 copies of the Manufacturing Reports Test Coupon. This JLCPCB PCB Service Review will show the quality of the business service and manufacturing capability of this Chinese manufacturer. They handle prototype orders with their factory in Shenzhen and production orders fulfilled by factories in Xinyu, Shuhai and Daya Baya, so I think it’s safe to say they handle a lot of volume, but does that volume come at the expense of quality.

The total cost of the order for 10 copies of the Manufacturing Reports Test Coupon v1 [...]

As one of the best known and most well regarded PCB prototyping services in the market, I’m excited to be writing this OSH Park PCB review. Acting as an order aggregator, they panelize multiple individual orders together to reduce the manufacturing cost for boards spun with their US based manufacturing partners. One of the prime selling points of using OSH Park as a fabrication partner, is the ease of use of the ordering interface. In addition to standard Gerber file uploads, PCB design files can be directly uploaded as well from EagleCAD and KiCad.

In the 2019 round of circuit board manufacturer reviews, OSH Park was the fifth most [...]