PCBA Service Review – Comparing PCBWay vs LocoPCB vs PCBGogo vs Seeedstudio

Daniel Eichhorn @ blog.squix.org, shares his experience with some popular PCBA services and documents his finding on his blog. He writes:

Until recently I believed that having PCBs assembled by a professional service is either too costly for small batches or not possible at all. That was until I realized that some PCB manufacturers offer an additional assembly service (PCBA) and that their minimum order quantity (MOQ) is often very low. But which service should you use for future prototypes and market tests?

So I decided to pick a handful of PCBA services and order the same small board from them. Placing the same order with different services should allow me to compare quality, speed and costs between the different services.

In this post, I’m going to compare four assembly services for printed circuit boards. I got quotes from four services but placed orders with only three of them. One service (Seeedstudio) was simply too expensive for my little experiment.

All four services have a combined PCB/PCBA service. The services first manufacture the printed circuit boards and then they use the boards in a second stage to solder the components. Before you place the order you have to define the job with a couple of form fields. The required documents vary slightly from service to service but basically, you have to deliver Gerber files for the PCB stage and a detailed bill of material (BOM) in CSV or Excel format.

Two services also required a file which describes how to position the components with a pick-and-place machine, sometimes referred to as centroid files. CAD tools often can export this information. Eagle CAD, for instance, can do this with a few simple steps.

In the following paragraphs, I will describe the four services. At the end of this post, I will compare them side by side.

PCBA Service Review – Comparing PCBWay vs LocoPCB vs PCBGogo vs Seeedstudio – [Link]

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