[TriEmbed] PCB:NG update

[Pete Soper]

Last night I was grousing about these guys rounding up to a minimum 
square inch (making very small boards cheaper to a great deal cheaper 
from OSH Park). This is clearly documented on their site, by the way. 
And this level of penny-pinching reminds me of a joke:

    When was copper wire invented?
    The first time two lawyers argued about who deserved a penny.

As an experiment I uploaded the charger board last night and the 4.3 
square inches scaled to an exact cost (i.e. $4.30 per board), not 
rounded to the nearest inch (also as documented). But this is for a 
minimum of six boards for a total of $25.87. From OSH Park three boards 
would be $21.55, or $7.18 each.

But in the process of doing this I took advantage of a new CAM file they 
make available to automate generation of the files they want from an 
Eagle board file. There was a bug in it. From reporting the bug today to 
having an explanation and fix for that bug was about 90 minutes. Impressive.

Also, they're extending assembly services beyond Digikey part numbers. 
For my test board above I selected this service and see that they will 
produce, assemble and ship six boards for $8 to $12/inch or 
$207.02-$310.54. So, optimistically knowing this is the opposite of a 
dense, difficult to make board, $34.50 per board. Coincidentally all the 
parts for this board are going to be sourced from Digikey. So in theory 
I could try these guys out and end up with six boards. I haven't made 
the BOM yet, but guestimate the all in price would be $50-55 per board 
all in with Q10 prices.

I wonder how this compares with what a local business could do for very 
small quantities?

What I'm actually going to do when I implement Shane's new feature 
requests and get the last few nits out of the layout is to get three 
boards from OSH Park and a stencil from OSH Stencils, assemble one, test 
the stuffings out of it, then assemble the other two with ECOs or go 
straight to a respin (or, with real luck, declare the thing good enough 
and go to Elecrow for 20 v-grooved boards and a metal stencil for $38).

Still, I thought others might find this interesting and some might find 
the assembly service desirable for cases where you need all the details 
of that to stay out of your face. Oh, except there's one "in your face" 
detail, which is that with this service *you* tell their software how 
you want your components placed. I played with the GUI tools for this 
for a few minutes but can't say how painful that might be. I suspect 
it's the case that for garden variety packages it's very straight 
forward, but for something weird they've never even imagined it could 
get very involved.

The other total unknown is what sort of testing they offer. I'll leave 
that for somebody else to research.

-Pete