I needed to fabricate some PCBs. I’ve seen some youtubers to advertise and recommend this service so I decided to give it a try. My order was done without using any affiliation link or discount code so there was no way for them to know who I am. I needed to create a microSD breakout board and luckily I found a similar OSHw project and only made some modifications: https://github.com/danielkucera/MicroSD_Sniffer . I prepared my board in Eagle and generated gerber files.
After uploading a zip with gerber files to JLCPCB I’ve got offered 10 PCBs together for $2 PLUS! $5.3 for the cheapest shipping so $0.73 per one. This didn’t make sense to me so I increased the quantity to 50 what gave me a total price of $14.60 => $0.29 per one. If I compare it to a local service (www.plosnaky.cz), they offered a price 170Kc/10pcs = $7.5 which was roughly the same but 709Kc/50pcs = $31.3. On the other hand, last time I used plosnaky.cz, the board was in my mailbox within a week but since the JLCPCB shipping cost was so high, I though it might come from China in two weeks too (I’ve seen such delivery times for some of my other orders from China in the past).
The order went well and I could watch my order in their portal:
So I was waiting and watching production process:
When it finally arrived, I was a little bit disappointed by the shipping time of about 1 month:
But the packaging was very nice:
And the final product:
They’ve added some strange code into the top silkscreen but it doesn’t matter much to me. Overall, I’m really satisfied with the result, the only small issue is a unevenly applied solder mask but it has no effect on it’s function.
So for me it was a good deal and I recommend you to use their services. If you want one of these boards (as I have plenty of them 🙂 ) drop me a line.
Got my first order back from JLCPCB couple weeks ago , and am similarly pleased. Could not figure out what I did, but got free shipping to USA, so 10 small boards cost me 5$US. Ordered on a Sunday evening and received following Friday, so my turn-around time was really fast. However, it would be stretch of imagination to grade these as even IPC-Class 2 boards, so think they are going after the hobby market full-on. Why did I wait so long to send out for my own boards? ;(
Lucky to see your blog. as far as I know, JLCPCB is completely hobby grade, the biggest difference is the base material and the copper weight, we can’t feel easily about the material difference but the copper weight really affect a lot about the durable ability, I’d got PCB with 9um wall copper which is 18 um min for IPC-Class 2. I can say 5$ PCB don’t comply with IPC CLASS 2 in every vendor. I use UNIKPCB, it comply with IPC-Class 2 except 5$ offer. I got one tip to confirm if it’s IPC-Class 2 boards. ask the vendor to provide micro-section. hobby grade vendor won’t provide you that .
Just ran my very first job with JLCPCB. I am very pleased with the result, 50 pieces 62x42mm 2 layer for about 14 Euros in total turnaround of 3 weeks to Germany, that was far beyond my best hopes!