Author Topic: Any experience with JLC PCB house in china?  (Read 69060 times)

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Offline sukuTopic starter

  • Contributor
  • Posts: 46
  • Country: hu
Any experience with JLC PCB house in china?
« on: February 26, 2018, 12:32:29 pm »
https://jlcpcb.com/

I see JLC PCB sponsored videos all over youtube, their prices are crazy low, so I was wondering if their boards were any good...

I'm have to order a batch of couple hundred boards and the their price calculator gave me 45% lower price than PCBWay. (129x81mm 1.6mm 1oz etc.)

If anyone has experience with JLCPCB, please share it below, I'm looking forward to hearing from you guys!
 

Offline TheUnnamedNewbie

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 1208
  • Country: 00
  • mmwave RFIC/antenna designer
Re: Any experience with JLC PCB house in china?
« Reply #1 on: March 01, 2018, 08:22:08 am »
I recently ordered a set of 10 4-layer boards from them. They should arrive any moment, so I'll try to remember to share the experience here.
The best part about magic is when it stops being magic and becomes science instead

"There was no road, but the people walked on it, and the road came to be, and the people followed it, for the road took the path of least resistance"
 

Offline josip

  • Regular Contributor
  • *
  • Posts: 149
  • Country: hr
Re: Any experience with JLC PCB house in china?
« Reply #2 on: March 01, 2018, 01:34:00 pm »
BTW, here is 2 weeks old review, with hi-res board picture.
https://idyl.io/2018/02/11/jlcpcb-prototype-pcbs-review/
 

Offline hcglitte

  • Regular Contributor
  • *
  • Posts: 137
Re: Any experience with JLC PCB house in china?
« Reply #3 on: March 01, 2018, 02:29:46 pm »
I have also ordered 10 large 4 layer boards with ENIG and some QFN footprints. I wonder if they manage to have solder mask between the pins.

I have previously used PCBCART for the same board, so will be interesting to see...

However, I just received an email that they wanted to alter my stencil file,
even though I told them in the notes that they must keep the apertures unchanged.
May be a language barrier...

This happens all the time regardless of where I order from. I just cannot understand that they want to do changes to it
even though I state in many different ways that they must not alter it in any way!!! My apertures are reduced and fine as they are.

Also, there is no select-box to choose stencil thickness. So you have to write this in the notes.

 

Offline usagi

  • Frequent Contributor
  • **
  • Posts: 390
  • Country: us
Re: Any experience with JLC PCB house in china?
« Reply #4 on: March 02, 2018, 12:43:37 am »
I switched to jlcpcb from oshpark.

jlcpcb have incredibly quick turnaround times for me. I submit order sunday and receive boards thursday. dhl shipping, $18. boards are really cheap. i suspect the quick turnaround time is because while oshpark outsources to manufacturers, jlcpcb IS the manufacturer. i have a weekly cadence going with them where i receive a board, hack on it for a couple days, make pcb changes in easyeda and submit new boards for the upcoming week. i have a bunch of projects going in parallel so i almost always have some order to submit for the coming week.

their loss leader is 2 layer 1oz copper fr4 green boards. as long as you stick with that the boards are super cheap. they don't charge extra for silkscreen on bottom of a 2 layer board.

I also started using their part service, lcsc.com. for the components I buy, they end up being a fraction of the cost of mouser or digikey parts. yes, they tend to be Chinese parts but for my hobbyist stuff it largely doesn't matter.

the nice thing about the boards is that they come fully machined and clean, unlike the oshpark boards which still have the panelizing snapoff bits on them.

i also like the integration with easyeda, it is basically three clicks from schematic -> pcb -> order. they obviously want to make it easy to spend money with them.  ;D

here's a really simple board I did with easyeda and ordered from jlcpcb.
« Last Edit: March 02, 2018, 12:48:45 am by usagi »
 
The following users thanked this post: josip

Offline soubitos

  • Frequent Contributor
  • **
  • Posts: 352
  • Country: gr
    • I sell on Tindie
Re: Any experience with JLC PCB house in china?
« Reply #5 on: March 02, 2018, 12:59:49 am »
I use them for all my projects. I also buy parts from them (LCSC). Their PCBs are excellent and they have parts "western" vendors dont stock. They have a good range of "western" branded parts too and also Japanese Korean etc which are all the real deal as far as i can tell...
 

Offline TheUnnamedNewbie

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 1208
  • Country: 00
  • mmwave RFIC/antenna designer
Re: Any experience with JLC PCB house in china?
« Reply #6 on: March 02, 2018, 11:59:38 am »
I got my boards yesterday and I am very satisfied with them. I was expecting the silkscreen to be lower quality, but it looks pretty good for the price. Will look at ordering from them again in the future.
The best part about magic is when it stops being magic and becomes science instead

"There was no road, but the people walked on it, and the road came to be, and the people followed it, for the road took the path of least resistance"
 
The following users thanked this post: Inverted18650

Offline Inverted18650

  • Frequent Contributor
  • **
  • Posts: 875
  • Country: us
    • Test Gear Addicts
Re: Any experience with JLC PCB house in china?
« Reply #7 on: March 03, 2018, 05:02:46 pm »
I work with JLCPCB and I love them. The software is intuitive and easy for beginners to take the leap into PCB design and the board house is always quick to get them done and shipped. I like the combined shipping through LCSC as well. I just ordered a new project with a stencil and I am excited to do some reflow work. My next project is going to be a panelized design for various breakout boards and maybe even a new "EE ruler". If you have any questions specific questions, I will do my best to answer them.

I have also been pondering a new LED-style microscope bezel light. If anyone has an ideas I would love to hear them. 

Offline TheUnnamedNewbie

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 1208
  • Country: 00
  • mmwave RFIC/antenna designer
Re: Any experience with JLC PCB house in china?
« Reply #8 on: March 03, 2018, 05:54:51 pm »
Here is a picture of one of my boards in the test setup. I designed the board in Altium, not in EasyEDA.

The best part about magic is when it stops being magic and becomes science instead

"There was no road, but the people walked on it, and the road came to be, and the people followed it, for the road took the path of least resistance"
 
The following users thanked this post: josip

Offline Inverted18650

  • Frequent Contributor
  • **
  • Posts: 875
  • Country: us
    • Test Gear Addicts
Re: Any experience with JLC PCB house in china?
« Reply #9 on: March 03, 2018, 08:49:45 pm »
Yes, you can import Altium directly, but I have also converted KICAD and EAGLE files and sent them to JLC with no issues.

Offline D3f1ant

  • Frequent Contributor
  • **
  • Posts: 346
  • Country: nz
  • Doing as little as possible, but no less.
Re: Any experience with JLC PCB house in china?
« Reply #10 on: March 05, 2018, 04:27:55 am »
No problems other than they do like to mess with stencils apertures a bit but having said that I haven't had any manufacturing issues with the changes they make...so assume they are making the changes based on experience. I getting quite a collection of free pens ;) and they are very fast.

They seem use the same fab house as "smart prototyping", I ordered from both a few minutes appart and their board marking, packaging etc is 100% identical, and the job number/serial they added to panel frame was only a couple of digits higher.

I wonder how many of these places use the same manufacturer. Maybe time for a sticky list.

 

Offline hcglitte

  • Regular Contributor
  • *
  • Posts: 137
Re: Any experience with JLC PCB house in china?
« Reply #11 on: March 05, 2018, 03:39:15 pm »
Seems they have a lot to do now. My design was payed on 26 Feb and they started production today. They claim 96 hours, and that has already passed... My boards should have been with DHL now.
 

Offline DerekG

  • Frequent Contributor
  • **
  • Posts: 882
  • Country: nf
Re: Any experience with JLC PCB house in china?
« Reply #12 on: March 05, 2018, 04:36:23 pm »
Seems they have a lot to do now. My design was payed on 26 Feb and they started production today.

The orders always pile up at this time of the year due to Chinese New Year which only finished 10 days or so ago.

Pray that it was Chinese New Year that delayed your order.

The only other time orders get delayed like this is when they send your files off to their engineers to "modify the Gerbers" to meet their standard manufacturing clearances etc. If this has happened, the boards you get back may well not be usable.

I'm speaking from experience. I placed an order through EasyEDA (so the boards were made by JLC PCB). They did not like the Gerbers & instead of coming back to me, sent the whole lot off to their engineering department for modification. This added another week to the order.

To give JLC PCB credence, they are remaking the boards for me after an agreement between us was struck. The boards we received were unusable.
I also sat between Elvis & Bigfoot on the UFO.
 

Offline Inverted18650

  • Frequent Contributor
  • **
  • Posts: 875
  • Country: us
    • Test Gear Addicts
Re: Any experience with JLC PCB house in china?
« Reply #13 on: March 05, 2018, 05:17:33 pm »
DerekG, can you include a bit more detail. Were the traces you laid too close to an edge or track widths too thin or was there something about the board they were not equipped to do? I am working on a panelized layout and had to refer to their guidelines section but the "do's and dont's" were pretty clear.

Offline DerekG

  • Frequent Contributor
  • **
  • Posts: 882
  • Country: nf
Re: Any experience with JLC PCB house in china?
« Reply #14 on: March 05, 2018, 06:01:07 pm »
DerekG, can you include a bit more detail.

I layed out some complex polygon planes on the copper layers. Polygon planes are generated by laying down multiple lines next to each other. With the chosen apertures that JLC PCB wished to work with, some very small gaps were detected (0.1mil). They then sent the files off to their engineering department who decided to make all the gaps very much larger (ie increased them to their minimum manufacturing track to pad clearance which is 6 mils from memory). This separated the pads from the tracks rendering the boards useless.

If the chosen apertures and the 0.1mil clearance was left unaltered, the manufacturing process would have left all the copper properly connected.

Note for those in metric countries: 1mil = 1 thousandths of an inch.

I also sat between Elvis & Bigfoot on the UFO.
 

Offline Inverted18650

  • Frequent Contributor
  • **
  • Posts: 875
  • Country: us
    • Test Gear Addicts
Re: Any experience with JLC PCB house in china?
« Reply #15 on: March 05, 2018, 07:45:37 pm »
@ DerekG: Thanks mate. I hope you understand my question was out of curiosity and in no way an attempt to be critical. Maybe you can help with another issue. Do you  know what the instructions set/ protocol is to get the board-house to leave a guard trace exposed instead of coated with solder mask? I labelled the PCB and in the comments section I clearly told them the this "NET_X" was a guard trace and that I did not want it to be masked. Maybe I didn't adhere to the protocol? I ended up using a dremel to clear the thin trace and all is well, but if you have some pointers I would be grateful.   

Offline Monkeh

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 7990
  • Country: gb
Re: Any experience with JLC PCB house in china?
« Reply #16 on: March 05, 2018, 07:53:28 pm »
If you don't want mask on a trace.. put an opening in the mask layer. Like anywhere else you don't have mask.
 
The following users thanked this post: mrpackethead

Offline DerekG

  • Frequent Contributor
  • **
  • Posts: 882
  • Country: nf
Re: Any experience with JLC PCB house in china?
« Reply #17 on: March 05, 2018, 11:53:26 pm »
@ DerekG: Thanks mate. I hope you understand my question was out of curiosity and in no way an attempt to be critical.

No worries. I now know what to look for & so will keep an eye out in my future designs. I've learnt to always examine the magnified Gerbers very carefully before sending them to the board shop.

Quote
I labelled the PCB and in the comments section I clearly told them the this "NET_X" was a guard trace and that I did not want it to be masked.

OK, I'm quite sure this is what has delayed your board. The staff in the front shop of the board house are monkey see-monkey do type people. Everything has to be "usual" for the order to progress through their system at the usual speed. As soon as there are some "extra instructions", the project goes off to their engineers & this often delays the job by some 5 to 10 days.

Quote
Do you  know what the instructions set/ protocol is to get the board-house to leave a guard trace exposed instead of coated with solder mask?

As mentioned by Monkeh above, add a trace on the solder mask layer where you want the opened track. You can confirm you have done this correctly by examining the Gerber (once generated).

If using Altium, move to the (say) bottom solder mask, then use the keyboard short cuts "P" (for Place) then "L" (for Line). This is different to placing signal tracks which is "P" (for Place) then "T" (for Track).

In packagers such as DipTrace, just lay a track down in the usual way when on the Solder Mask Layer.

I often open up the solder mask on bottom layer tracks if I want to increase their current carrying abilities. Doing this ensures a layer of solder is layed on top of the copper during the wave soldering process.
I also sat between Elvis & Bigfoot on the UFO.
 
The following users thanked this post: Inverted18650

Offline hcglitte

  • Regular Contributor
  • *
  • Posts: 137
Re: Any experience with JLC PCB house in china?
« Reply #18 on: March 19, 2018, 10:38:18 am »
Received my boards and stencil.
They modified my apertures and even added some extra apertures below an IC since they probably thought I had forgotten them.
This annoys me so much I have no words. How on earth can I communicate to them that they are not do ANYTHING to my stencil design files???
 

Offline sixtimesseven

  • Frequent Contributor
  • **
  • Posts: 330
  • Country: ch
    • Flickr
Re: Any experience with JLC PCB house in china?
« Reply #19 on: March 19, 2018, 04:40:03 pm »
I ordered a 4-Layer board from them (early 2017) but I wasn't too impressed with their quality. Soldermask was of and had kind of scratches across the board in the mask. I sent them the pictures and they refunded the purchase. I didn't order from them again.

I frequently order form Elecrow / Aisler and have ordered a couple of times from dirtypcb and allpcb. They all worked fine so far. Elecrow is great since they allow a fair bit of customisation, V-Cuts etc. for free and have very quick technical support. Aisler is particularly great for customer projects since the dark green solder mask and thick gold plating looks very professional :) All PCB is cheap and fabricates even 4-Layer in 2 days (3-4 tops) and ship ""for free"" via DHL which is great if you compare that with the "express" services from the competition.
 

Offline hcglitte

  • Regular Contributor
  • *
  • Posts: 137
Re: Any experience with JLC PCB house in china?
« Reply #20 on: March 20, 2018, 12:49:20 pm »
I know got a definitive answer from them.

If you add your paste layer file together with the PCB files and click "add stencil to PCB" then they will ignore your paste file and generate their own based on the other gerber data (!)

If you place a separate stencil order with just the paste layer file, then they print it without any modifications.
It could even be good to rename that file completely I would guess...



 

Offline janekm

  • Supporter
  • ****
  • Posts: 515
  • Country: gb
Re: Any experience with JLC PCB house in china?
« Reply #21 on: March 20, 2018, 01:35:58 pm »
No problems other than they do like to mess with stencils apertures a bit but having said that I haven't had any manufacturing issues with the changes they make...so assume they are making the changes based on experience. I getting quite a collection of free pens ;) and they are very fast.

They seem use the same fab house as "smart prototyping", I ordered from both a few minutes appart and their board marking, packaging etc is 100% identical, and the job number/serial they added to panel frame was only a couple of digits higher.

I wonder how many of these places use the same manufacturer. Maybe time for a sticky list.

smart prototyping are an agent company so they will order from whichever manufacturer they think is a good match for your order while giving them a good margin. Seems they use JLC PCB as one of their factories to order from (personally I prefer ordering directly from a PCB factory since that makes quality / service a little more repeatable, in theory).
 

Offline katy201607

  • Contributor
  • Posts: 10
  • Country: hk
    • www.pcbgogo.com
Re: Any experience with JLC PCB house in china?
« Reply #22 on: March 21, 2018, 12:58:55 pm »
it seems 2 USD for 10pcs PCB? how about the freight?
Professional Electronic Engineer from PCBGOGO
www.pcbgogo.com
 

Offline VEGETA

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 1916
  • Country: jo
  • I am the cult of personality
    • Thundertronics
Re: Any experience with JLC PCB house in china?
« Reply #23 on: March 21, 2018, 01:54:42 pm »
Can you use them with CircuitMaker? directly or should I export from CM then upload files?

Offline Inverted18650

  • Frequent Contributor
  • **
  • Posts: 875
  • Country: us
    • Test Gear Addicts
Re: Any experience with JLC PCB house in china?
« Reply #24 on: March 22, 2018, 05:02:34 am »
more notes:

I just replicated the input PCB for the Keithley 228 Source Meter in EasyEda.com (its public so check it out) and ordered the boards from JLCPCB.com. Just $2 for 10 boards with "gold fingers" (card edge board) and DHL was about $19USD. They should be here within a couple days. I also ordered a couple SMD breakouts with stencil that are here now. I'll post a video about it (hopefully) tomorrow.

If you have several boards in your cart, you can get the 1st batch of, up to 10, PCB's for just $2, then each batch of PCBS thereafter is just $5. IMHO, its well worth it to send 3-4 gerbers in one order and get them all shipped at the same time, for the ~19USD flat rate. You can also get free shipping if you order the BOM via LCSC.com, their parts store, during promotion periods.

The default QTY is always 5, but if the board is small (less than 100x100) you can usually get 10 for the same price. Also gold fingers are free (just learned this one). You can "panelize" small PCBS yourself and still get them for $2. I did this with the SMD breakouts.

The solder mask layer is automatically generated, and not an option in the layers tool. So we cannot alter it to, lets say, leave a guard trace exposed. I am looking into this more now. I used the "pads tool" (adjusted in the sub-menu) to get exposed copper tracks and it worked well.



Share me

Digg  Facebook  SlashDot  Delicious  Technorati  Twitter  Google  Yahoo
Smf