EEVblog Electronics Community Forum
General => General Technical Chat => Topic started by: onemorejoule on April 14, 2019, 10:22:06 pm
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I'll try and turn this into a discussion topic.
What was one electronic piece of gear or step that you hesitated on taking and had zero regrets after pulling the trigger? A pricey scope? etc?
For me, it would be the decision to finally spin my own board for a personal project instead of resorting to my usual perf-board wire jumble. I went with JLCPCB based on price so hopefully I dont regret this haha. To be frank, I've spun quite a few boards for work but I have never "allowed" myself to spin a board for a simple one-off home project. This time, I felt too lazy to cut, strip and solder a bunch of wires and just jumped in on a PCB order. The funny part is now I want to take on more complex projects at home because the anxiety of manually wiring it is fading. I love hand populating pcb's (except qfn/bga's), it's dealing with the wiring that gets me.
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It's been dirt cheap to have boards made in China for around 10 years now, what made you wait that long to try it?
I stopped wiring up anything more than trivial complexity on perfboard a long time ago, life is too short to spend hours and hours hand wiring something.
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hahaha I am kicking myself now believe me! I suppose I was completely ignorant to the process and never looked into it. My work would usually ends with submitting my gerber/drill files etc and ordering would be out of my hands so I never looked into pricing. Definitely not going to be ordering perf board in the future!
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The rush you get when you get a package containing your designed PCBs never seems to dull. Also, the disappointment when you have to place bodge wires or find out you have to get creative for a poorly made footprint never seems to fade as well.
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It used to be crazy expensive, I remember seeing "deals" for I think it was 3 small boards with no silkscreen for around $60, then it dropped quite suddenly to about $20 for 10 small boards, and most recently I ordered 5 boards for under $8 including postage. As much as I like to support domestic manufacturing, Chinese board houses have made it feasible to get boards for all sorts of random hobby projects. I still etch my own when I'm in a hurry but that's rare these days.