Seeed Studio Fusion PCB Service

[metalphreak]

http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/fusion-pcb-service-p-835.html?cPath=185

So I'm sure plenty of people will be interested in this service. I have a suspicion that they use the same fabrication places as Itead Studios, but Seeed offer a lot more options in terms of board sizes, quantity, colour, finish etc. Anyway, I've put in an order and I'm going to update this thread as it progresses, so you can get an idea of lead times and so forth.

Board is 4.5x3cm double sided and is a basic design for a breadboard power regulator/supply.

10x boards, 1.6mm, 2 side silkscreen, HASL, Green soldermask - Total Cost: 13.42 USD (inc shipping)

10/07/2011 Sunday: Paid and emailed PCB files
11/07/2011 Monday: Reply from Seeed saying received and processing (if no board errors found)
11/07/2011 Monday: Website order status changed to "In production"
15/07/2011 Friday: Shipped!
21/07/2011 Thursday: Tracking says it now actually left Hong Kong...
28/07/2011 Thursday: Package arrives!

[Ryu.Hayabusa]

Amazing prices they offer, can't wait to see your results. 

[flano]

I tried them recently and they are comparable to iTead.

[PsI-On]

Oohh that looks like a DDS function generator you got going there? How is it working out?

PsI

[_Sin]

I'm waiting on my first PCBs to turn up. Ordered on the 4th, shipped on the 11th.

Meanwhile I took another look at my gerbers, and I've noticed a possible issue. Doh!

The drill file seems to be offset by about .01 of an inch in both x and y. I'm not sure if this is going to be a problem, or how it could be avoided. I used the Eagleexport script as given by Seeed themselves.

Has anyone else seen this?

Fortunately even if the holes are offset on the final board, it's designed with pretty big tolerances and should be fine. Untidy, but functional. However I don't like that it's off in the gerber view, and I wouldn't want to see it on a board with much tighter clearances.

I know I should have double checked this in advance, but it was late, I was in a hurry, and it looked ok at first glance... plus it's cheap

[metalphreak]

Yes there's an option in the CAM script that's disabled supposedly for "greater compatibility". Mine were offset by a large margin so I re-enabled the option with no issues. Someone asked on the Seeed forums and they said they manually align drill holes anyway, so you might be ok

[_Sin]

Thanks. I just checked their forums and saw the post about the same issue. Indeed I think I'd seen it before, and just forgotten, or pushed the information to the back of my mind (possibly why I wasn't so concerned when I saw it on my own board).

Assuming all goes well, I've got a more complex board I want to get done, so I'll try re-enabling the options for that, at least for my own peace of mind...

[metalphreak]

Yeah I've got a few random boards i'd like to make. For the price, I really couldn't be bothered with home made PCBs unless I needed something immediately.

My boards shipped today. Now the waiting game begins

[shadewind]

I've used both iTead and Seeed and they're pretty much identical. Good thing about iTead though is that they don't require you to put the order number on the silk screen. Not that it matters much but it's something. iTead now has pretty much the same options as Seeed. Whenever Seeed upgrades or improves their service, iTead seems to do the same so there's competition for you.

By the way, I see that people use large holes for DC-connector footprints which isn't necessary. You can use routed slots, both iTead and Seeed are capable of doing those. And you can have any board shape you want.

Another thing, I have gotten extra boards when ordering from iTead sometimes. For one order, I got somewhere around 20 boards instead of 10.

[_Sin]

FYI, my boards turned up today. So that's about 2 weeks turn-around from ordering, to arriving.

Everything looks good so far. The first board I pulled out at random had a track which has lifted off, but it's not one of the 5 they tested (and it checks out OK for continuity, so it may be largely cosmetic). A couple have the tiniest blemishes on the tinned pads, but nothing that would cause a problem I think. The drill holes look pretty spot on.

Also, I got an extra couple of boards.

Thumbs up from me.

My next board will have finer tolerances, and I'll need to have it gold plated rather than tinned. We'll see how that goes!

[Chet T16]

And you can have any board shape you want.

Really? Both state that the board size will be the smallest rectangle it fits in.

I ordered my first boards from itead a few weeks ago, they seem to have gone missing somewhere along the way according to the postage tracking so i figured they migght be a lost cause and ordered the same from seeed.

[Jon Chandler]

Delivery from China can take a couple weeks or longer.

ITead and Seeed both route the board to any desired shape.

...the board size will be the smallest rectangle it fits in. ..

is just to determine the board size.

[Chet T16]

I know delivery is bad but i've had two lots of 'stuff' come from china since they were dispatched and the tracking website has stayed the same since the 7th

Thats brilliant about routing the shapes, i'll be taking advantage of it next time!

[metalphreak]

Assembled Board (yes those are vertical 1206 resistors where 0805 should be...)


I ended up with 12 boards (5 of which are marked as tested). All of them are perfect which isn't surprising as they aren't complicated boards. Even though I decided not to put my order number on the silkscreen, Seeed still puts their own numbers on there. I guess this is to track them as they usually attach the small board runs to bigger panels. You can see on the logo on the bottom side, the tolerances between silkscreen/soldermask/copper. Pretty good on all the boards (there's supposed to be a little bit of soldermask on the inside of the silkscreen on the three exposed copper hexagons). Like itead studio, they'll route out your boards to pretty much any reasonable shape, so there's no reason not to put rounded edges on your boards

My only tips are:
Use what board edge you like - rounded corners = win
Make a space for them to put silkscreen codes if you don't want them placed elsewhere on your boards.

[metalphreak]

Received a few more boards from Seeed recently

Check out  the images here: http://imgur.com/a/kcBrC

The white soldermask turned out to be pretty nice. A small percentage of the boards have silkscreen blemishes or a slight misalignment but all of the boards are fine electrically. Ordered a set of 100 boards and received 110 so the blemished ones are freebies anyway

It would seem that the PCB factory that produces these is the one who puts the little number codes on the boards, and they always get put on the front regardless of your requests. Solution: before creating and sending off your gerbers, mirror your entire design, so the front becomes the back, and vice-versa 

[shadewind]

Received a few more boards from Seeed recently

Check out  the images here: http://imgur.com/a/kcBrC

The white soldermask turned out to be pretty nice. A small percentage of the boards have silkscreen blemishes or a slight misalignment but all of the boards are fine electrically. Ordered a set of 100 boards and received 110 so the blemished ones are freebies anyway

It would seem that the PCB factory that produces these is the one who puts the little number codes on the boards, and they always get put on the front regardless of your requests. Solution: before creating and sending off your gerbers, mirror your entire design, so the front becomes the back, and vice-versa 

Nice! As I said previously, you may use slots instead of large holes for DC jacks. I have done this successfully without even realizing when I used the included Altium footprint.

[joelby]

Nice! As I said previously, you may use slots instead of large holes for DC jacks. I have done this successfully without even realizing when I used the included Altium footprint.

Are you thinking of the DC jack in the miscellaneous connectors library? That one inexplicably has two holes next to each other and some annotations rather than a slot, even though Altium supports slots.

Itead just turned it into a plated slot, and PCBCart me asked for confirmation before doing the same.

The built-in libraries are a bit of a hassle, really! I'm slowly building up my own.

[shadewind]

Nice! As I said previously, you may use slots instead of large holes for DC jacks. I have done this successfully without even realizing when I used the included Altium footprint.

Are you thinking of the DC jack in the miscellaneous connectors library? That one inexplicably has two holes next to each other and some annotations rather than a slot, even though Altium supports slots.

Itead just turned it into a plated slot, and PCBCart me asked for confirmation before doing the same.

The built-in libraries are a bit of a hassle, really! I'm slowly building up my own.

Well, a plated slot is what you want, isn't it? Anyway, in what way does Altium support slots specifically?

[joelby]

Well, a plated slot is what you want, isn't it?

Yep!

Anyway, in what way does Altium support slots specifically?

You can make a rounded rectangle pad and give it a slot instead of a hole.

My point was that the built-in libraries are a bit dodgy and in some cases are clearly ancient - perhaps the DC jack footprint predates the slot functionality!

[shadewind]

In that footprint, there is a track on Mechanical 1 to represent this so it appears to me that it does as it should. I'm not sure why the holes are there, though.

[metalphreak]

Yeah the Eagle parts I had for the DC jack with slots were a bit iffy so I didn't use them. In the future I'll sort out a proper part with slots, but at the time I simply didn't care

Seeed Studios have updated their page: http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/fusion-pcb-service-p-835.html?cPath=185

They've just clarified the whole panellising thing. Basically, they don't care what you do within the board space you pay for, but they will only separate the entire outline, and will not do drill lines or slots to make it easy to separate yourself 

You can see on this board I've put two on one 5x5 board:

I only left 2mm of space though which isn't quite enough. 3mm should be perfect. I separate mine with an electric tile cutter (~$100?). Blade cutting width is 2.2-2.4mm and with the water tray it collects all of the fibreglass dust Only good for straight cuts and making really tiny boards this way isn't really advisable since you would be putting your fingers awfully close to the blade 


Oh and I did mention this in the shoutbox, but, Seeed are now offering an acrylic laser cutting service Perhaps soon even a solderpaste stencil service. Sounds pretty good. Get your PCBs, stencils, and enclosures all made in the same place. Pricing looks very reasonable compared to places like pinoko.

Itead studios have made some changes as well. They now offer a 4 layer service, as well as expanding the size options for boards. They also offer a high volume (50-200) service which is comparable in price to Seeed's offering. I still find Seeed's single page much easier to use rather than a huge number of different SKUs. Too bad Seeed don't offer black soldermask Black + ENIG gold = sexy.

[electroguy]

It would seem that the PCB factory that produces these is the one who puts the little number codes on the boards, and they always get put on the front regardless of your requests. Solution: before creating and sending off your gerbers, mirror your entire design, so the front becomes the back, and vice-versa 

that's not true, i got some, and some boards had the order codes on the bottom silkscreen, others on the top silkscreen. made it completely useless, now i gotta go get them done again elsewhere......

[metalphreak]

Well that sucks They must have done your boards on two different panel runs or something. Every time I've used them, the code has always been on the front, and i've done batches of 100 boards through them before as well.

[electroguy]

actually, i had another look, and it *might* be because they couldn't fit it on the top layer, so they had no choice but to put it on the bottom layer. So i guess you might be right...

[_Sin]

Last board I had done, they put their code underneath a chip footprint so that it wouldn't be visible after assembly. Didn't ask them to - I thought that was a nice touch.