[Coco] Coco [OT] Circuit Prototyping

[Mark J. Blair]

On Jul 22, 2014, at 06:18 , Steve <6809er at srbsoftware.com> wrote:
> Like you, I'll use breadboards for early design and testing.  But even for my early prototypes, I still use PC boards.
> 
> Elecrow.com has 2 Layer 10 * 10 cm PC boards for $11.90.  That's not just one board but five of them. Give them your Eagle CAM file and wait about two - three weeks for the low cost shipping ($4.77) option.  ($25 in shipping, you will get it about a week.)  They are complete boards with solder mask, silk screen printing and holes drilled.


Recently, I've been using OSH Park for my small-quantity, small-size PCBs: https://oshpark.com

Unlike many other prototype PCB houses, they offer ENIG (gold plating) as their standard surface finish, which is nice for card edge contacts. 2-layer board pricing is $5 per square inch for 3 boards, with free shipping and no setup fee. That gets expensive for a larger board; I might not use them if I ever make a QBUS board for my PDP-11! But it's nice and cheap for small boards such as my CoCo EPROM Pak.

They also provide a neat feature for those of us who like open-source hardware: After uploading board files, you can optionally choose to share the project so that anybody can easily order its PCBs directly from OSH Park. For example, here are the projects I've shared so far:

https://oshpark.com/profiles/NF6X



-- 
Mark J. Blair, NF6X <nf6x at nf6x.net>
http://www.nf6x.net/