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• Manufacturing the Board at PCBWay

  Wissam Tedros • 05/20/2024 at 20:31 • 0 comments

  In this blog I will walk you through how you can order one of the Boards for yourself, and present you my experience with PCBWay, who decided to Sponsor my board, Big shoutout for them :)

  PCBWay has a quick PCB order option where you can simply Upload the GRB.zip files, then the page will automatically load again with all the parameters needed to proceed with the order. Do not worry if the small GRBR viewer shows with some defects, you can have a proper view by visiting their online Gerber viewer, I really love this feature as it gets me a clear idea of how the board will look like, and it is extremely user friendly and straightforward to use.

  I benefited from PCBWay's assembly service as there a Lot of Small SMD parts on my board, on both sides that I don't feel comfortable assembling by hand, so you can choose to do so by scrolling down and checking the "Assembly Service" section, you can either input all the parameters or, PCBWay will do that for you once you upload the BOM and xyz files.

  After submitting all the files, you will have to wait 24hrs for engineering audit which of course, this board passes, PCBWay suggests for each missing part a replacement and inform you of the lead time (usually between 7 and 14 days), I tried to make this board with ICs that were in stock on Mouser, Digikey, and LCSC, and all the assembly on this board is done on one side, which can greatly reduce the overall price of the order!

  Once happy with all the parts, you can then pay for the board manufacturing, assembly and parts costs, and choose your preferred shipping method, in no more than three weeks your assembled board will be at your doorstep. 

  I even had some wrong parts that I needed to replace after the confirmation of the quotation, by simply contacting the support team they accepted to replace the wrong part with no additional cost, covered by PCBway themselves

  Before shipping, PCBway sends you a Picture of your assembled board to confirm if everything is spot on, and sure enough it was, here are the pictures that were sent by their support after the assembly

  Notice how well even the smalles QFN IC is soldered with no problems at all, that would have been practically impossible for me to do.

  I highly recommend PCBWay for any PCB manufacturing you need, and I can't wait to share more about this project I plan to expand with my already built quadruped robot "RoDog

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