Close

V2 boards arrive

A project log for Over-engineered LED strip controller

Way too much stuff to light my garage MY way.

wjcarpenterWJCarpenter 09/07/2020 at 22:000 Comments

Wow. Wow, wow, wow. I clicked "pay now" on a Monday evening. The following Monday, in the afternoon, I had the boards in my hands; a few hours short of a week and less than $20.

When I decided to have new PCBs made, I was prepared for a big delay, especially during these pandemic times. Ordering parts from China is hit or miss on shipping delays. I guess that's because a lot of small package shipping is done as cargo on passenger flights. With fewer passenger flights, competition for space is tough. There are also all kinds of you-never-heard-of-them shipping companies being used, with whatever arrangements they can figure out. I chose DHL for shipping, and the estimated time was 2-3 days. I didn't really know whether to trust that estimate, but it was true. I guess DHL probably operates their own all-cargo flights from Asia to the US, so their capacity is not diminished by there being fewer passenger flights.

I ordered these PCBs from https://jlcpcb.com/ with the usual process of uploading a ZIP of Gerber files. The forms for ordering PCBs from many of these China-based PCB factories look very similar, so I imagine many of them are just taking orders for someone who actually has a factory. JLC has enough info on their web site that they either have the factories or they do a very convincing job of talking about them. :-) 

Here are pictures of the new boards with the original boards for comparison. You can see that the V2 boards are much less cramped. I was going to have the V2 boards made in a different color. It was the same price, but was said to have up to 2 days production delay, so I went with the default green.

Discussions