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A comment on The End of Arduino 101: Intel Leaves Maker Market. Parent comment

Re:The End of Arduino 101: Intel Leaves Maker Market by Animats on Tuesday July 25, 2017 @12:51PM (#14849383)
There's SEEED Studio, in Shenzhen. They make PCB boards and assemble them. If you design using only parts in their Open Parts Library [1], they offer quite fast turnaround. They have ARM and ATMega CPU parts. They can also source from DigiKey and Mouser. They have a Design for Manufacturing manual, with lots of information on tolerances.[2] They'll hand-build one-off prototypes for you. Upload your Gerbers and BOM, and they'll give you a quick quote.

Of course, all this assumes you can design a working board. It's not inherently difficult, but there's a considerable learning curve. There are lots of online resources. For board design, there are lots of packages. I use KiCAD, which is open source, but Eagle is probably more suitable for pro work. (KiCAD is a good package, but the component footprint libraries are not that complete and may be somewhat off.)

(I've used them for blank boards. They do a nice job, but it's not super-fast. All their boards have been good, although once, by mistake, I got boards intended for someone in Japan, and they got my boards. Seeed re-made the boards and shipped again.)

[1] https://www.seeedstudio.com/opl.html [2] https://statics3.seeedstudio.com/fusion/ebook/PCB+DFM+V1.0+....

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Re:The End of Arduino 101: Intel Leaves Maker Market by SAI_Peregrinus on Tuesday July 25, 2017 @08:08PM (#14852891)
For one-off boards bigger than a few square inches I like 4PCB.com. $33+shipping for a 2-layer board, 5 day turnaround, up to 60 square inches for the fixed price. Minimum quantity 1. For contrast Seeed charges $4.90/sq inch for 2-layer and 5-day turn, minimum quantity 5. $66 for their 4-layer boards, though "only" 30 square inches. And they have a 1-day turnaround bare-bones prototyping service: those boards have no solder mask, but they credit the price of the bare-bones boards to your production order, so it ends up being a fast PCB prototyping service that only costs shipping). They're in the US too, so shipping is faster than the Chinese companies.
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Re:The End of Arduino 101: Intel Leaves Maker Market by Animats on Tuesday July 25, 2017 @08:35PM (#14852970)
There are tons of board houses. What's unusual about Seeed is that they will do one-off assembly for a reasonable price, provided you design to their standards.
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Re:The End of Arduino 101: Intel Leaves Maker Market by SAI_Peregrinus on Tuesday July 25, 2017 @09:30PM (#14853155)
True, just mentioned 4PCB because they've had very good service in my experience (as a hobbyist/student). I've also used Seeed, they are quite nice, especially for small boards.

This reminded me of pcbshopper.com, it's a pretty neat comparison service for PCB houses. The data isn't always perfectly accurate though, especially because it doesn't take sales or other special pricing into account.

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