paddi91

Happy to answer that question! In the end it's a numbers game. Manufacturing gets cheaper with higher demand. For 6 layers the demand is rather low. We've figures from a US PCB comparison site and the share of 6 layers and more is below 5%, everything else is 2 and 4 layers. JLC serves a huge domestic market, so even with niche products they can do order pooling. That's not possible for us, thus the difference between 4 layers (€28.29) and 6 layers (€184.83). If there would be more demand in general, we could offer much lower prices.

Disclaimer: CTO & Co-Founder of AISLER here

We're trying to make electronic manufacturing (PCB & PCBA) simple, affordable and speedy. A high grade of automation allows prices starting at 12.20 Euros including VAT and shipping. Our software platform is completely built in-house, including state-of-the-art ODB++ integration. Let me know if you've any questions, happy to answer.

Keep it simple, just one call to solve every model.

KiCad provides a handy Plugin and Content Manager to find and install plugins and other extensions. However, beside the official KiCad repository, which is regulated, it is nearly impossible to provide a self-hosted repository. This application provides an easy to set up service to serve the KiCad PCM.

We're going to start assembly with shipment in march. Drop us a line if you're interested in our pilot.

KiCad Pcbnew files contain all required footprints etc., unlike the schematic files you need no libraries or such.

Creating Gerber files is sometimes hard as different fabs require different Gerber files. Starting with the file extension ending with floating point precision.

One argument against uploading KiCad files is copyright as the fab could reverse engineer the PCB. But this does not count for open source projects and is really unlikely to happen.

Shameless plug: We just launched an affordable PCB prototyping service in Europe with native KiCad support. The PCBs are manufactured in Germany with a manufacturer usually working for the automotive and medical industry. See https://go.aisler.net for details.

As I noticed some interest here, I'd like you to test the PCB service. Use coupon code 'hn102016' on checkout to get a 15% discount on your order. Would be happy to get some feedback on the PCB quality!

On the page is a pricing calculator, just scroll down a bit. As I said we're trying to get a low price on low quantities, if you only need 3 PCBs (e.g. for prototyping) we're cheaper than DirtyPCBs.

Yeah, we met back in 2015 I guess! Will you be there in 2017? Would you be interested in some exchange over 1clickbom?

We noticed that a platform for OSHW without making the actual hardware available is kinda useless. That's why we started to thinking about, how do we make these projects available cheaply?

Shameless plug here, we're just working on getting a PCB & assembly service like Seeedstudio to Europe. What we're trying to achieve is to get close to prices from China but with zero quantities. That means you don't have to take care of stock, as soon as you need one we manufacture it. Beside that all manufacturing is done in Germany and we take care of logistics.

Anyone interested take a look at https://go.aisler.net, if you'd like to participate in our beta assembly just drop me a line at [email protected]

My 9-5 job got a bit boring after 5 years so I decided to work on an idea I already had in mind for a few years. With the help of my co-founder (which I met in the meantime) the business got serious and I noticed that I'm way to busy with the 9-5 job. So I got the opportunity to work 24h/week at a local startup which also shares our technology stack. I usually split the week in 3 days on the paid job and 3 days (w/ one day of every weekend) for our own startup. Now we're one year later, still having 2 jobs as the income is not sufficient enough to pay for life.

The glorious fix during Apollo 13 mission, https://flic.kr/p/zci7am

It has gerber-to-svg as an dependency, so I'm curious what it actually adds to this.

If anyone would like to give it a try, you can get a kit including PCB and parts at AISLER https://aisler.net/damellis/cellphone2hw/diy-cellphone

Please note that the kit does only include parts which are available from the major distributors. You may check the Bill-of-materials at https://aisler.net/damellis/cellphone2hw/diy-cellphone/bom

Disclaimer: I'm one of the founders of AISLER

Obviously no way to build these PCBs by hand, 4 layer and a lot of hard to solder parts. BOM cost for the controller is about 100USD.

https://aisler.net/googlecreativelab/anypixel/controller-r3 https://aisler.net/googlecreativelab/anypixel/display-r2

Whoever is interested in buying one: https://aisler.net/tltx/swc_usb/swc_usb

For everyone who is interested in buying one, https://aisler.net/kanflo/aaduino/aaduino-v2

If you're looking for great projects with the ESP8266 have a look at https://aisler.net/search?query=ESP8266

Just in case your're lookin' for some other stuff to do with the ESP8266 https://aisler.net/search?query=ESP8266

My startup tried to solve exactly this problem in the Electronic Design Automation domain. We provided VCS and compare functionality focused on the needs of this industry.

We pivoted. The main issue we faced is the way the electrical engineers work and how difficulty it is to change this. It was incredible hard the explain these people how to properly use a VCS. We focused on a simple interface and tried to optimize on the way electrical engineers work. No chance!

Obviously the same applied to LayerVault [1].

[1] http://thenextweb.com/apps/2015/03/11/layervault-the-version...

Hi kgs42,

the already mentioned ESP8266 is definitely the way to go. Have a look at [1]. for some example circuits. [2] shows how to connect multiple sensors.

[1] https://www.aisler.net/projects?query=esp8266&src=hn_1 [2] https://www.aisler.net/projects/7890