So, a couple of weeks ago I placed my first order with www.pcbway.com. I have been super impressed with their service, right from the beginning of the ordering process to having the boards in my hands.

Even for a complete beginner, the pcbway website makes the ordering process simple and straight forward with sensible pre-selected defaults if you go for their small prototype offer. This is priced at an incredibly sharp $5 for 10 pieces for a 1 or 2 layer board as long as you can stay within the 100mm x 100mm size, which in fairness is plenty big enough for many hobby projects or even many commercial designs. They even give you a nice selection of solder mask colours to choose from, but beware Purple, Matte Black and Matte Green cost more – something I figured out after I was already part way through the process so had to upload my design again. To be fair there is a nifty pricing calculator displayed on the left hand side of the page that updates as you change options, so this was totally my fault for not paying attention.

Once you have selected your options and uploaded your gerber files they have an actual human engineer do a manual review! They turn this around within an hour, and will contact you if you have any problems. One of the foot prints on my board was for a barrel jack power connector, and it had drills over slots. The engineer emailed me to check if they should be drilled or slotted. Great service and incredible turn around time on the review.

Once through the review process, you pay for your boards and they enter manufacturing. This is one of my favourite parts of the website – they have a real-time progress indicator of your boards as they go through the various manufacturing stages! I loved seeing the update that my board was up to the next stage of manufacturing – it’s a little gimmicky I suppose, but it really appealed to me and I bet I’m not alone in that.

The order process console on the pcbway website.

Time from placing the order to delivery in New Zealand was just 7 days (including a weekend) – amazingly quick turn around time. The boards arrived well packed in a nice pcbway box, with good bubble wrap and foam protection around them.

The actual boards themselves turned out really well. I chose the red solder mask which looks pretty sweet, although I’m keen to give the blue a try next time. I had used some reasonably small track sizes down to 6mil, and some pretty small package sizes like a tiny little SOT23-6 USBLC6-2SC6 part and everything has come out beautifully. The silk screen is sharp and easy to read – although next time I’ll include a bit more information such as the component values and maybe some graphics for kicks.

Summary

I can definitely recommend giving www.pcbway.com a try. Their prototype prices are pretty hard to beat and their service is excellent. They also have a neat feature where you can share your project and if other people order it you get 10% of the value of those orders. I look forward to using them again in the future and who knows – I might even enter their PCB Design Contest some time!