Forum - Ordering boards

Hi Brendon,

Firstly I would like to thank you for using our discussion board to ask these questions. I'm sure these threads will be helpful to many other miniscope users in the future.

PCB fabrication and assembly will definitely be new to a lot of users of our scopes. Below outlines the general order flow to get assembled PCBs:

PCB Fabrication

PCB fabrication refers to the actually printing of the circuit board. In order for a company to fabrication a PCB they need the copper layout of each layer of the PCB. They will also want the layout of top and bottom solder masks as well as the silkscreen layout. Each of these layouts is stored in its own Gerber file. Along with the Gerber files the PCB fabrication house will also want other information relating to the specs of the PCB. This information can be found in the '.docx' file in the 'Fabrication Files' folder on GitHub. All you should need to do is zip all the files in the 'Fabrication Files' folder and email them to the PCB fabrication house to get a quote.

PCB Assembly

Once the PCB has been fabricated you will need to have it populated with electrical components. This process is called assembly. In order for a PCB assembler to know which component goes where they will need a Bill of Materials (BOM) file along with a Pick and Place (PnP) file. These 2 files effectively tell the assembler the position of each component along with the component's part number. The assembler will also need other assembly information which is listed in the '.docx' file in the 'Assembly Files' folder. All you should need to do is zip all the files in the 'Assembly Files' folder and email them to the PCB assembly house to get a quote.

I meant to mention one more thing. I plan to get a series of price quotes from our preferred PCB Fabrication and Assembly House (Sierra Circuits) this week and will be sharing the price quotes on our site. If you just want to order the exact PCBs on our wiki you should be able to just reference these quotes and Sierra Circuits will handle everything else.

Super helpful. I think I could do all of that. But if you actually set up a series of quotes we can just call them up and reference that would be absolutely perfect. We coudl say we want to order according to quotes ABC and XYZ and they mail things to us (once we pay), right?

That is exactly what I am in the process of setting up. I am hoping to have everything in line by the end of the week. I'll update you on this forum once I know more.

We are trying out a pcb fabrication and assembly company in the Netherlands. We will keep you posted of our progress. Might be good to know for others in Europe that do not want to order directly from US.

- Tycho

@Tycho Could you tell us what the name of the company is?

Hi Ivo, the company name is KCS (http://www.elektronica-assemblage.nl/index.asp?page=home&taal=en). They will consider producing more PCBs if ordered in sufficient numbers (minimally 100), but currently do this as a side project for us.

To get an idea of how high demand is I have made a spreadsheet available (for European users especially), where you can fill in required PCB quantities:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Oe_fX_4wobbePmkIUYOzpKBnNbHiiQgP_ZtZtg5p6XU/edit?usp=sharing

Update: we are facing issues with the PCB manufacturer not able to handle some of the specifications for manufacturing. May revert to group order w/ Sierra Technologies.

Update 2: seems like manufacturing can be outsourced to other local company, so we'll continue development in Netherlands.

Are there any group orders ongoing for the US?