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.
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.
What are the benefits of accepting kicad files instead of gerbers?
I understand people can make errors when generating gerbers but they can also make tons of errors when sending you the kicad files (like not including custom libraries).
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.
All these PCB manufacturers are super cool, but does anyone know any services which come closer to making complete products for you based on design files?
I'm thinking about flashing microcontrollers, soldering components, inserting PCBs I to cases, putting them into packaging?
Obviously the holy grail would be for them to do everything in small batch runs and handle shipping for you too, but I'm also interested in services which may do only parts of this.
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 patrick@aisler.net
Finally, something being done in Europe! Sign me up. I've been using Seeed, ITEAD & OSHPark for my hobby stuff, and MacroFab for work stuff (eyeing closely PCBng which gets a lot of things right, but doesn't support all my components yet), but all of those have the same problem: shipping. You either pay with time (3 weeks to get your boards back) or with money (>$60 for quick shipping).
I believe there is a lot that can be done to reduce the cost of electronics assembly and I'm very happy to see something happening here in Europe.
co-founder of paddi91 here. What your are saying is essentially what has driven us to start investigating into this.
We come from the Open source hardware and hobby electronics world, and have backgrounds in mechanical engineering and information technology. So we wondered how we can add a European flavor to it:
Lots of high quality manufacturers here in (central) Europe, but with a focus on High-End High-Scale series production, both for PCB and PCB assembly. We collaborate with them, automate most of the production process for them, and thus are able to offer competitive prices for low quantities.
We started investigating into this because we want every OSHW project to be reproducible by others. So that if you are an author and publish your designs with us (we synchronize with github if you want), other people (and the many others that are not able to design or assemble the project) can receive a copy of the current version. And since not everyone can assemble by themselves, we try to make it as simple as possible which is the reason for the PCB Assembly pilot. Here we use similar tools to automate everything. It should therefore be affordable to re-produce any project on-demand. Seriously, if you want to help make open source electronics more accessible come and join us with your project for the assembly beta, the more projects, the better, as it improves the test-suite ;-) feel free to either send an email to patrick via patrick@aisler.net (my co-founder) or contact me directly via felix@aisler.net
By the way: the cost parameters for assembly would be the following:
cost of the pcb x 2 + cost of parts. no minimum quantity required.
All boards come with green soldermask, white top and bottom legend, and will have ENIG surface plating. We only use high-class FR4, 1.6mm TG150 material.
So, I did a quick check, and you're currently over 4x more expensive than OSHpark for 2-layer PCBs, but the assembly proposition looks much more promising. I will definitely keep an eye on your project.
You pivoting from your OSHW platform Patrick? This is Kaspar, I think we might have met at FOSDEM 2 years ago? I gave a talk about my browser extension: https://1clickbom.com
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?
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.
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!
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.
A PCB consists of multiple layers, each one of which is described by a gerber file. gerber-to-svg renders each individual layer to svg; this project aggregates all the layers and stacks them up (hence the name) in the proper order.
We use gerber-to-svg (it is the best we've ever worked with) server-side, but we use svg-stacker to generate images for the cases where we need them (thumbnails, printouts, etc.)
On the front-end, we use html5 canvas rather than a pre-stacked SVG.
The descriptions on that page are really weird. They're just descriptions looked up by category, but they try very hard to obfuscate it by being uh, personable and witty.
On it's own, that wouldn't be so bad (just quirky) but the style doesn't lend itself to accuracy or brevity and it's hard to tell which, if any, of the text was written by a person maintaining the project's page on the site.
E.g. in answering the question: "Can I make it?" with an overall score of "98%"
Yeah, you will probably be able to make this. Feels like this is almost complete, only thing missing is your spirit and some minor stuff.
Below that is the actual list of things that are missing, which contains one item (apparently worth "+2"): Difficulty is relative, especially with footprints I have never seen before.
I have no idea what this means (I suppose it's about PCB footprint? I think the first part of the sentence is just banter?), but anyway, the top text is just a representation of the 98% "Can I make it?" category, which a less witty website would describe as "Project progress" or something. The representation of 73% is Yeah, you might be able to make this. There's still quite some homework left, but it's doable for you, isn't it? And I didn't even quote the parts where they anthropomorphise the website...
To end on a less curmudgeonly note, apart from the copy-editing, the overall execution seems good; I like how they break down the total cost of the project.
thanks for taking the time to comment on the presentation of the projects. We try to index and rate all open source hardware projects by their development stage. Our goal is to provide an insight for users like you whether the project can be built. For that we evaluate the difficulty and the project's dependencies (like parts).
You are right that some of our copies are a bit quirky and maybe need better explanation/call-to-actions. We already work on that and will soon release a revised version. Our designer has tried to "humanize" our analysis to make it a bit more approachable, maybe we need to put some additional effort into that ;-)
