Hi all!
We’re working on setting up an instant PCB Assembly quotation service on our website. I wanted to know if anyone has had any experience with such services and if so what were their shortfalls and strengths.
thank you in advance for your feedback.
Hooman
Circuits Central Inc.
Hi Hoomanj
I used a couple of online tools. The two drawbacks were: 1. they weren’t very accurate, and essentially I had to go through the quotation process again after the online one. 2. They required me to put in all sorts of inputs about the size of the boards the line spacing the pads the holes ect… I would rather like a tool where I can just upload the gerbers and get a quotation back instantly.
Cheers,
Marc
Hi Marc,
Thank you for your feedback, but what you are referring to are tools for PCB Fabrication (the bare board) quotations. What i’m working on, and what our company offers, is assembly (so mounting components onto the PCBs).
cheers,
Hooman
Your two competitors for a small volume assembly service would be http://macrofab.net/ and http://www.smallbatchassembly.com/ which both have a great reputation. You’ll have to explain how you’re better then those services to get any traction I’d imagine. For larger volume builds, online quotation is almost never the right answer.
That’s valuable information. Thanks!
After a short glance I notice that these companies put a lot of restriction on “small, quick-turn proto runs”:
although factors related to PCB Fabrication process timeline are out of our hands, or if you are using a part that has a lead time. when it comes to assembly our experience shows that limitations such as size and components are irrelevant on the majority of cases.
Our goal is to give you the quickest turn-around while guaranteeing the highest quality. If a board is so complex that assembly can’t be done in 24 hours we’ll let you know. But high component count or board size are too general to be limiting factors.