PCBs arrived from PCBCart

More exciting news about the miniature instruments as our second set of PCBs from PCBCart.com arrived this afternoon. Woo-hoo! We had 200 boards made up for just under �100 - making them less than 50p each.

Here they are, ready for inserting into our first commissioned miniature guitars. The soldermask and HASL (hot-air-solder-level) finish certainly makes soldering the boards up much easier than the homebrew boards we've been struggling with so far!

The cable on the right was soldered first. As we got familiar with the method for attaching the ribbon cable, the last cable (right) has a much better finish. These cables were hand-soldered using solder paste rather than the solder pot but only because that was what was to hand!

Even soldering by hand with a cone-tipped iron (rather than our preferred hot-air-soldering method) was quick and easy. Ok, the first transistor we put down went a bit wonky, but that's only because we were rushing to see how quickly we could assemble a full board!

Here's the first of our new boards ready to go into the latest (commissioned) micro guitar

Back in 1991, Metallica released their eponymous "Black Album".
It is still considered by many to be their best album to date. Everything about it was black. Including the guitars. This guitar is for a 90's Metallica fan who wants to remember James Hetfield before he shaved off his handlebar moustache and cut his hair!

PCBs ordered from PCBCart.com

After receiving such great service from PCBCart.com for our earlier guitar neck part of the project, and struggling to find a quick and easy way to attach cables to our home-etched boards, we decided to put another order in for more PCBs. Soldering multi-core cable to professionally produced boards (with only the pads exposed and solder mask covering the traces) is quite easy when using a solder pot.

Soldering quarter-pitch cable to home-etched boards with exposed traces can get a little messy with bridges and shorts and traces lifting when you try to correct them and so on. Simliarly, using home-brew reflow techniques are a little difficult with tiny components on home-etched boards because when the solder paste melts, instead of it pulling the component into line over the pads, the solder sometimes runs along the traces, dragging the component with it!

 Hopefully all these problems will be solved by using properly masked, professionally produced circuit boards for our little guitars. Now we can simply populate a board and either hot-air gun or bake the board to fix everything in place. We already know that soldering cable to a professionally produced board is much easier and less likely to cause faults, so while we're waiting for these new boards to arrive, we're going to buy/build a stop watch to time how long it takes to build a miniature guitar from start to finish!

 For anyone interested, here's the schematic and PCB layout for the miniature guitars.

PCBCart order is in

We've found making consistently good double-sided PCBs quite difficult of late, especially when we're working with tiny 0.20mm traces (normally we don't go lower than 0.5mm to ensure a good trace even if the etching goes a bit awry).



Having designed the PCBs for both guitar body and neck, we spent some time looking at different providers and suppliers. There are plenty of people on eBay offering PCB manufacture and we've already been in touch with quick-teck.co.uk.



Matt from BuildBrighton suggested PCBCart and in the time it's taken other PCB manufacturers to respond to an initial request for information, these guys have built gerber files from a simple design, debugged it, confirmed and organised all the silk-screening and solder-masking and submitted the plans for manufacture.







Their response times are amazing.

I was given the task of investigating PCBCart. I posted my order to them at about midnight and went to bed. The next morning there was an email from PCBCart asking to confirm a few things - after I emailed, I got a reply within minutes (not hours or days like other fab-houses) and in less than 30 minutes and a flurry of emails, the boards were ready for production!



I was really impressed with their service and how quickly and keen they were to get everything sorted out. After filling the online quote/order form out (they even accept PayPal) and paying a rather reasonable �140 for 200 pieces, our boards are in production and we hope to have them in about 12 days. If the quality of the manufacture matches their customer support, we should have some fantastic PCBs in less than two weeks - it's taken longer than that for some of the other manufacturers to respond to our initial query.



Hopefully that will be the last piece of the miniature guitar puzzle in place and we can start assembling them for real!