Quoted from cobra18t:I got the boards in today. This was my first time ordering from JLCPCB. They are 2-layer boards and they took about a week from order to receipt with DHL shipping from China to California. I might have got them sooner if I had stuck with green soldermask. They claim 24 hour fab time with green and 3-4 days with any other color. But I wanted red...because I wanted red.
I got the minimum order of 5. They are 7.75 x 4.25 inches.
They look quite good. Via drill hits are spot on and soldermask alignment is barely short of perfect. The soldermask is clean even on nearly tented vias. The silkscreen is clear with no smears or spatters. I have been spoiled by ENIG and ENEPIG plating in the past, but the HASL on this looks very good. The only place where the solder plating is not level was a spot on each of the corner mounting holes. I can live with that.
The third picture shows the tiny surface mount FET portion of the solderpaste stencil that I lasercut cut today. The FETs are only about 3mm square. The stencil is made from a clear polyester sheet so it it kind of hard to see. I had to use the Digikey ruler to have something for my phone camera to focus on. Sprechen of Digikey, I also got my parts order today. Maybe tomorrow I can solder a board if I have time.[quoted image][quoted image][quoted image]
@cobra18t, you made the same kind of board I was just considering making! I thought, "How about I design a board that acts as a bunch of wings and is easier to physically mount than multiple boards hanging off of one another." I just discovered @openpinballproj's OPP and am itching to build my own machine. I've used STM32 micros a lot, and I was also thinking about putting one or more STM32 MCUs directly on the PCB instead of soldering the "blue pill" boards onto the larger board. Sadly I have more ideas than money at this point, so so far all I can do is dream and design.
That said, I'd be happy to help whip up boards in KiCad as time permits!
