Thanks for the tutorial, I got a batch of black Z80-MBC2 PCBs made through JLCPCB and they're far better quality than the green one I bought off Ebay (manufacturer unknown). The entire batch including shipping wasn't much more than buying a single one from Ebay. Uploading gerbers and selecting options on their site is very straightforward.
Its interesting to here other peoples experiences compared to mine as I'm in the UK and your in the US, basically the same but I never had a problem uploading the Gerber's...cheers
It seems to be very hit or miss for me. Other comments have been arriving that suggest the same thing. So I guess it's a feature. Once I uploaded a board and I got an error message of some kind that suggested that the rendering that had failed was being done in the Amazon cloud. So they probably have a box that's overloaded. It tries to do the renderings and when it falls behind it just doesn't work right or something.
Hi John, would you be able to post a summary of the hole sizes etc you use for JPCPCB ordering for these boards? I'm not sure whether the defaults the website chooses are sane or not - Thanks!
I *really* need to do a video on this for my KiCad series... If you can run KiCad, go to the PCB editor, click on the plotter output, then on "Gernerate Drill Files", and click on "Generate Map File". That will generate a gerber file with a keyed index of all the holes sorted by size. The smallest HOLE anywhere on the Retro! is .45mm and the smallest DIAMETER is 8mm, which is larger than any of the JLCPCB options for adding to the cost of your order. (Bigger minimum hole sizes are less expensive.) I order mine with the default of .2/.45mm option selected. My design is on the order of double that size. Looking at JLCPCB right now, I can see that the price for the correct 4-layer options is $7 USD... obtained by taking ALL the defaults except switching the order from 2-layers to 4. It looks like the far-left option selector is chosen in every category EXCEPT for the 4-layer and 1.6 thickness options. Make sense?
There's something a little wonky about OshPARK - they record your boards as 100.3 mm square in spite of being dimensioned at 100 mm in your layout, thus over their prototype size limit. This affects the price significantly. I wasn't too concerned because, same as you, I was just pricing them but never intended to buy at that price. JLCPCB didn't have that problem. Might be worth dropping them a line.
By the way, I think you're mixing too things there. I'm not aware of a limit on OSH Park at 100 mm. It's a four layer board and I think the price it at 10 bucks a square inch and it's roughly 16 square inches. Therefore, I would expect it to be about 160 bucks which it is. Even so as you point out the size did come out wrong so something is strange there.
@@JohnsBasement Yeah - old fartness rules. Don't know why I thought there was a 100 mm limit for some category of prototyping, but still strange that they inflated the perimeter dimensions.
Thanks for the tutorial, I got a batch of black Z80-MBC2 PCBs made through JLCPCB and they're far better quality than the green one I bought off Ebay (manufacturer unknown). The entire batch including shipping wasn't much more than buying a single one from Ebay. Uploading gerbers and selecting options on their site is very straightforward.
Sell the extra ones on ebay and you'll have then gotten yours for free!
Its interesting to here other peoples experiences compared to mine as I'm in the UK and your in the US, basically the same but I never had a problem uploading the Gerber's...cheers
Hmm.... Are we talking about 2-layer or 4-layer boards?
@@JohnsBasement 2 layer, only ever uploaded one 4 layer.
It seems to be very hit or miss for me. Other comments have been arriving that suggest the same thing. So I guess it's a feature.
Once I uploaded a board and I got an error message of some kind that suggested that the rendering that had failed was being done in the Amazon cloud. So they probably have a box that's overloaded. It tries to do the renderings and when it falls behind it just doesn't work right or something.
Hi John, would you be able to post a summary of the hole sizes etc you use for JPCPCB ordering for these boards?
I'm not sure whether the defaults the website chooses are sane or not - Thanks!
I *really* need to do a video on this for my KiCad series...
If you can run KiCad, go to the PCB editor, click on the plotter output, then on "Gernerate Drill Files", and click on "Generate Map File". That will generate a gerber file with a keyed index of all the holes sorted by size.
The smallest HOLE anywhere on the Retro! is .45mm and the smallest DIAMETER is 8mm, which is larger than any of the JLCPCB options for adding to the cost of your order. (Bigger minimum hole sizes are less expensive.)
I order mine with the default of .2/.45mm option selected. My design is on the order of double that size.
Looking at JLCPCB right now, I can see that the price for the correct 4-layer options is $7 USD... obtained by taking ALL the defaults except switching the order from 2-layers to 4.
It looks like the far-left option selector is chosen in every category EXCEPT for the 4-layer and 1.6 thickness options.
Make sense?
There's something a little wonky about OshPARK - they record your boards as 100.3 mm square in spite of being dimensioned at 100 mm in your layout, thus over their prototype size limit. This affects the price significantly. I wasn't too concerned because, same as you, I was just pricing them but never intended to buy at that price. JLCPCB didn't have that problem. Might be worth dropping them a line.
I noticed that too. I met one of the OSHPark guys at KiCon a few years ago. Nice guy. I will follow up on this. Good idea.
By the way, I think you're mixing too things there. I'm not aware of a limit on OSH Park at 100 mm. It's a four layer board and I think the price it at 10 bucks a square inch and it's roughly 16 square inches. Therefore, I would expect it to be about 160 bucks which it is.
Even so as you point out the size did come out wrong so something is strange there.
@@JohnsBasement Yeah - old fartness rules. Don't know why I thought there was a 100 mm limit for some category of prototyping, but still strange that they inflated the perimeter dimensions.