Fusion PCB is a PCB service from Seeedstudio. They have been offering PCB prototyping service since I made my first board in 2011. It has recently been revamped a little, tweaking prices and options, as well as integrating an online Gerber viewer from EasyEDA. I was invited to give Seeedstudio’s revamped Fusion PCB service a try, and since I had some boards in the pipeline for manufacture, I thought why not?

You can configure various options for the PCB, such as board thickness, copper pour and surface finish. You can also make flex PCBs or aluminium for better heat sinking, as opposed to regular FR4. These options will of course come at a price. However, you can select various colours for your PCB at no additional cost.

The Boards

I ordered 2 sets of boards in total. I’ve decided to opt for an ENIG finish for the TIL311 display boards, just because it looks nicer in gold. The boards are manufactured with black solder mask, making the gold pads stand out better.

I’ll describe the display board in a separate post after I’ve assembled it. For now, here’s what 4 of the boards look like, component side up:

Like most PCB prototyping services, they track your order by printing some kind of order identifier onto each PCB. Usually they try to put this identifier underneath a component like an IC so it gets hidden when the board is fully populated, but sometimes they put it somewhere prominent, like under your product name. On this board, the identifier sits under IC4 but for the other board, it was under the product name.

The PCBs arrived in a shrink-wrapped bubbly packaging to protect the boards. There was also a desiccant thrown in for one set of the boards to keep it dry.

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