PCBWay is a PCB manufacturer that prides itself on quick turnaround. You can learn about CNLohr’s sucess story here. They also offer detailed tracking of your order’s progress on their website.

They have reached out to me and kindly offered to sponsor the boards for this particular project, which I will be talking about in the coming weeks. As the cost of these boards were more expensive (compared to their “normal” orders), I had to pay for shipping myself.

With each PCB project, I find more and more methods of testing PCB manufacturers. This time, it’s with a PCB that is inserted directly into your USB socket.

The requirement for such a board is 2 mm thickness. The USB connector size is standard, so the usual 1.6 mm PCB thickness isn’t going to work unless you pad the connector area.

Also, I opted for gold fingers on the USB connector contacts. This is usually done for contacts on the board edge that will be inserted into some mating connector (like PCI cards and USB connectors such as this).

They also offer matte black & matte green colors. I haven’t seen matte colours being offered at other board houses so far. I would have loved to try them out, but that would have bloated the cost beyond my comfort level.

Order Process

The order flow for PCBWay is a bit different because you submit your gerbers without making payment first. This allows their engineers to take a look at the design before you actually pay.

Most other systems I’ve used are largely automated. After you submit your gerbers, they typically don’t expect any problems and so they collect payment from you first.

I uploaded the gerbers on the 8th Aug and I tracked my order progress online. Their website allows you to track the detailed progress of your board as it moves along the manufacturing process. For small runs like this one, it is not crucial but if you were doing a large project with panels of many boards, this would definitely be handy.

They started manufacture 2 days later (on the 10th) and completed everything by 12th. It was not until the 14th that they actually shipped the boards out and provided me with a tracking number.

Here’s a summary of the timeline:

• 08: Gerber files submission
• 10: start of PCB manufacture
• 12: boards completed
• 14: boards shipped (via registered post)
• 24: boards received

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