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Comment by AshamedCaptain | Hacker News Reader

What an amazing world?

15 years ago, there was a shop down the corner that would print me PCBs for a pittance. The only thing I had to do was to drill the vias by hand, something which I would do with a simple mount for an off-the-shelf drill.

Today, that shop has been replaced by some brand clothes store of which there are other 17 quasi-identical ones in town.

If anything, it is harder today to get this done than it was 15 years ago.

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If you gave a hacker space in town, maybe at your local library, and they have a decent CNC router, you can probably still get PCBs made locally. I don't know how the price would compare to the big bois like PCBway. They wouldn't end up looking quite as "professional", but it all depends on the price you can get and how much same-day and shopping locally matters to you.

Having a shop in town for rapid iterations of a design sounds awesome.

If you want to know what's possible today at which prices, check out these prototyping services for example: https://jlcpcb.com, https://www.pcbway.com, https://oshpark.com

Drilling and plating vias is the hard part they were skipping.

You guys are getting your vias plated? /meme

We had to stick a big blob of solder in the hole.

TBH, I never had any vias plated. I would always use solder and consider soldering overall the most difficult task of the entire process without any doubt, much more annoying and difficult than drilling.

That doesn't scale if you're doing a design that needs lots of vias. Particularly so when stitching together ground puddles on 2-layer boards. Soldering jumpers into hundreds of holes isn't practical.

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