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Comment by junon | Hacker News Reader

Don't assemble via JLC. Get a good soldering iron, skillet, sand, paste, and order from mouser to do them yourself. If you're iterating errata with a full run each time you are wasting unbelievable amounts of both time and money, and you're probably not tinkering with the board enough, increasing your overall iteration count.

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I assembled my own PCBs for years and once I used JLC assembly I never went back. It costs more in shipping from Digikey to pay for assembly at JLC, so you’re literally not saving money. You’re also spending more time ordering parts, and the actual assembly is a pain even if you’re skilled. Hand placing components just sucks. Plus you end up with boxes of capacitors and resistors you will never use again.

I just don’t think this really is a better way of doing things.

Do you generally limit yourself to the parts that JLC stocks? Or do you send them reels with the parts you want to use? Or will they order the parts you want? Last I looked, I don't see that they have any Microchip microcontrollers available (plus plenty of other active components and connectors).

I think that has changed? You can now send components to them that don’t exist at lcsc?

I do my best to use only JLC parts for convenience sake, but it is easy to order parts from global suppliers in to your parts cart at JLC. I’m not sure if you can send them parts but they have a “global parts” function in your “parts cart” that lets you search most global supply companies and they will buy the parts for you.

Thanks, I'll have to look into this more.

JLC is too cheap now to do this yourself.

OP is complaining about turnaround times for development, not cost.

Also, really take a look at JLC's component prices and compare them. Some of their markup, namely for ICs, is borderline criminal.

I’m in same boat. Turnaround is awful for anything besides the most basic boards, and that being fast doesn’t really help when it’s just quickly entering a slow delivery process.

I find pricing really scattered everywhere. Often mouser and digikey, which others swear by, have worst pricing (and availability). But I think these places are intentionally high on some items to discourage production runs and keep it a prototyping service. Not sure why they care though.

As far as I understand, Arrow is where you go when you need larger component batches. And if you're too big for Arrow, you probably already have a Chinese manufacturer in the works.

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