Designing and building your own board

Sending the Board

To get started, you submit a board design (with the generated Gerber files), the bill of materials (BOM), and the quantity required, and then the company will return a quote within a day or two. You can then pay via PayPal, and your boards will be manufactured. It would be inappropriate to disclose pricing and quotes here, but I found them fair and competitive.

Feedback

TinySine will check your work for obvious flaws (what is obvious to them may not be obvious to you) and for issues that may arise in manufacturing. For example, I followed all the design rules for placing a USB connector on a product, but TinySine found that the USB connector had to be pushed down during manufacturing, so they asked me to move it over about 100mils. Always, always pay attention to manufacturing concerns raised by your vendor. It helps both them and you keep the cost down.

Remember that you, and not the manufacturer, are responsible for the design of the board. You need to get it right. First-timers (i.e., when your first prototype board is good to go to manufacturing with no changes) should always be your goal. It cuts your costs down, and gets your board to the customers faster.

Remember that manufacturers make their money from production of boards, not prototyping. When they gently tell you to do a prototype or a breadboard yourself before shipping them files, it is a win-win. When designing and developing SunAirPlus, I had to remake the board three times (for analog considerations, not gross functionality). Nobody was happy about that. Now SunAirPlus is done and working perfectly, and I learned a lot though that design. I'm happy to report that the I2C mux breakout board is a first-timer and will already be on sale by the time you read this.

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