Teeprom Alternatives

Teeprom reviews and mentions

• Comparing Hobby PCB Vendors
  8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 25 Mar 2023

  https://github.com/bkw777/Teeprom

  I've orderdered several times from oshpark because over the last 5 or so years I've iterated the design slightly many times. From oshpark I have received different results at different times from the same board outline. One time was a single rat bite in the middle of the short ends, leaving the castellations fully clear. Another time was two rat bites on each end at the corners, but on the short sides, again leaving the long sides clear. But most of the time the tabs are placed randomly other than being spaced apart.

  Even the buggered ones were usable, it's just that one was usabel after cleaning up, and still slightly uncosmetic even after cleaning up because you can only sand down not fill in, while the other was fully cosmetic out of the box.

  I give all my boards nice rounded corners now just because. It's even functional not just cosmetic. Any time a part has to fit into another part, there has to be some reliefe either on the inside or outside part, they both can't have perfectly sharp inside and outside corners and fit into each other. It's often not possible, and usually not desirable because of stress riser, to manufacture perfectly sharp inside corners, and so you need the outside corner of the mating part to be cut down. Or if the inside part must have a sharp corner, then you need to cut out extra relief in the inside corner of the outside part, like adding a round hole centered on the corner, both for stress-riser reasons and just to ensure the part will always be able to fit without interferance.

  In these parts above, the drawing for the carrier has imaginary perfect inside corners, and in real life the printer doesn't quite make a knife-edge inside corner of course. And the pcb has slightly rounded corners. If the fab couldn't do it for me with the router, I'd do it by sanding.

  I would say this particular project is a special case with needs that most people won't need to worry about, so I'm not saying oshpark is a bad choice. It's just a difference, and the whole point of the article was to compare and show differences.