About a year ago, a rep for PCBWay contacted me offering to sponsor my first run of boards. 10 months of testing and troubleshooting and 3 versions of my project later, I was ready to learn Kicad and give this a try.

A couple of weeks before I did this myself, a friend of mine in Texas who is also learning Kicad and I made a simple SMD 555 blinker board. We made our order via PCBWay and he got the boards a week and a half later. The yellow solder mask looked very cool. He soldered the components on one of them and it worked. I felt confident I could design a board for my project and got to work.

After 2 weeks of layout, measuring parts, and checking and rechecking my work I was ready. I zipped up my gerber and drill files and went to https://www.pcbway.com/ to get started making my order.

This was only my second time to do this and the first time to order a board more complex than a blinker.

The process was easy - just indicating how many designs were in my gerbers (4), how many layers in the board (2), how many I wanted (10), and what surface finish (HASL lead-free) and color of the solder mask (blue). For the other things like board material, track thickness, minimum hole size, copper thickness, etc. I just left the defaults. Once I had selected my options, I submitted the order for review. PCBWay has a reviewer sanity-check your gerbers before accepting the order.

I had wanted to use v-cuts so I could break the different components apart. I drew these lines in a user layer and made a note of it in my order comments. It turns out v-cuts must run the length of the board (they cannot stop in the middle), and the reviewer contacted my a few minutes after I submitted. They explained this limitation and offered to use tab routing instead. This is fine by me so I accepted. A few minutes later my order was approved and I could check out. I also was able to see a preview image of what it will look like. A run of 10 of these 2-layer boards measuring 110mm x 140mm with 4 designs was arount 95 USD.

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Big thanks again to PCBWay for helping me out with this. Ordering was easy and the reviewer was helpful. I will probably never get out the ferric chloride or sodium persulfate again.

My board fab will take 3-4 days and shipping 4-6 days, so I should have 10 copies of it in about two weeks. If anyone is interested in trying to build this, I'm happy to give a few away after I test one of them.

Once I get the actual boards I'll post some pics.

After I am sure it works, I will make small update to it and make it a shared project on PCBWay. I'll also put the Kicad project on Github so you can tweak it to your requirements and get the latest version. I'm sure I will continue to tweak it a bit over the coming months as I learn more about PCB design.