PCB Fabrication Guide

This guide describes how to have a printed circuit board made. This almost universally must be accomplished by ordering a small run of boards to be manufactured and shipped to you.

PCB fabrication equipment is expensive so it may help to follow the steps below to order PCB fabrication from a 3rd party vendor unless you have your own stuff.

Ordering from JLCPCB and PCBWay and Osh Park

All three companies provide similar services including:

1. Online automated quotes based on: board quantity, size, and materials.
2. Add-on services: PCB assembly, stencil fabrication, etc.

Vendor Experience

These options allow a lot of flexibility, an accommodate all the requirements of getting the Data Gator boards made. Experience with each company might vary slightly. For example, I experienced:

• slower fabrication and shipping times with Osh Park (up to a week longer) whereas JLCPCB has a turn around of less than two weeks, ideal for prototyping.
• JLCPCB assembly services were buggy as of August, 2023, preventing double sided SMD component assembly.
• PCBWay provided good assembly and board fabrication, slightly lower mask quality than the other two and a fair amount of engineer interaction for assembly process (a good thing for working through issues).

Osh Park has the advantage of being based in the USA and offers various tiers of production speed, which may appeal if working on a government project.

JLCPCB Steps (Can use for the others as well!)

In most cases to fabricate the board, you will upload the board as a Gerber file through the link on the manufacturer’s website using the links above. Data Gator PCB Gerber files can be found by navigating to hardware revisions.

1. Navigate to site.

2. Upload Gerber using site link. Click Upload Gerber -> select zipped gerber file.

   

3. Use configuration menu pictured below to set preferences for board fabrication. Note: default options are sufficient, though the options used for this project are provided in the screenshot below if you wish to check.

   

4. Choose add-on services. Note: the selected options are defaults from the site and may need to be changed based on your equipment and usage and are not meant to be copied.

   • if you have a stencil printer, you will likely want to select the framework option for the stencil as this means you will receive a frame holding a tensioned stencil.

   • assembly requires additional steps, so there will be an additional guide written for this.