ddusty21
New member
I may not be a golden-eared long-haired audiophile, but I found this website by trying to find any sort of real world review of the PCB supply company PCBX.com. This forum seems to be the only place that they're advertising and/or people are mentioning their services.
as a noob to these forums, I don't have sufficient privileges to respond to any of the existing PCBX threads, so I'm posting this here...mods, you can move it if so desired!
Please note that I never gave any hint to PCBX that I was going to review their services with the order--and I wasn't compensated in any way to review their services.
Brief history: I've made well past 40 PCB orders primarily from JLCPCB.com. They're cheap...and for the most part, quality is good. Their website has improved substantially over the years, and to the best of my knowledge, it is the gold standard for online PCBA ordering. Nobody else comes even remotely close!
The bad? If JLCPCB messes up an order (in my experience it's usually PCBA soldering), they literally are too big to care. The one that really ticked me off was when the best I could get them to do was offer a $25 coupon for a $200 order that didn't have a single usable PCB because of bad reflow soldering on their end. Each PCB had different issues because different regions of the mini ESP32 module weren't soldered down. After buying replacement ESP32 modules and getting someone to replace them with a hot air gun, the boards worked properly--it was not a design fault, it was a production fault.
Overall, JLCPCB PCB quality is decent. They visibly aren't the world's best boards, but they're functional--and quite economical. Can't really complain about that.
Another site I've used is PCBOnline.com. Every time I've ordered from PCBOnline, I pull the boards out of the box, and say, "Wow, the PCB quality is visibly higher than JLCPCB!" They also have significantly better production abilities...but a notably higher minimum cost. (They are better for production-level quantities.)
I tried quoting a job on PCBWay.com, but they did such a horrible job with the quote--by a human--that I didn't even bother going through with the order. (They "couldn't find" any part that didn't have an LCSC number on it, and got a lot of costs completely wrong.) If they didn't care enough to get the quote right, what would they do with the actual order itself?
Enter PCBX. "Register to get your first order free, 1-10pcs"...now that's an enticement. I had designed a fairly straightforward 2-layer PCB using a lot of smaller SMD components (i.e. 0402 discretes), and a 128-pin 0.4mm-pitch QFN (Allwinner V3s). Basically an "HMI" platform for driving a 7" capacitive touch screen...intended as something you could use for a responsive, polished user interface to a project. (Allwinner V3s being the cheapest option I found that could directly drive a low-cost RGB666 1024x600 TFT panel, and provide decent peripheral connectivity.) This is something that JLCPCB would probably do alright with, but it would also be a good "litmus test" for a new supplier.
First impressions on PCBX: everyone tries to have a fancy website, but the eye candy only goes so far. Most of the times, it comes to an abrupt stop as soon as you upload the files--and then you're literally to emailing some Chinese employee (PCBOnline, PCBWay, etc.) PCBX is definitely trying, but the show came to an abrupt stop with the "AI component match" step, which was a laughable disaster. Of the 60 unique components, it only "matched up" eight...and of those, only one was even remotely close (BAV99, quoted at $0.06083/ea). Standard generic parts "couldn't be found" (0402 10K resistor, for example). Meanwhile, there were ridiculously off-the-wall quotes, such as $31.25/ea for a generic 12K 0402 resistor, or $77.29/ea for an XL1509-5.0 switching regulator!
Total "AI" quote for 5pcs of these boards? $9,600! Yes, welcome to our much-hyped "robot overlords", who prove hopelessly useless at the most basic reality. (I didn't mention that this order--as uploaded to PCBX--was completely and totally ready for ordering on JLCPCB.com, i.e. every part in the BOM had an LCSC number attached to it.)
I casually poked around to try to correct the BOM entries to PCBX catalog components by hand...but the website just isn't there yet. So I gave up, and submitted the order for an actual PCBX employee to quote.
Three days later, I received an actual quote from PCBX: a unit price of $34.6506/ea, total ~$173. That was more like it! All of the parts had a "4 day lead time" except for the Allwinner V3s, which had a 12-day lead time. I'd thought that PCBX had their own component warehouse (similar to JLCPCB), but a minimum 4-day lead time on components pretty well tells me that they probably have a component sourcing partner company. Hey, just an observation, not a complaint.
"first order free"--well, the devil is in the details: "up to 30 lines BOM". I had a 60 line BOM, so they quoted me $71.79 for the order (not including shipping). Hey, I'll take it.
After paying for the order (November 14), a week passed before I got a notice from them (November 21) that there was a DFM problem. Sure enough, I'd just "grabbed a KiCad footprint that was the same diameter" as a speaker I was trying to use--and while the diameter was correct, the pin spacing wasn't. I corrected this and resubmitted the production files.
...only to get another DFM problem report from them a day later. Apparently, when revising the board to fit the different speaker pin locations, I'd somehow missed that a whole capacitor was effectively half underneath the speaker--mea culpa again. (Yes, I do run a DFM report in KiCad on every board before submitting it--but KiCad's "courtyard" around every component is extremely generous, making close placement of parts impossible to do without either ignoring the courtyard warnings, or disabling them altogether. Classic case of KiCad "crying wolf" until I just start ignoring the warnings!)
Third time was the charm, and order production was finally started, on November 25th.
On December 6th, I got an email from "Priscilla" saying that they had sent me a PayPal invoice for shipping the order: $10 for Global Direct Shipping (8-20 days). Well, we were now into Christmas--and as is very typical, the package went halfway around the world in just a few days. Then add a week and a half to transit 60 miles out of USPS purgatory and finally be delivered on December 24th. Forty days from placing the order to receipt; I guess I'm more than spoiled with JLCPCB usually managing a 2-week "order-to-door" timeline!
The boards were very well packaged: an outer layer of foam, then a box, then an inner layer of foam around the boards. (All of the other PCB suppliers I've experienced just do the box and an inner layer of foam.)
First impressions: PCB quality is on par with JLCPCB or slightly lower. They're definitely not PCBOnline-level quality, that's for sure!
In a visual inspection, I noticed that the alignment was slightly "off" on several SMD parts--nothing preventing functional operation, but noticeable against the silkscreen lines. Interestingly enough, these mostly affected the bigger packages (SOT-23, LGA-8). The 128-pin QFN soldering was clean and tight, as were all of the much smaller SMD parts.
The real question: did the boards work? Well...in this case I'd made a mistake with the EA3036 power supply IC, accidentally getting two of the voltage divider resistors reversed. This meant that the 3.3v rail was "supposed" to be at 0.73v, which obviously caused the V3s to fail to boot! After fixing that by hand, yes, the boards work perfectly.
Would I buy from PCBX again?
Absolutely...if I wasn't in a hurry!
as a noob to these forums, I don't have sufficient privileges to respond to any of the existing PCBX threads, so I'm posting this here...mods, you can move it if so desired!
Please note that I never gave any hint to PCBX that I was going to review their services with the order--and I wasn't compensated in any way to review their services.
Brief history: I've made well past 40 PCB orders primarily from JLCPCB.com. They're cheap...and for the most part, quality is good. Their website has improved substantially over the years, and to the best of my knowledge, it is the gold standard for online PCBA ordering. Nobody else comes even remotely close!
The bad? If JLCPCB messes up an order (in my experience it's usually PCBA soldering), they literally are too big to care. The one that really ticked me off was when the best I could get them to do was offer a $25 coupon for a $200 order that didn't have a single usable PCB because of bad reflow soldering on their end. Each PCB had different issues because different regions of the mini ESP32 module weren't soldered down. After buying replacement ESP32 modules and getting someone to replace them with a hot air gun, the boards worked properly--it was not a design fault, it was a production fault.
Overall, JLCPCB PCB quality is decent. They visibly aren't the world's best boards, but they're functional--and quite economical. Can't really complain about that.
Another site I've used is PCBOnline.com. Every time I've ordered from PCBOnline, I pull the boards out of the box, and say, "Wow, the PCB quality is visibly higher than JLCPCB!" They also have significantly better production abilities...but a notably higher minimum cost. (They are better for production-level quantities.)
I tried quoting a job on PCBWay.com, but they did such a horrible job with the quote--by a human--that I didn't even bother going through with the order. (They "couldn't find" any part that didn't have an LCSC number on it, and got a lot of costs completely wrong.) If they didn't care enough to get the quote right, what would they do with the actual order itself?
Enter PCBX. "Register to get your first order free, 1-10pcs"...now that's an enticement. I had designed a fairly straightforward 2-layer PCB using a lot of smaller SMD components (i.e. 0402 discretes), and a 128-pin 0.4mm-pitch QFN (Allwinner V3s). Basically an "HMI" platform for driving a 7" capacitive touch screen...intended as something you could use for a responsive, polished user interface to a project. (Allwinner V3s being the cheapest option I found that could directly drive a low-cost RGB666 1024x600 TFT panel, and provide decent peripheral connectivity.) This is something that JLCPCB would probably do alright with, but it would also be a good "litmus test" for a new supplier.
First impressions on PCBX: everyone tries to have a fancy website, but the eye candy only goes so far. Most of the times, it comes to an abrupt stop as soon as you upload the files--and then you're literally to emailing some Chinese employee (PCBOnline, PCBWay, etc.) PCBX is definitely trying, but the show came to an abrupt stop with the "AI component match" step, which was a laughable disaster. Of the 60 unique components, it only "matched up" eight...and of those, only one was even remotely close (BAV99, quoted at $0.06083/ea). Standard generic parts "couldn't be found" (0402 10K resistor, for example). Meanwhile, there were ridiculously off-the-wall quotes, such as $31.25/ea for a generic 12K 0402 resistor, or $77.29/ea for an XL1509-5.0 switching regulator!
Total "AI" quote for 5pcs of these boards? $9,600! Yes, welcome to our much-hyped "robot overlords", who prove hopelessly useless at the most basic reality. (I didn't mention that this order--as uploaded to PCBX--was completely and totally ready for ordering on JLCPCB.com, i.e. every part in the BOM had an LCSC number attached to it.)
I casually poked around to try to correct the BOM entries to PCBX catalog components by hand...but the website just isn't there yet. So I gave up, and submitted the order for an actual PCBX employee to quote.
Three days later, I received an actual quote from PCBX: a unit price of $34.6506/ea, total ~$173. That was more like it! All of the parts had a "4 day lead time" except for the Allwinner V3s, which had a 12-day lead time. I'd thought that PCBX had their own component warehouse (similar to JLCPCB), but a minimum 4-day lead time on components pretty well tells me that they probably have a component sourcing partner company. Hey, just an observation, not a complaint.
"first order free"--well, the devil is in the details: "up to 30 lines BOM". I had a 60 line BOM, so they quoted me $71.79 for the order (not including shipping). Hey, I'll take it.
After paying for the order (November 14), a week passed before I got a notice from them (November 21) that there was a DFM problem. Sure enough, I'd just "grabbed a KiCad footprint that was the same diameter" as a speaker I was trying to use--and while the diameter was correct, the pin spacing wasn't. I corrected this and resubmitted the production files.
...only to get another DFM problem report from them a day later. Apparently, when revising the board to fit the different speaker pin locations, I'd somehow missed that a whole capacitor was effectively half underneath the speaker--mea culpa again. (Yes, I do run a DFM report in KiCad on every board before submitting it--but KiCad's "courtyard" around every component is extremely generous, making close placement of parts impossible to do without either ignoring the courtyard warnings, or disabling them altogether. Classic case of KiCad "crying wolf" until I just start ignoring the warnings!)
Third time was the charm, and order production was finally started, on November 25th.
On December 6th, I got an email from "Priscilla" saying that they had sent me a PayPal invoice for shipping the order: $10 for Global Direct Shipping (8-20 days). Well, we were now into Christmas--and as is very typical, the package went halfway around the world in just a few days. Then add a week and a half to transit 60 miles out of USPS purgatory and finally be delivered on December 24th. Forty days from placing the order to receipt; I guess I'm more than spoiled with JLCPCB usually managing a 2-week "order-to-door" timeline!
The boards were very well packaged: an outer layer of foam, then a box, then an inner layer of foam around the boards. (All of the other PCB suppliers I've experienced just do the box and an inner layer of foam.)
First impressions: PCB quality is on par with JLCPCB or slightly lower. They're definitely not PCBOnline-level quality, that's for sure!
In a visual inspection, I noticed that the alignment was slightly "off" on several SMD parts--nothing preventing functional operation, but noticeable against the silkscreen lines. Interestingly enough, these mostly affected the bigger packages (SOT-23, LGA-8). The 128-pin QFN soldering was clean and tight, as were all of the much smaller SMD parts.
The real question: did the boards work? Well...in this case I'd made a mistake with the EA3036 power supply IC, accidentally getting two of the voltage divider resistors reversed. This meant that the 3.3v rail was "supposed" to be at 0.73v, which obviously caused the V3s to fail to boot! After fixing that by hand, yes, the boards work perfectly.
Would I buy from PCBX again?
Absolutely...if I wasn't in a hurry!
