What's a good PCB assembly service?

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626Pilot
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What's a good PCB assembly service?

Post by 626Pilot »

I'm looking for a board house that has decent pricing on runs from 10 to 100 assembled PCBs. I used Seeed's PCBA service to produce one prototype already. Their pricing is pretty good. However, their parts catalog is limited. If it's necessary to use something they don't have, they charge a LOT extra, and they don't give volume discounts.

Case in point, I'm designing a board that uses a SOIC-16 chip (DS3231 real-time clock) that costs about $8 in small quantities. The unit cost goes down to about $4.10 if I buy them in quantities of 1,000. However, if I go through Seeed, they charge $9 whether I'm having them assemble 10 boards or 1,000. On top of that, the assembly cost goes up by $10 per board. So, this one little IC is adding about $20 to my assembled board cost. That's no good!

I hope to find a place that can run small batches (10-100) without charging me a zillion dollars for adding one run-of-the-mill IC to my board. This specifically has to be a place that does assembly, not just PCBs by themselves. It's fun to solder up one board, but once the design is verified, I need to be able to order piles of working boards.
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rootboy
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Re: What's a good PCB assembly service?

Post by rootboy »

I was very happy with the price and service that I got from Hackvana.
crisp90
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Re: What's a good PCB assembly service?

Post by crisp90 »

I am also very happy with Hackvana services. Once ordered them to built Arduino circuit and it was good in quality.
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