[birdsongs]

It's also shockingly easy to just get boards made and populated these days. I of course have a station but I use it less and less.

I paid like 40€ last week for 5 smaller PCBAs, 0402s all nice and correct, jumpers, all my ICs. Don't have to worry about diode orientation or solder bridges. Just complete boards shipped to me. Easily beats my own labour rates.

[joshmarinacci]

Where did you buy your populated boards from? I want to make a small in and not deal with SMT at all.

[birdsongs]

I use jlcpcb, they're common in the prototype and hobby domains. But there's quite a few board houses in taiwan and china that do this, definitely shop around.

The annoying part is getting the bom and component placement files correct. I use kicad since it's free, and there's solid instructions from most houses on what they need.

[Animats]

JLBPCB does small runs cheap as a loss leader, so they get the production runs, if any, later. Also, they get to see what people are doing, in case something interesting goes by.

There's also a suspicion that JLBPCB may be encouraged to do this by the Party, to discourage other countries from maintaining an independent prototyping capability.

[birdsongs]

Ah, really interesting points, thanks. It definitely seems too cheap to be true.

[vladak]

Unrelated question but I see you're probably located in Europe. Are there any places around to get your PCBs treated with conformal paint ? And I mean tiny runs - couple of PCBs.

[birdsongs]

Just saw this. We have a local producer in Norway we've used but they're pricey, and only used for medium sized prod runs.

It's usually an options at the assembly house you use, bundled with the pick and place and soldering process.

Honestly it might just be worth doing it yourself if it's a few and you only need something like acrylic. Use a good flux off and degreaser, get the board spotless, and use something like this https://no.rs-online.com/web/c/facilities-cleaning-maintenan...