I've had over 8000 PCBs produced through Seeed, including 4000 assembled PCBAs, and I'm generally pretty happy with them. I can run a global electronics business out of my apartment because of Seeed.
We did have one major production issue where a critical part was substituted for an out of spec part without authorization and without anyone at Seeed knowing about it. [1] That was very frustrating. But once I came up with a software fix, Seeed had their local rep Erin (who is amazing) take the 3000 boards I had, set up a programming station I provided in her basement, and run a 30 second programming and calibration routine on each one. The boards work now.
So yeah. Even with as easy as Seeed makes it, production issues happen. But I'm sticking with Seeed for future production runs.
Seeed if you're reading this, can we get an option for silkscreen color on your fusion service? Thanks!
The fact that you can send drawings to be fabricated and get hard goods in the mail days later has been true for years. You could have been running a global electronics business from home for fifteen years now. So what do these guys add over players like pcbexpress, or the innumerable Chinese shops?
The small batch multi-layer boards haven't been as affordable. Also, many of the board houses won't work with small batches for anything above 4 layers. Now this isn't an issue when you're running a full business (assuming said business is large enough to have the capital to invest in a large enough order of boards).
This is great if you're running a small prototyping lab or doing some one-off or freelance work, since it'll be much easier to get these multi-layer boards in small enough batches.
Follow up. Another major thing with Seeed is that they have no minimum order quantity for assembly. They'll do 10 or 10,000 PCBAs for you. Lots of other places I quoted had large minimum order quantities. My main products might have met those requirements, but some of my accessories didn't. With Seeed I can do everything in one place.
That's true. To be honest they're not different in principle. They used to have amazing customer service, where I had a very good relationship with the guy on their end (we emailed each other pictures of our cats). But that person no longer works in that role and I no longer have the time to email often, so lately my customer service experience has been pretty basic.
I'm sure there are many services you can use that would let you do this. The only other time I've had PCBAs made in China was through GoldPhoenix and I was very unhappy with the quality of soldering.
We did have one major production issue where a critical part was substituted for an out of spec part without authorization and without anyone at Seeed knowing about it. [1] That was very frustrating. But once I came up with a software fix, Seeed had their local rep Erin (who is amazing) take the 3000 boards I had, set up a programming station I provided in her basement, and run a 30 second programming and calibration routine on each one. The boards work now.
So yeah. Even with as easy as Seeed makes it, production issues happen. But I'm sticking with Seeed for future production runs.
Seeed if you're reading this, can we get an option for silkscreen color on your fusion service? Thanks!
[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/flutterwireless/flutter...