Olimex advice for Eagle users

Here follows some advice based on my experience of using Olimex for PCB prototypes.

~~Olimex are the cheapest and most helpful board house I've found, and I highly recommend them.~~

Update: 13th January 2012

Spirit Circuit's ebay shop is back! It's now under one of their sister companies, Stickleback Manufacturing:

http://stores.ebay.co.uk/Stickleback-Manufacturing/Stickleback-Circuits-/

For anyone in the UK, this is a great option for getting a small number of boards made. 1 square foot (Â305m by 305mm) of double side PTH PCBs (with mask & silscreen) is £50 delivered.

Update: 21st August 2011

Unfortunately, Spirit Circuit's ebay shop seems to have vanished. I sent them an email a week or so ago to enquire but got no response, so not sure what's going on there.

Current best options for small quantities of prototype boards seem to be:

http://www.custompcb.com/pcb_prototype_quote.htm - farily large minimum quantity, but quite reasonable price for a 1 week turnaround
http://www.goldphoenixpcb.biz/quote2.php - fairly large minimum quantity.
http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/fusion-pcb-service-p-835.html?cPath=185 - very cheap, but quality is questionable.

Update: 17th April 2011

I've never quite felt comfortable advising against olimex without offering a real alternative (pcb train are pricey, especially for small boards) - however after some time searching, I've stumbled onto a UK based company that seem to have it all. They're offering excellent prices for small runs of PCBs.

They offer a couple of different options:-

"Go Naked" - a free 48 hour turn around board. No solder mask or silk screen and not routed to outline, but at that price you can't really go wrong!
their eBay shop - 10 working day turnaround, ordered in multiples of 1 square foot (ie. 305mm x 305mm), single design, they'll panelised and route to fill the space you order (all prices inclusive of VAT and P&P):
- 1-2 layers: £37
- 4 layers: £47
- 6 layers: £57

Update: 18th June 2009

I don't think I can recommend olimex any longer. I used them between 2005 and early 2009, and over that time they've got less and less reliable. It is now very difficult to place orders with emails seemingly often getting lost, and the orders seem to be getting slower / taking longer and longer to be handled. The PCBs are unfortunately also not the best; incidences of tracks lifting and through hole plating coming out during rework are significantly higher with the boards I've had from Olimex than those from other manufacturers.

They are perhaps worth considering for prototype, but you might want to look for somewhere local to you instead. I'm in the UK, so PCB train's express 1 day prototype service charges £35 delivered for 2 day turnaround for a single board - pretty hard to beat!

For production runs (20 boards or more), I'm currently using European Circuits. So far, their service and responsiveness is far above that of olimex, the boards are higher quality and the prices seem comparable. They also do the assembly and box build for me.

General advice

If making a small board, try if possible to make it panelize onto an SS panel rather than an SQ, as it is cheaper to order 4 SS panels than 1 SSQ. (You get a 20% 'repeat order' discount for 3 of the SS panels, even if they are all ordered together.)

Make sure you have the 'Always vector font' option in the 'user interface' settings switched on.

Olimex have some advice for avoiding their 'silk screen' fix charge.

They also have instructions for generating gerber and so on.

Generally I:

Save board/schematic with a -ss prefix
Run OlimexAllSilk.ulp
Run drillcfg.ulp
Goto CAM processor
Run excellon-rack.cam, giving it the rack just generated by drillcfg.
Run gerb274x.cam
Use pentalogix viewmate to view the generated files

Advice for single sided boards

When doing single side boards, the eagle libraries use lots of 0.8mm drills - this isn't a standard drill for olimex so they will charge you $1.30. Just pay this; it's usually not worth the hassle to avoid it.

If you really insist on avoid this charge, you have two choices:

Use restring to increase the pad sizes, then use a drill rack without a 0.8mm drill, and make sure the tolerances cause the 0.8mm holes to be increased to 0.9mm.
Follow the instructions below for changing drill sizes for double sided boards, and change the 0.8mm drills to 0.9mm ones.

Advice for double side boards

For double sided boards, Eagle will give you the required hole side in the final board, but olimex require the hole size before plating.

It is a bit fiddly to do this, see our HOWTO for adjusting drill sizes.

Joseph Heenan, joseph@heenan.me.uk