Hello all,

I have created a new email address for you guys to send us some feedback.  If you have any ideas that you think could improve BatchPCB, send an email to feedback@batchpcb.com.  Please keep them as constructive as you can.  Remember, if you have any technical issues, keep sending those questions to support@batchpcb.com.

Thanks and keep on PCBin'!

Alex

Hello everyone! 

My name is Alex and I am the new BatchPCB web admin.  I have made some small changes over the past week or two that I will upload today.  I will do this update at around 11 AM MST.  Things should go smoothly but if you run into issues please email us at support@batchpcb.com.

Thank you!

Hi All!

The publishing for PCB Designs is a little better now - the descriptions were looking a little funky so I broke down and gave you all a WYSWYG Editor for the description field. Now you can do some simple formating in the descriptions which should look a little nicer.

You can now easily also add a link to a project site for the design and images. Eh, you can't upload images yet but you can display an image from your site - just copy the URL from the image. In some browsers you can simply drag n drop the image from the other site.

Have fun!

Yes - you saw correctly: Cheaper! Yay! How?

Simple - we are not going to round up design size to the nearest inch any more. Except for the 1 square inch minimum, the prices will now be the simply the area of the board calculated during upload.

Repeat: No more rounding up!

Important: Designs panelized together will now return uncut!! As part of the changes that allow us to stop rounding up we now strongly recommend that you do not panelize your design together to get a better price!. You don't need to do that anymore and if you do they will come back as one piece. Just to be clear: this only applies to designs you panelize together yourself and order as one item. Otherwise designs are cut as usual.

Ok .. hey, what about faster? Yes, we hope faster. The past couple of weeks we have been experimenting with the production system - we are hopeful that we can shave a few days off lead times and eliminate the exceptionally long waits. And, yes - the idea is to include four layer boards too, but shhh! I'll give a big shout out about that when we know it is certain.

Alright .. better? Of course! We are always getting better :-).

Enjoy!

Today we are releasing a new feature - PCB design publishing. This means that you can now make your design available for the public to browse and order. Some people have been sharing links to their designs for a long time and this makes it much easier to share your design with the public.

How do I do it? Simple - go to "My Account" => "PCB Designs" and click "View" on the design that you want to publish. Now scroll down and you will see that you can change the name, the model and add a description. The description can have whatever you wish (don't be obscene ..) and contain links to your project site or email if you like.

Then, at the bottom of the page there is a check box to "Publish Design" - check this if you want the design to be available to the public or uncheck to unpublish.

Note: You have to add the design to your cart at least once - purchase is not required and you can remove it from the cart after that.

The published designs will be available here for all to see. This also allows people to order copies of the design. If you only want some special people to be able to see the design you can still leave it unpublished and use the old method of sending the link (also at the bottom of the PCB Design viewing page in your account).

Note that the Gerbers themselves are not published - just images of the board. People may differ on this point - but I decided to let designers make the decision of whether to publish the Gerber files; you can do that on a project site or some where and put a link in the description for now. If there is demand for it we can add a feature to also allow people to access the Gerbers later.

Have fun!

This is the last call for four layer designs - we will be sending the current panel on Monday. Yes, I know .. I said March 1 - I held off for a few more days to give a couple of people time to get their designs in. Ack - I catch it either way, but for those waiting please accept my apologies and realize that we were waiting for your fellow designers to catch the bus. I know that they thank you for your patience and so do I.

Again - Last call for Four layer PCB design! Monday is too late! Hurry up!

Hey all! There are updated Eagle CAM files from Sparfun engineers - use these now (Right click and "Save As"):

• 2 Layer design cam
  
• 4 Layer design cam
  

These should fix a couple of minor issues that the older versions caused.

 Also - there is a newer Sparkfun Eagle tutorial from Nate. This one is very good - check it out here:

• New Eagle Tutorial

• Older Eagle Tutorial

Have fun!

 Ah, my week of Sundays is over - I had a nice relaxing break in which I did absolutely nothing all day. No, its not very exciting .. I am fundamentally a pretty boring person; for me it was nice and a needed respite.

 And, to my great surprise and pleasure there were no big disasters in my absence. In fact, there were almost no problems at all! The new system is now humming along nicely and operations here are going smoothly again. Now we start looking at some new features - first up will be a new Help section. If you have any ideas about this or little HOWTO's that you would like to contribute please contact us and let us know.  There are a couple of other secret developments in planning but I have to keep you waiting a little until they are more certain before I announce anything - but with luck we will have some very good news that I am pretty sure everyone will be happy to hear.

 Otherwise things are going well here, turn around times back to normal and so on. We'll keep posting new developments here so stay tuned.

Hooray! A huge batch of panels came in today - (typical ..) they all came at once. So, we will be very busy the next couple of days packaging and shipping out many orders that have been a little behind schedule. And tomorrow we expect yet another shipment of them - in short, if you have been patiently waiting for orders placed in late December or early January they will probably go in the mail in the next day or so.

Thanks for your patience - we do apologize for the delay on these orders. However, we are through the worst of it now and you can expect turn around times to improve from here on out. Normal turn arounds are about 3 - 4 weeks to your door. Why so long? Weell, as it says in this FAQ, "Cheap and fast don't play well together". Simply put, this is a unique deal being able to get just one of any design at a low square inch price and it means we have to jump through some hoops to get you a good deal (see the FAQ item for more on the process).

 As mentioned here before, holidays are a little slower - but the rest of the year is pretty straight forward. Still, we know that this could still be better and one of the current projects is to find ways to cut down on the turn around time. We are back to normal for orders from late January on - but we hope to make this even better soon. I'll post any developments here so stay tuned!

Yes - we do accept four layer PCB designs .. at least for now. However, demand for this has been low - it is possible that we will drop this if demand does not increase. Right now we have a four layer panel that has been filling for a couple of months and it is still only 25% full! What this means is that four layer boards have been taking a very long time to turn around .. there is some discussion about this as it becomes a problem for us and you because of the long wait.

The charge is very reasonable: $8.00 / sq. inch. and the mininum charge will be for one inch. The tolerances are better than the two layer boards - 6mil (~0.15 mm) trace and space width and 13mil (~0.33 mm) drill sizes. Compared to other services this is a very good deal - we want to be able to offer it but only if it makes sense to do so.

So here is the deal - I have resisted dropping support for four layer boards at the request of some of the members; but we really need to do more of these to keep it up. You can help with this by either ordering some four layer designs or getting the word out that you can have them done cheaply here. I will say "four layer PCB" a whole bunch here in hopes that google will pickup on it .. but other than that there is not much we can do but just try to get the word out. A panel is only 10" x 15" so we don't need millions to fill one - but we do need more than we have been getting to turn a panel in a reasonable time.

We will try to send the current panel soon - even if it is not completely full (which we did with the last panel). I would like to give everyone a couple of weeks to respond and get on the current four layer panel. If response is good and we don't lose money on this panel again we can keep support for four layer PCBs. If not .. sadness might happen.

Please Note: Four layer orders should be made separately from two layer boards - the turn around time is different and we have to ship them separately.

Thanks from us and all the four layer PCB proponents - now go out and design some cool four layer stuff, ok?