For quite a while, I despised the fact that surface-mount assembly prototyping required you to do your own solder paste and pick and place the components by band. Alas, I was merely short-sighted. Searching around on the Internet, I came upon this site, JLCPCB(JiaLiChuang (HongKong) Co., Limited). They do in fact provide fully automated assembly of printed circuit boards, including pick and place for surface-mount devices. Ball-grid array assembly is not supported, though. Still, come on, that’s pretty good!
20191125/https://jlcpcb.com/v
20191125/https://support.jlcpcb.com/article/13-who-is-jlcpcb
20191125/https://support.jlcpcb.com/category/78-smt-assembly
20191125/https://support.jlcpcb.com/article/83-smt-assembly-faqs
20191125/https://support.jlcpcb.com/article/79-pick-place-file-for-smt-assembly
20191125/https://support.jlcpcb.com/article/80-bill-of-materialsbom-file-for-smt-assembly
Interesting that they’ve only been around for 12 years. “Only” 12 years? Come on, that’s a long time! In the tech world in general, yeah, but they are relatively young compared to other companies in their area of electronics prototyping/manufacturing support companies such as Digi-Key, Mouser, etc. Then again, PCB manufacturing service companies seem to be rather young… many of the old big electronics businesses did the whole process in-house. So in that respect, they are old for a PCB manufacturing services company.
And looking more into this, now I realize that dirtypcbs.com may
provide the same through their “dirty BOM” site feature. Oh yeah, and
the custom cables? That is mainly about getting a service to crimp
standard cables onto standard connectors for you, with minor tweaking.
No need to suffer the pain of crimping your own cables.
Yeah, unfortunately, OSH Park offers nothing along the lines of BOM. If you want professional automation, you’ve got to take it to Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and the like around Asia.
Preface to this discovery:
What? I saw mention of Digi-Key PCBs on Twitter? Wait, can you really have Digi-Key ship you PCBs too? No, that’s not what was happening. What was happening here, a Digi-Key employee created PCBs with Digi-Key branding, had them packed up, and was going to use them to help teach soldering. There you go, not a Digi-Key provided service. Look elsewhere.
20191125/DuckDuckGo digikey pcb
Oh, now this is an interesting article discussing Bill of Materials (BOM) integrated into a PCB CAD design software, namely that of the site owner.
20191125/https://www.altium.com/solution/digikey
So, working with a manufacturer that also places components on your printed circuit board, the key to that is the Bill of Materials (BOM) specification, which apparently has become fairly standardized in the industry.
Interestingly, I saw mention of this “PCB ruler” from Digi-Key, basically a ruler made as a printed circuit board.
20191125/https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/ruler-from-digikey/