South West Makers

I needed a quick method of checking the best resistance needed for various circuits. I could use a variable resistor, but some circuits needed less than 1 ohm, so I whipped up a couple of low and high resistance decade boards at home using this method: http://forum.swmakers.org/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=186. A year has gone by and I have used them a few times and thought I could add a couple of variable resistors and a few extra rows of resistors and send the board off to China to be produced professionally.

The home brew version:


Panellised PCB as sent off to China for production:

I forgot to mention a bit about who I used to manufacture the PCB panel of boards. You can read a review of a few manufactures here: http://forum.swmakers.org/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=208

This panel is being made by Seeed http://forum.swmakers.org/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=208 and cost US$4.90 + US$13.26 for shipping, or A$25.63 for 10 lots of four boards, or around A$0.64 each delivered to my door in 18 to 30 days time.

The PCB arrived back from being manufactured at Seeed in Shenzhen China. Seeed's manufacturing times are all over the place. This one took 6 days to be made and 23 days to be cheaply shipped to Australia, so it arrived 29 days after the order was placed.



The only mistake was the connection plug footing was not quite the best size. It works, but could be improved if I do another PCB order.