Penalized Panelizing

Published on 2018-06-12 in Kubik M0.

Turns out that my simple yet brilliant idea for using the remaining board space for the mechanical parts of the legs is not so great after all. Most of the board houses noticed that people cram multiple designs into their boards, and started to demand extra payment for them. For example, at jlcpcb, you pay \(2 for the first order, and \)8 for every additional design on the same board, while ordering a separate PCB with that other design would cost you $5… Crazy stuff.

I decided that I won’t be participating in that, and simply went to DirtyPCBs, who don’t do such a thing. But they use white silkscreen with the yellow boards, which would look bad with the diagonal stripes that I added, so I ended up ordering black PCBs. Oh well.

Ultimately, I probably want to laser-cut the mechanical parts anyways, but I really wanted to test how this would work.