Boards from Aisler

Published on 2017-10-14 in PewPew FeatherWing.

Recently I found a board maker similar to OSHPark, but based in Germany, Europe. Could it be that my wish came true? As soon as I had a new version of PewPew’s PCBs designed, I decided to try them.

The prices seem similar to what OSHPark offers: at OSHPark I paid $8.95 for three 2.00x0.90 inch PCBs, here it’s €8.43. However, OSHPark has free shipping (which constitutes the bulk of the waiting time for me), while Aisler charged me additional €4.96 for shipping. But that’s totally fine by my if the boards land in my mailbox faster this way.

There is a bit of disappointment here, though. I made my order on 28th of September, and for nearly two weeks nothing happened. I finally went to check the order’s status two days ago, and it said on the website that they will be fabricating it within 1 hour. I assumed that it’s just a fancy message, but indeed one hour later the message changed to information that they are shipping it within minutes, and later that day that it shipped. The boards arrived two days later.

So in theory, it could be much faster than OSHPark, which usually makes my boards within a few days, and then they take two weeks to get here. However, in practice waiting for fabrication made it about the same. Perhaps it will get better as they get more orders and the panels will fill up faster?

Now about the boards themselves. Here’s a photo:

First of all, as you can see, the boards are green. As with OSHPark there are no color options, which is fine, but green is a bit boring. Their website is all orange, it would be super-awesome to get some orange boards! Oh well, green is fine.

There is ENIG finish, just like with the OSHPark boards.

Both the solder mask and the silkscreen are much lower resolution than what you get with OSHPark. If you look at the chip footprint on the left, you will see that every pin pad is different width — that’s the effect of low-res solder mask. You can also see that the head of the sheep logo bled into the outline — that’s the effect of low-res silkscreen. For comparison, boards from OSHPark and SeeedStudio:

Finally, the board outline. I’m really shocked about that: it looks like it was cut out with a hatchet by a drunk worker. I guess I shouldn’t have ordered during the Octoberfest.

I still need to assemble the board and see if it works, but all the traces look fine visually. We will see how that goes.