What is PCB Assembly on-demand and why is it so important?
To start with, I’ll ask a question: What time is it as you read this post? If you’re reading it during normal business hours, then you should probably hurry back to your CAD software and finish up the layout before closing time. Or… Don’t worry about closing time. That’s what on demand manufacturing is all about.
Not that I want to encourage over working and under recreating. But the point is that sometimes we just don’t have enough time in the day to finish before our service providers check out themselves. That’s where the “on-demand” comes into the PCB assembly episode. You have on-demand book ordering and on-demand hamburger ordering. Why not on-demand electronics manufacturing ordering?
In a sense, on-demand PCB assembly is not new, especially in the prototype world. It just used to be different. Back before surface mount (SMT) ruled the electronics design world, it was not uncommon for an engineer to hand a blank PC board and a bag of parts to a poor technician mid-day Friday with eh statement: “I need this built by Monday morning.” I was, fortunately, never on the receiving end of such a transaction, but I witnessed it more than once. Today’s on-demand PCB assembly is not like that. It’s all about making things easier for everyone on your end.
By hoping over to our quote page, you can get a quote and place an order (or request a formal quote for your formal approval process) any time of the day or night. Now I happen to be pretty partial to our own set of PCB assembly services (and I’m also pretty partial to those of our fab partner, Sunstone Circuits), but a lot of folks are in the on-demand world these days. The important thing is that you can order just about anything on your own time these days and we’ve been making sure that PCB assembly is in that set since 2003. (Almost 20 years as of tis writing).
That leads to my recommendation for this coming weekend. I would suggest that you close up your design on Friday if you aren’t quite done yet. Come back to it on Monday and after it’s finished, go through your completion checklist and then ad a few of our items to it:
- Double check that your part numbers are up to date and match your reference designators.
- Double check that you have put the most current files in your .ZIP file.
- Include intelligent CAD files if at all possible (such as IPC-2581 or ODB++).
- If you are kitting your parts up, make sure your kit is organized and all parts are clearly marked (read more here).
- Make sure to inspect any parts-drawer parts (read more here).
- Give a thought to anything that might seem a bit ambiguous and do your best to document it. Ambiguity is the enemy of quality.
Once you are satisfied with your design package, hop over to our quote page, get a quote and place your order and leave the PCB assembly to us. And if you’re not quite ready to get a quote of place a quote yet, you can take a look at our PCB assembly resource page for additional help navigating this process.
Duane Benson
Whomever can spot the ambiguity in the following image will receive 15 points (which you can do nothing with).