cost effective

2 Articles

Pretty purple PCBs, made in the USA

Does Made-in-America Make Sense For PCB Prototyping?

July 6, 2025 by 96 Comments

These are tough times for American hackers, and rife with uncertainty. Trade wars are on, off, on again– who can keep track? If you’re used to getting everything from China, that can really cramp your style. [Jeremy Cook] took the time to write up his experience prototyping with American-made PCBs, just in time for us to totally miss Independence Day.

The project was a simple nightlight, using a single LED, a photoresistor, a transistor, and a CR2032 battery. The CR2032 battery does complicate things, though: [Jeremy] figured out a neat way to hold the battery using a PCB cutout, but it needs to be a 0.8 mm board. (That’s going to matter in a moment.) He’s put that PCB on GitHub if you’re interested.

To start off, JLBPCB is the Chinese clearing house of choice for [Jeremy], and they quoted a very cheap $7.10 for 20 boards. The problem was that shipping across the Pacific Ocean, plus the ever-wavering tariff charge, brought the price to $48.08. About five dollars of which was from tariffs; the rest you can put down to the cost of jet fuel and the size of the Pacific Ocean.

On the other hand, OSH Park, was able to get [Jeremy] three of their pretty purple PCBs for $7.75 all-inclusive. Overall, since he’s prototyping and does not want 20 boards this revision, [Jeremy] saves quite a lot by staying local– including the environmental impact of shipping and laxer regulations in China, if that sort of thing matters to you. 

The suprizing thing is the turnaround time: [Jeremy] got his pretty purple PCBs from OSH Park a full twenty days after ordering. Similar orders from China take only a week, which is just mind-blowing when you stop and think about the great honking ocean in the way. We could perhaps cut OSH Park some slack in that 0.8 mm boards are not the most common, but their quoted turnaround time for two-layer prototypes is minimum 12 days.

They do offer a “super-swift” option for two-layer boards, but then they lose on price. As [Jeremy] points out, there are always tradeoffs. If you’re really in a hurry, nothing’s faster than milling the boards yourself. Or you could go the old-school toner-transfer etching route.

Our thanks to [Jeremy] for the tip. If you’ve got a better way to prototype, do send us a tip about it. Also, please us know in the comments if you’ve tried an in-country PCB fabricator, and how it compared to the usual offerings from the PRC.

Robotic Cheetah Teaches A Motors Class

May 29, 2019 by 14 Comments

It seems like modern roboticists have decided to have a competition to see which group can develop the most terrifying robot ever invented. As of this writing the leading candidate seems to be the robot that can fuel itself by “eating” organic matter. We can only hope that the engineers involved will decide not to flesh that one out completely. Anyway, if we can get past the horrifying and/or uncanny valley-type situations we find ourselves in when looking at these robots, it turns out they have a lot to teach us about the theories behind a lot of complicated electric motors.

This research paper (gigantic PDF warning) focuses on the construction methods behind MIT’s cheetah robot. It has twelve degrees of freedom and uses a number of exceptionally low-cost modular actuators as motors to control its four legs. Compared to other robots of this type, this helps them jump a major hurdle of cost while still retaining an impressive amount of mobility and control. They were able to integrate a brushless motor, a smart ESC system with feedback, and a planetary gearbox all into the motor itself. That alone is worth the price of admission!

The details on how they did it are well-documented in the 102-page academic document and the source code is available on GitHub if you need a motor like this for any other sort of project, but if you’re here just for the cheetah doing backflips you can also keep up with the build progress at the project’s blog page. We also featured this build earlier in its history as well.