Where to get a few prototypes pcb's built and/or assembled

Depends on your timeline.

Chinese places will be the cheapest and slowest - gold phoenix will do large panels for about $100 shipped as I recall, and they'll even cut out your boards (meaning you might get 50 of the boards).

njpcb.com is also cheap - e-mail them for a quote as they don't have a set price. They also are notorious for spamming - so you might want to consider if saving a few bucks is worth supporting a spammer.

Here in the USA there are other good options - Advanced Circuits (4pcb.com) makes very, very high quality boards and often has good specials. I recently had 20 1.5x5cm boards made for $120 shipped with a

5 day turn around (ordered them on a Friday, got them the next Wenesday). I personally have been using Advanced Circuits exclusively for a little while now as they make really high quality boards, have incredibly good customer service, great turn around, and are located in the USA.

It all depends on your timeline and budget.

-Mike

Marc Re> I have a small 2 layer board ( surface mount devices and I need about five prototypes built. Does anyone

Thanks for your response.

I'm also looking to have the surface mount components assembled on the boards.

Any thoughts?

Marco ________________________ Marc Reinig UCO/Lick Observatory Laboratory for Adaptive Optics

Hi Marco, If you don't mind sending to Australia, I may be able to help you.

We do prototyping and small volume runs for our customers. Mostly 1 or 2 prototypes at a time and production runs of 1 up ;).

Email me some details if you're interested. (remove the obvious spambot trap)

Cheers, John

snipped-for-privacy@bigpond.net.au

Hi Marco, assuming you were asking a comercial source, have a look at New Micros

We do about 2/3's of our business as custom or semicustom boards, the other 1/3 standard run computer boards. We've flown on the Voyager, Pegasus, Ariane, explored the oceans with RAFOS floats and ALICE probes. We have several projects working with Panavision in development of their optical motion control systems, and we sell to several observatories around the planet.

We can (design, program,) manufacture, prototype, build short run, or long run. For short runs like you mention, we hand build in house. For instance you might look at our PlugaPod(TM) board, which is 1.3" x 1.0" with about a dozen SMT components for comparison.