h1

Easier and harder

March 17, 2014

Armed with my gerbers, I went to OSHPark, the place where I’ve heard small quantities of small boards can be had at a reasonable price. It starts with a nice welcome page. I pushed the giant Get Started Now button, thinking I’ll need a log in. Nope, it gets started, wanting me to upload my files.

We’ve only just met, that seems a little fast.

I tried to upload files but it failed because I tried to upload the first of the many files in my newly unzipped directory. Happily, it told me to load the zip so I deleted my expanded folder and just loaded the zip file I got from electrical engineer Casey. Clearly, this site was designed for idiots. Which is great in this case.

When I uploaded the zip, it didn’t have one of the files but it told me which one was missing. I emailed Casey. But then, as I was procrastinating kitting parts decided to write up these experiences, I read more of the text surrounding the large buttons on OSHPark. It said I can put in the brd file. I saw one of those in the source directory (as opposed to the Gerbers zip).

This succeeded. Faced with a “name it and give us your email”, I had to choose Continue (the only other option was start over). The buttons were inviting but I felt like I was herded along the path.

The site showed the different layers, similar to what Casey had sent. They looked good. Now, Approve or Approve and Order? I wanted to order them… but how much will it be? They didn’t (yet) have payment info so cancelling was possible.

Oh! Check this out, on the next page it said:

Your design will cost $6.45 per set of three.

Squee! I can buy them! They aren’t very expensive. I have to buy in units of 3… well, I thought it would be $40 for 10 or 15 so… let’s do 15 ($32.25). And free shipping? Cool!

Seriously, this is too easy, it has to fail catastrophically any second now. Typed in my credit card number (obviously this is a business expense!)… now there is email from their bot and a receipt in my email account.

I just bought boards. Wow. That’s pretty cool. So easy a software engineer could do it.