[kevin200]

The cost of Gold finish for Express PCB manufacturing is very high, I am wondering what company can do it with low cost? While quality is not affected.
Thank you:idea::idea::idea::idea:

[brian257]

I have never used gold in my boards so I have nothing to compare the price to, but I have recently switched to Accutrace for all of my boards and have found that they are very good quality and price blows away the other PCB makers I have used. They also have a great new customer special for 50% off your orders for the first $1,000 in orders you make. No affiliation with them, just a happy customer, but if you are using a company with better prices and good service let me know.

Printed Circuit Boards..Accutrace pc boards

[bill south]

Hey Guys;
I'm just now getting into PCB's and am wondering what design software is the best deal. Eagle is what I have found the most references to but their boards are limited to 80 X 100 mm (~3X4") and that is just to small for my project. I need at least a 4 X 6 or larger. Any advise will be appreciated!
Bill

[brian257]

I have an old version of Traxmaker that I have been using for about 15 years and it does a good job. I think it may be shareware now. A few years ago I had to do some more advanced building of some custom complex device patterns and I needed something to do schematics and simulation also so I evaluated a bunch of different programs. I found Eagle to not be very easy to use for this and most other programs were very expensive. I finally settled on Proteus from Labcenter and I have been happy with it. I think it very much blows away Eagle, but is not as popular because so many people just want to use a free program these days. One of the really cool things about the simulation part of the program is that you can simulate both microcontroller code and the complete circuit built around it in the same program.