Discussion

colin@colino.net

Liftyee: Useful overview of PCBWay's capabilities. I might consider switching from JLCPCB.Design critique - I would put the mounting holes further from the board edge, for added strength. The screw heads are going to overhang a certain amount anyway.I suspect more and more hobbyists are using 3.3V microcontrollers like the ESP32, Raspberry Pi Pico, and countless Adafruit offerings. Unless you know your project won't need much processing power, I don't see much reason to use a 5V "ATmega..." -based Arduino these days. Much easier to use a cheap £2 32-bit overkill processor than to deal with running out of RAM, etc. Also, most advanced sensors I've seen have 3.3V logic levels now.

progbits: Tangential but since it's in the title...pcbway and jlcpcb sponsorships, especially on hobby electronics YT videos, are quite interesting case.On one hand they seem redundant at this point. Both companies are well known to the target audience to the point of saturation, there isn't really any serious competition (in terms of capabilities, speed and price) and yet they keep sponsoring more projects.On the other hand, it's probably the sponsorship I tolerate the most. Both are genuine companies unlike all the borderline scams such as all the vpns, brilliant, mobile games, etc.

qingcharles: Even if he had written a bad review, it would almost certainly still have resulted in a backlink to PCBWay which increases their Page Rank and search engine performance.

mnkyprskbd: The value of this kind of sponsorship is not as much about becoming know to the target audience but creating the environment to grow the number of audience.