I'm frankly amazed at how cheap getting PCBs made is these days. When I first started out my electronics hobby in the 00's, everything I did that I wanted to be "permanent" was done on perfboard with through the hole parts, ordering PCBs was a pipe dream for a teenager funded mostly by birthday and Christmas gifts, even if the ads in Servo magazine suggested otherwise.
I took nearly a decade off (shifting into contract app/game dev work, university, and then starting my career did not leave a lot of room for my electronics/robotics hobby) and now the bargain basement price for a batch of 5 "passable" quality boards is <= $10 (and "good" quality for <= $50), surface mount parts suddenly became very accessible and to be honest, for some of the stuff I've played around with, the price savings by using SMT usually pays for the boards. DIPs are getting really expensive. It completely blows my mind.
The other thing is that the state of enclosures for the finished part has gotten a lot better. When I was doing electronics projects in high school, I was always stymied by enclosures that cost $100 and had to be heavily modified. I didn't have that kind of money, and I didn't have a drill and all the hole saws necessary to make a good front panel. If I was lucky, I put it in a shoebox or an Altoids tin, but I mostly had bare perboards laying around on my workbench, longing for a real home.
Now 3D printing is a thing, and it excels at making enclosures for your projects. With a couple hours in CAD, you can have a perfect enclosure on the first try, and they work and look great. Since getting a 3D printer a few years ago, every bare circuit board project in my house has gotten an enclosure, and it's wonderful. You aren't constantly worried about static shocking it, or pulling out some critical wire. You can just use the thing you built like it's a real product.
Yes, it's amazing. You often don't even need to have a PCB made much either because there are tons of modules for all common hobbyist circuits available very cheap, cheaper than the individual parts! I'm building a robot with a Raspberry Pi, a MOSFET module, a camera module, an LED module, a power supply module, a current regulator module, a motor driver module, and audio amplifier module, an Arduino module, etc. Not a single perf board or custom PCB required.
Other important equipment like PC-connected oscilloscopes and lab power supplies are super cheap now too.
You might have missed an opportunity in the 1990's to make your own boards by drawing with an etch-resist pen. I was making boards like that using money from my paper run.
Maybe we need a new national anthem "Praise God for the rise of China" ;)
and now you've got places like jlcpcb.com that will do pick and place on many common SMT components for like pennies per unit (there's even a free tier for common resistors and capacitors)
I've long ago retired me FeCl acid and DIY copper boards; 3 day shipping from China is just too convenient.
yep! I actually just ordered boards from them. I probably would've ordered assembly from them if I hadn't wanted to do it myself for fun.
How does the pricing for "extended parts" work? It says $3 per component, but it would seem they mean per component type?
Thinking of doing an FPGA board with them because the concept of soldering an 0.8 mm pitch BGA with hand alignment and a modified toaster oven where a screw up ruins a $50 part is a bit much for me.
I took nearly a decade off (shifting into contract app/game dev work, university, and then starting my career did not leave a lot of room for my electronics/robotics hobby) and now the bargain basement price for a batch of 5 "passable" quality boards is <= $10 (and "good" quality for <= $50), surface mount parts suddenly became very accessible and to be honest, for some of the stuff I've played around with, the price savings by using SMT usually pays for the boards. DIPs are getting really expensive. It completely blows my mind.