Professional PCBs almost cheaper than making them at home

Step 4 Create a drill file

The manufacturer needs to know what drills to use. Eagle has automatically used whatever drill fits the components that have been chosen. Go to File/Run and select the file "drillcfg.ulp". I selected inches rather than mm and that seemed fine with the manufacturer. Click ok then ok again. It will save a file with a .drl extension.

Comments

[dveloz]

At work I keep different drill sizes to a minimum; for every different drill size the price of my board goes up. My understanding is that for every differently sized drill bit, a worker must stop the drilling process to swap out the drill bit. Labor stateside can be expensive, does this matter in China?

[matseng]

It's not a matter of labor and the costs related to that. It's more a matter of getting less boards thru the drilling machine in a given time period. The machine will change the bit automatically by itself, but it needs to spin down the current drill, return to the drill rack and replace the drill and then spin up to an ultrahigh speed again. All this takes a lot of time that could have been productive drilling a lot of holes instead.