Hi all,
The last years I’ve sampled some parts from LCSC.com and it looks to be an interesting alternative/supplement to Mouser, Digikey, RS & Farnell. After looking over some samples of USB C connectors from them, I came to that I’ll only use USB C from here on in my projects (unless clients insist on something else).
So I laid out some simple breakout boards in Kicad to test some of these parts. $0.14 for a USB C power connector or $0.24 for USB 2 on Type C is quite tempting, so I wrote up some of my thoughts on my blog. If you have an interest in USB Type C, please have a look and provide some feedback? I also added some experiences from laying out a USB 3.1 SuperSpeed Hub, so it’s hopefully an interesting read for anyone curious.
Those were quite cheap @LukeBeno? I noticed that the free shipping is 30-50 days and that express shipping starts at $46.86? What did you choose and how long did it take?
With LCSC, I ordered 13 different products (80 items) and paid $29.85 for DHL. Slow shipping from LCSC is just a few dollars and took 12 days to Norway.
For low volumes, I thought that 24.5 cents is pretty cheap, of course there are probably lower cost Micro USB’s out there or other parts from LCSC like you identified. At a minimum I thought it was a fair deal.
I was introduced to them scrolling through Twitter. It looked like too good of a deal not to try so I just impulsed 100 with the inexpensive shipping. It really did take a long time to arrive, 30 days at least but that was OK because I was just planning to use it when it arrives. Since doing the design, I stocked up on more of them while the first 100 were consumed.
It’s a habit that I’m in now, when I see interesting parts for a good price, I’ll just buy some large quantity of them with the slow shipping.
LCSC is great too and their speed/shipping cost is low, I just bought a few reels of buck regs and mosfets from there. This is the same habit, standardize on a 6cent buck regulator, but a reel of 1000 (just $60) and have prototype parts for a long time.
I have plenty of packages arriving in my mailbox for items that I completely forgot that I ordered… Maybe I have a problem…
Thanks for the experience report and the breakout board designs, Jens. That’s really useful. Sounds like I’ll be steering clear of USB 3 for now. It sounds hard to get right!
@ian USB 3 is only hard if you need those fast speeds, but if you do (or have a client that needs it) it can be good to know that it’s more expensive both in terms of hardware and likely also in amount of work I also think that I’d do it faster the second time around.
It took 3 PCB’s over 2 months to implement the 3.1 Hub correctly, but I also did other projects at the time. I didn’t count the hours for the Hub specifically (as there are other things on that board also) but it wasn’t too bad. I got great support from TI and I usually do, so I prefer to use hardware from them when I design something where I have limited experience.
