Hi there,
Thank you all for sharing the information on your project.
I was wondering if you could also let us know the fabricator(s) you used for the different boards. We would like to place orders with your fabricator, and put together our own unit for testing and further researches.
I contacted online PCB makers like JLCPCB and PCBWAY, but they will need more than just the brd. file and sch. file.
Thank you.
Best regards, Andy
I'll ask Bernhard Zimmermann.
@aortegam Thank you.
I managed to generate manufacturing files (like gerber, BOMs, pick and place information) with the provided info. using Autodeak Eagle. Will also have further discussion with some of the manufacturers I used, and see if they can process our order.
But, I have to admit I only have very limited knowledge in board manufacturing.
I will update you guys how things go from here as well.
Thank you all again for sharing your tech. here. It certainly helps us and a great deal of many other people.
Best regards, Andy
This is very exciting Andy. Do let us know how it goes!
Hi again,
A quick update from our end here:
We have been liaising with PCBWay for fabricating an unit for us. Their Sales and Supporting teams are most certainly very helpful, and spend considerable effort in sourcing for various components for the different parts of the system for us. I am very grateful for the support we have.
However, we were told a large number of the components needed cannot be sourced at this point, and we should either suggest equivalent alternatives, or supply the components ourselves. I am afraid this is beyond the knowledge and capabilities of our team.
As such, I would like to reach out to the Community here again, and see if there is anyone could give us some contact info. for PCB manufacturers they used to make a functional NinjaNIRS unit. I am hoping it would be easier for the PCB manufacturers to repeat an order, and save them (and us) some time to process our order.
I don't mean to come across as a free-rider on other team's effort. But, last thing I want is to end up with a unit that doesn't work, or we have to second guess the data collected, just because we made our unit with questionable components that we suggested without proper knowledge.
Any help from you all will be very much appreciated.
Thanks.
Global supply chain disruptions have greatly impacted the ability to get components for making all types of circuits boards. For instance, we've been waiting for over 6 months for, for instance, a simple plastic connector part so that we could build a few more ninjaNIRS21 units. Very frustrating. They have arrived and now we are making those units and will update the hardware page with the documentation for ninjaNIRS21.
If you want a working fNIRS system out of the box without having to build it and debug it yourself, then you really should go to a commercial fNIRS company and buy a proven system that the company will be able to support. For those who do have circuit knowledge and want to build and modify their own fNIRS systems, I think we, as a community, can go quite far and use this forum to help each other.
We at BU have thought about providing the pre-populated circuit board components to those who don't want to build them themselves. But this costs us time and money and we have to figure out how to support that effort.
@dboas Understood. Thank you for your message, Dr. Boas.
I understand PCBWay is based in Shenzhen, and if they are having issues with sourcing components, chances are people all over the world are experiencing the same issue, too.
I will check with my supervisors here and see if this is something (the global supply chain disruption) we could wait it out.
And in the mean time, I will see if anyone else in the forum might have other suggestions..
Thanks again.
@andylamcuhk We have made good experiences with PCBWay. Unfortunately, as David Boas mentioned, several parts of NinjaNIRS are currently nearly impossible to source.
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