Speaking of making PCBs...
We were chatting about making PCBs in the tymkrs irc the other day and @Tautic passed on an interesting article that I thought would be worth repeating here. We had been chatting about @laen's work in making PCBs for DIYers/Makers and the word on the street is that to make the prices more hobbyist friendly, he combines a whole bunch of orders onto a single panel so as not to waste space.
Here's the site that goes through a lot of the details and is in general a pretty interesting read: http://circuitpeople.com/Blog/PanelsInPcbManufacturing.aspx
Essentially, it's cheaper to put all of the different boards from different projects (assuming they're produced in a similar fashion) on one panel as opposed to having a few boards on a single panel and wasting the rest of that unused panel space.
You can quickly see that more boards packed into a set of panels means more efficient (less costly) manufacturing. And, generally speaking, the more boards that fit on a panel the lower the per-board price. This works out well for both customers and fabricators. However, it's one of those things that seems to be missed during PCB layout.
Costs can skyrocket when your design differs from "what everyone else is doing" because your boards will need to be on panels all by themselves. Boards that are done using "common" technology are easily aggregated; meaning the cost of manufacturing the panel can be spread among multiple customers. This can be a huge cost saver. But if you're boards are going to be on panels by themselves, you have to take a close look at panelization efficiency.
Essentially. Three things matter - size, rotation, and spacing between boards
Size:
Rotation:
And spacing:
Now if you want to do PCB fabrication yourself - there is a calculator on that linked page that can help - though the boards need to all be the same size. I imagine though that @laen could help out if you only needed a couple done!
@atdiy/@tymkrs