Stenchill and EasyEDA: a link exchange, not a partnership
Last month I wrote about Stenchill becoming a JLCPCB Advocate. This is the follow-up, and it needs a warning in the first paragraph: what I am about to describe is not a partnership. Nobody signed anything. No money changes hands. It is a link exchange between a small tool and a big one, and I would rather you hear that from me than read more into it than there is.
What actually happened
EasyEDA is the PCB design tool made by the same group as JLCPCB. I wrote a Stenchill extension for it and got it listed on their Extension Marketplace. Along the way I ended up in a conversation with someone at EasyEDA, and we landed on something simple: I point my visitors to EasyEDA, they point their users to Stenchill.
That is the whole arrangement. No contract, no exclusivity, no obligation on either side.
Why EasyEDA, and why now
Because it closes a loop that was already half closed. You design your board in EasyEDA, you order it at JLCPCB, and you print its stencil at home while the boards are in the post. Same group for the first two steps, and Stenchill for the third.
The extension also removes the step I like the least in my own workflow. Instead of exporting Gerbers by hand, zipping them and dropping them on a web page, you open a menu in the editor and the stencil comes back to you. Same generator, same settings, fewer clicks.
What changed on the site
a link under the upload area on the home page, for people who are designing in EasyEDA right now
a short section on the extension page for people who have never used it
a link to the marketplace listing, so you can install the extension without downloading a file
All of them carry a tracking marker, so EasyEDA can see exactly how many people I send their way. That is deliberate. When you ask something of a company, it helps to be able to point at a number.
No money involved
There is nothing financial in this arrangement, in either direction. What I get out of it is visibility for a tool that nobody finds on its own, and at this stage that is what Stenchill needs most.
Where it stops
The extension needs the desktop version of EasyEDA Pro. The browser version blocks the call to stenchill.com, so it cannot work there, and no amount of goodwill on their side would change that.
And none of this is me telling you to switch design tools. If you use KiCad, the KiCad plugin is still there, still maintained, and gets the same features at the same time. If you use something else entirely, the web page takes your Gerbers like it always has. The point of Stenchill was never to send you somewhere. It was to save you the trip.