This is a great help - I plan to go thru this process hopefully soon. I know that you are populating the bga and small surface mount components yourself (and I want to be able to do it too) but is it expensive or problematic to let JLPCB to populate the harder parts?
I have only had JLCPCB populate the components on one of my projects. They did a nice job. Often, I don't need five fully populated PCBs. I believe you would need to order a minimum of five populated PCBs. Also, I am using parts I have acquired inexpensively (e.g., Ebay), and I expect JLCPCB would want to use parts they supply (if they have the parts). I'm not sure if it's an option to send parts to JLCPCB, but even if it was, it would be burdensome for me to do so.
