Hi Andrew founder of CircuitHub here. Happy to answer any questions. Hardware design has been in the news a lot lately as it's going through the same AI revolution as coding. We're happy to make it easy to turn those designs into physical products.
I'd highly recommend you revisit your protection of customer's IP. Considering that you require source files (not just the industry standard gerbers), your legal terms are very unfavorable to customers. This makes me uncomfortable because it makes my IP much easier to leak. As written, I cannot justify the risks given your agreement.<p>Nothing in the legal terms explicitly prevents your employees from using my designs for other purposes. If you leak my IP and I find out 13 months later, your terms prevent me from seeking damages because you only cover 12 months from manufacturing.<p>I like that you have an NDA that I can opt in to, but you should be offering the NDA by default when I upload the files. I should not have to go looking for it in your documentation.<p>Edit: I realize that there is also limited protection and a lot of risk using a Chinese manufacturer. But requiring source files makes it much, much, easier to look at my design, recognize what it's for, and reproduce it, or at least copy the innovative parts of my design.
You can upload Gerbers/ODB++ if you like. We also sign custom NDA's. We count many of the worlds largest corporations as customers so this is pretty standard.
Here's what the documentation says:<p>---<p>In order to receive a quote on CircuitHub, you will need to upload the original design files from your EDA tool, or an export that carries the same data. This allows us to provide instant quotes and automate the manufacturing process to lower lead times and cost. Currently, our platform works with Altium, KiCad and Fusion 360 files, and with ODB++ and IPC-2581 exports from any design tool, including Cadence Allegro and OrCAD.<p>We do not accept Gerber files on their own because they do not contain all of the design and assembly data required by our automated process. We do use your Gerber files when you upload them together with an ODB++ or IPC-2581 export, or with Fusion 360's EAGLE exports, which describe the parts.<p>---<p>Other vendors don't require this. They just need the gerbers, BOM, and CPL files. That's way different than source files or ODB++/IPC-2581 exports, which is basically the same thing as source.
Then there's either a usability issue or a bug. I uploaded gerbers but it wouldn't let me continue unless I uploaded schematics and board files.<p>And why should I have to sign an NDA? You aren't giving me any confidential data, I am giving it to you.
Would you address other concerns voiced above? They are pretty serious points or allegations. Also, a PCB sourcing should not require a custom NDA when the selling point is convenience, legal protection, and speed vis-a-vis overseas sourcing.
I second the use of NDA/privacy gaurantee as default. It shouldn't be opt-in with friction. Of course if I want to use a custom/overriding NDA then i'm happy to contact you to review.
It’s several steps up from Chinese manufacturers already however where they will almost certainly use your design for something else if it suits them and you have no protections.
I agree up to a point. It's like the difference in giving someone binary or source code. Yes, someone can reverse engineer gerbers into a schematic, but that's a lot different than handing over the schematic, which includes more information about the design than the gerbers do. It's much easier to look at a schematic and say "oh, that's a circuit I want to use" than it is to look at gerber files and think that.<p>I have some level of confidence that JLC is going to protect my IP. They are big and if someone's IP leaked it could be devastating to their business. Their legal agreements are a lot more detailed and favorable than what's currently on circuithub.
I wish you well, domestic electronic production is something we need very badly.<p>I won't complain about the price, I understand it's going to be more expensive than China. But it's a tough one for me. I have a budget that I have to work with, and while I have some flexibility 3X prices (your site priced $9k compared to JLC's $2k, even after tariffs and shipping) make the project nonviable for me. I hope you can continue to improve pricing over time as you scale.<p>Also your parts selection interface needs a lot of work. I have a very simple board and I had to go through clunky search and select for parts, even when the digikey part number was in the description.
Thanks for the feedback on part selection interface, we are just wrapping up some big improvements here. On the pricing side, if you fit within the Proto Board spec we are very comparable with JLC on much shorter lead time. If you go outside that then for now we are quite a bit higher price. But bear with us, more capacity and thus lower prices all round coming soon.
Looks interesting. As a US manufacturer/designer I will be keeping an eye on this closely.<p>Currently, all assembly is done in house (in the US) but bare PCBs typically are still made in CN.
We used to produce everything overseas and just do the QA/test in the US but during the chip shortage I ended up setting up the production line to attempt to eliminate any possible shortages/tariffs.<p>It is a difficult struggle manufacturing commercial products in the US (doubly so with an openhardware project) since the final cost is the major blocker but I decided it was worth it for many reasons. Big issue though is knowing that even if I pay someone 2x the going rate for an employee it still will not be a living wage. Not sure the fix there. I see you are planning to lean heavily on automation/AI for this, will be watching to see how it all progresses.<p>There are still some major blockers in the US. Commercial/Industrial real estate being a big one. Costs are not going down...even if employee count is minimized.<p>I wish nothing but the best for the project.
> Big issue though is knowing that even if I pay someone 2x the going rate for an employee it still will not be a living wage.<p>Being mindful of wages is great, but eventually you have to accept that creating a job at a less than ideal wage is better than not creating any job at all. If the pay is not enough then you’ll get the signal through being unable to hire because workers are taking better paying jobs.<p>An unintuitive feature of the job market is that creating more low paying jobs actually puts upward pressure on wages. Ideally the low end of the job market should be saturated with job opportunities, which creates a situation where employers have to compete with each other to raise wages to find and retain employees, which means pay goes up for everyone.<p>So don’t let worries about not being able to pay as much as you’d like get in the way of paying anyone at all. The alternative (less jobs, more outsourcing) is worse in every way.
The problem is almost entirely that housing is too expensive.<p>"Living wage" is an awful term because it intrinsically holds employers responsible for real estate costs, which are strongly correlated with higher pay (read: as employees get paid more, housing costs rise to match it).<p>$20 an hour is not awful pay when you can rent for $600/mo. So the actual fix is to just build more housing, and it will bring back the viability of all these disappearing jobs.
Employers used to just build housing for their employees. While in some cases it lead to questionably practices, it almost seems the lesser evil today.
Employers are free to use their political capital to push against bad behaviour by landlords and NIMBYs, but they traditionally rally behind politics that favors both of those groups.<p>They sure have a lot of that capital.
> Being mindful of wages is great, but eventually you have to accept that creating a job at a less than ideal wage is better than not creating any job at all.<p>For the employee, maybe. For the employer, it depends on how much time/money you have to put into training and what turnover is. Paying non-living wages leads to high(er) turnover because people will leave for anything better.
Right. That’s exactly what pushes wages up. Employers have to find the wage that retains employees while still being profitable.<p>Money is not unlimited though so “just pay everyone a living wage” isn’t a real solution. If you can’t afford to pay ideal “living wage” (which is an undefined target that keeps moving depending on who you ask) then your options are to either not create the job at all, or outsource the work.<p>So therefore, creating a job at any wage is better for your economy than not creating the job at all.
I will reply to this post to clarify (although I will be responding to several).<p>"Living wage" in my area is $40/hr. That is just to live, not thrive or gain.<p>Rent prices have gone insane [1], which in turn have drove up COGS. Since COGS have gone up the real estate investors have raised their prices on rents/housing to make up for the increase. The feedback loop has gone on too long...I am concerned the only option is collapse and for a lot of investors to lose money. This will feedback into the system even more...it will not benefit either the renter or the investor.
As they say..."the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent".<p>I run a very small company that is largely bootstrapped. I fix all my own machines, do my own setup, move my own equipment. Personally, I work on every step from design through packaging (janitor>CEO). There is not enough money to pay a living wage for others...so I end up doing everything myself. 70hr weeks are not uncommon. (I also cook my own meals, fix my own car and bake my own bread...otherwise I would not make it)<p>If you have not been a renter for the last 10 years you may not have noticed. Building more is not helping since the only things being built are done so they can set them to the new "normal" price. It is to the point where they consider an "affordable home" as $400k (in my area they literally named this development as "Miracle on Britton"). Meanwhile the average renter makes <$40k/year.<p>I have not been outsourcing more due to this. Just working harder myself...but even so I barely get by. 5 years ago I gave up the hope of ever buying in this area [2], currently I am just working to stay here long enough to take care of family. If I did not have that I would be long gone.<p>Doing what I can to bring back manufacturing to the area, but I am a small fish working mostly in Opensource Hardware. If the project starts making money again very likely it will be cloned to the point where there will be no way to make profit (already happened once).<p>[1] <a href="https://www.zillow.com/rental-manager/market-trends/coeur-d-alene-id/" rel="nofollow">https://www.zillow.com/rental-manager/market-trends/coeur-d-...</a>
[2] <a href="https://www.zillow.com/home-values/136166/coeur-dalene-id/" rel="nofollow">https://www.zillow.com/home-values/136166/coeur-dalene-id/</a>
So then why open source it? People are cheap, and if I can get a knock off version of your thing for a tenth of the price, why would I support you? The prisoner's dilemma encourages me to defect. I've got my own bills to pay, mouths to feed. Me being shortsighted and an asshole doesn't help you pay your bills and feed your mouths. I pay the Adafruit premium when I can because they've done so much good, but I can't help but also know that I could save money and go elsewhere.
One nice aspect of automation is that we are able to pay people well due to the leverage. I'm proud of the fact we've been able to create a lot of good well paying high tech jobs in an area that really didn't have many.
It’s incredible that you set up an in-house PCBA pipeline. I’m curious about what that looks like, and what you are building/manufacturing, if you don’t mind sharing!
I run some used Manncorp/Autotronik equipment. Pnp, oven, bunch of hand tools and such for rework (Metcal irons). If I didn't have this I would likely build a line using an openpnp based machine.<p>Making boards for the Smoothieware/Smoothieboard project. [1]<p>Mostly small SMT stuff on there. 0402, BGA, etc.<p>[1]<a href="https://github.com/Smoothieware/Smoothieboard2" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/Smoothieware/Smoothieboard2</a>
Thanks! Best of luck with your project also!
> Big issue though is knowing that even if I pay someone 2x the going rate for an employee it still will not be a living wage. Not sure the fix there.<p>The fix is you will just have to buy American and pay higher prices for higher "living wages". There's no way around it besides taxes or tariffs on foreign goods to equalize the wage/price difference (which does have some down sides).<p>I buy American and western-made products as much as possible, and I pay higher prices (assuming high quality) for those higher wages. If you want low cost, you can't by definition support "living wages".<p>There's no "oh if only the CEO makes less" way around it either. Labor is simply more expensive in the west and will remain so and you can vote with your wallet, as I do, or you can pay people less than living wages.
If the wage difference is what is stopping you, then you aren't <i>really</i> trying to compete. There will <i>always</i> be a shithole country with dirt-cheap wages where companies can get stuff made with virtually-unlimited manual labor. Unless you are going to turn the US into a country with third-world living standards, you won't be able to compete with that, so don't even bother trying. Still want to compete on price rather than quality, speed, or services? Automate <i>everything</i> and make wages irrelevant.<p>China already figured this out, mind you. Their wages have been exploding as the country has developed, and due to their horrible one-child policy they are facing a giant population cliff. They have been pushing <i>very</i> hard to switch their factories from cheap labor to automation, and those dirt-cheap Chinese EVs our Western politicians are working so hard to block in order to keep the horribly outdated Western car manufacturers alive are the direct result of that.
How many people are willing to pay more for America/Western-made products? How many are able to correctly know which companies are honest, and which are finding loopholes (e.g. bringing in underpaid temporary workers from abroad, finding the bare minimum for a product to be qualified as "Made in X", writing "Designed in America").<p>And how many people will be willing to pay a premium when the locally made products are worse quality than foreign products? It's happening right now with Chinese consumer goods (e.g. robotic vacuum cleaners), EVs, etc. Eventually there's a high possibility you won't be able to buy anything in the product category you want.
My personal limit is 2x the Chinese prices but in reality the prices end up being 4-5x more.
> How many people are willing to pay more for America/Western-made products?<p>No clue, but there are millions. Just depends on the product.<p>Here are two examples. One made in France, the other in America:<p>[1] <a href="https://www.debuyer-usa.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.debuyer-usa.com</a><p>[2] <a href="https://smithey.com" rel="nofollow">https://smithey.com</a><p>One of those pans is made in France (western) the other is made here in the US. The quality of the US pans are a bit better which is part of why they command the higher prices. But you can also buy a pan from Wal-Mart for 1/10 or 1/5th the cost. But that's up to you. You can support higher wages or you don't have to if you don't want to.<p>> And how many people will be willing to pay a premium when the locally made products are worse quality than foreign products?<p>Why are you assuming the American and locally made products are worse than foreign products? Sometimes they are, sometimes they aren't.<p>> Eventually there's a high possibility you won't be able to buy anything in the product category you want.<p>Well for a lot of these we can just do without, but those are the kinds of things you have to figure out if you want "living wages". Wages are higher in the west so we will automate things to keep some prices low/lower and we'll just pay higher costs to support the living wages. Or we won't and then we won't have living wages. You can do things like try to raise the minimum wage or w/e but then you're just making American/western products less competitive with the cheaper foreign products. Then you'll have to implement tariffs and agree with Trump there in order to offset the wage differences.
The way around it is not having to pay people wages at all which I hope American manufacturers are trying to do as much as possible. They already have totally dark factories in China and if we want to bring manufacturing back we will have to do it as well.
The site quotes prices for ≥4 layer board production are on the order of 10x JLCPCB. I can pay for DHL overnight from JLC and still come in from uploading my design to holding it in my hand ~7 business days or less.<p>A domestic PCB manufacturing pipeline, has been a pipe dream for me an many other Hardware startup EEs for a long time. Until costs are more competitive, CN still gets the business. Hope you can bring costs for small batch prototype PCB manufacturing down further in the future, then you will have our business!
Thanks for the feedback. For 5 units of 2 or 4 layer turnkey assembled boards, so long as you fit in the Grid Proto spec it's a little bit more expensive (not 10x, more like 1.3x) and much faster - we have benchmarked this quite a bit. 7 days to the US with any consistency is not possible, we have a lot of data points on that, median is about 10 days. To other countries it might be faster?
If you are doing pool pcb manufacture - think about getting your design rules as a template in KiCAD (you could talk to KiCAD services corporation about how to do that) or Altium. This would help people designing to avoid getting to a finished pcb then discovering that you have a rule about no route through pads or whatever.
> For 5 units of 2 or 4 layer turnkey assembled boards, so long as you fit in the Grid Proto spec it's a little bit more expensive (not 10x, more like 1.3x)<p>Does that include the cost of parts? One of the issues I had with sourcing prototype PCBA's in the US is parts are much more expensive (not 10x, but also not 1.3x).
I recently went through the exercise of asking one of the Chinese manufacturers how much it would cost to build me a board (a bit pirate adapter board for ESP3 that does all the voltage conversions to the GPIO pins so you don't burn something out). Board layout & BOM already exist on github. They do 5 boards minimum. Ok, so I figure I can sell the other 4 boards, probably not a big deal. Total's about $400. Then we get to the point where I'm about the pull the trigger and it goes to a page on tariffs and it looks like at least 45% + they want my SSN to give to CBP to collect the tariff. That's a hard "Nope" on sending my SSN to China. So I'm going to give this a look.
What company is asking for your SSN?
This is all very common practice. Has been for at least a decade. Some companies require this info for them to purchase from you as well.<p>This is one of the benefits of being a company. You use the tax ID instead of your social security number.
PCBWay, but I suspect all of the Chinese manufacturers have to do this now.
I've ordered hundreds of things from JLC over the last decade. Both bare boards and assembled boards based on my own designs that I uploaded, BOMs i provided, and sometimes even special parts I had shipped to them. All ordered boards arrived to me just fine over their cheap shipping (name varied often, last i recall was "direct standard line") and over DHL, and precisely zero times was I asked for my SSN.
We've had a few batches of mostly assembled (minus through hole parts) prototype boards made with y'all recently, pretty stoked how quick it is. Plus no tarrifs vs the last PCBway order.<p>Curious, why are surface mount USB-C connectors not able to be done as part of the surface mount components (treated as a through hole I think)? Too fiddly?
Andrew, congrats on the launch! Great to see another scaled manufacturer and assembly line here in Massachusetts. I helped scale another startup with personalized for 3D prints for orthodontic braces (<a href="https://lf.co/blog/deloitte-fast500-2024" rel="nofollow">https://lf.co/blog/deloitte-fast500-2024</a>), so feel to reach out to exchange tips since the generic mass manufacturing world is not well suited for this new world of “one size fits one” at a global scale.<p>Also, one question to pick your team’s brain: What’s your team’s AI PCB workflow and design tips to work with your production line? Any specific tips for ESP32-related integrations?
Exciting! Will quote an upcoming spin with y'all. I've worked with Lightspeed in Haverhill, MA for SMT assembly in the past and loved picking up boards in person. I grew up in "flyover country" and having access to local board houses never cease to amaze me :)
Adding to the litany of feedback: your BOM parser and manager is a source of pain. For a few BOM items it's fine, but for 50+ with 500+ placements there it's a heavy human lift with a lot of human error that is ripe for automation. Also, DNP interpretation are large hazard for silent failures. The spreadsheet is gospel.
Business 101, page 1, line 1:<p>"Never put any friction between your customer and giving you money"<p>Dude, absolutely get rid of the requirement to make an account to get a quote. Understandable(ish) to need one to check-out, but hell "Check-out as guest" was probably one of the most profitable innovations in e-commerce ever.<p>A longer list of accounts <i>is not</i> worth more than a longer list of orders.
I was interested and hit the friction twice, after making an account, It wouldn't accept eagle files or just the raw gerbers. I know it's older but even sparkfun and adafruit designs are in this format.
I hesitated to even get a quote when it said I have to upload my schematic and pcb source. Their legal terms offer very little protection or reassurances that they will protect my IP. Giving them source files is was more risky than gerbers to me.<p>It's industry standard to accept gerbers and BOMs. Now that I've reviewed their legal agreements, using them is a hard no right now.
I got stuck at make an account and didn't progress farther. am i hearing right they don't accept industry standard gerber files?
100%. Let people play and —most importantly— invest time and effort in the platform without friction.
For PCB quotes yes, but this kind of thing can be gamed by competitors. I think this is why there isn't great price info for many brick and mortar and online shops now..
Which is more important? Blocking competitors from gaming your price quotes, or making the buying experience instantly better for every single customer and potential customer?
> but this kind of thing can be gamed by competitors<p>What's preventing a competitor from creating an account?
Most of these work have real person to look and validate the cost.
Doing that without account would be too little friction and overwhelm the team.
Most of the ones (for cnc and sheet metal at least) I’ve used do an estimate while you poke around and select options and then you send it for a final validation and quote.
Right and they already said they have a massive backlog and are trying to increase by 500%.
Since you have been building for years you must be aware of how tariffs affect the viability. how would a reduction to zero affect the project?
Have you given any thought to hypothetically '3D printing' functional electronics, or is that still in sci-fi territory?
Hi. I'm a little confused about how many companies are under your umbrella. Is CircuitLabs the parent company for The Grid and all these other companies on this page? <a href="https://www.circuithub.com/case-studies" rel="nofollow">https://www.circuithub.com/case-studies</a>
Hey,<p>Are you interested in partnerships? I'm running pcbjam.com (web port of KiCad with collab, sharing, git, AI etc.) and I'm looking for a partner to do what EasyEDA is to JLC. Where can I find you?
Are you considering any in-house fab capabilities? Are you considering accepting consigned fabbed boards?
GERBER is the standard. Why won't you accept it?
What's the refinement process been like over the last five years? Many small problems or a few larger ones?
Are you manufacturing in the UK as well? Saw on your site you are hiring mechanical engineers here.
I'd love to see you successful, so wanted to comment:<p>The app feels very vibe-coded, and gives impression it's not well tested and polished for a new user/project.<p>I appreciate PCBs aren't the usual the consumer-level type of user, but I felt confused by a lot compared to JLCPCB. Hope that helps.
How automated is your process. If it is the vast majority of it then why can’t you price match China. Are there other factors besides labor that causes the higher prices?
How much of a concern are environmental regulations?
I just wanted a quote. But signup was painful it needs a major review. Then I uploaded a zip of my gerbers and it came up with some error that I could not figure out and halted any further movement. I'd love to do my PCBs domestic but the site makes it way too hard.
I've been using Macrofab for a couple years now and their experience is MUCH smoother. Prices are a bit higher, but for me, that is not an issue.
Earlier this month I ordered some PCBs. Due to the tariffs OSH park was actually a viable competitor for small batch runs. I've also found them to be higher quality than PCB way
eish sorry about the bad experience here. If you could drop a note to support@circuithub.com we'll get you fixed up.
Also uploaded an old gerber export straight from KiCAD and no dice. The project files themselves seemed to work.
Our PCBa manufacturers in Dongguan and Shenzhen are like 2 days end to end for prototypes on small sized boards (40mmx20mm 30 component single layer) and at scale after prototyping is done they're incredibly cost effective.<p>Do you see these costs coming down further with mature automation or process improvements?
I've done a lot of PCBA sourcing from Shenzhen so I have domain knowledge here.<p>The main latency for this is typically sourcing. The partners I've worked with will get PCBA done within a day or two once they have parts.<p>The claims here about a breakthrough in setup time also don't really fit with my experience. What is this, putting a new stencil in, adding different components to a hopper? I've toured PCBA factories and it's not like their lines are typically down for set-up. I think this takes like 30min?<p>Also, it doesn't look like they substantiate their 2x speed claims? They "benchmarked" this, but with what suppliers? Their claims would make sense if they found random suppliers, not exactly specialized in rapid prototype style PCBA, so they're not comparing like to like.<p>Don't get me wrong, I really want this to happen too, but the desire for this to happen seems to be making the community gullible. I'd love the founders or someone with circuithub to link to real benchmark evidence and explain why their changeover procedure can produce several days of difference.
Understandable concerns. We don't call out competitors specifically but you can probably guess who we are benchmarking against. I did the one we describe in the blog post myself with our toughest competitor in Shenzhen, it's real I assure you.<p>I've run hundreds of low volume orders on conventional lines, it's death by a thousand cuts, tough to describe exactly why until you do it.
Yeah, my first reaction to your competitor analysis pricing is disbelief. I think it'd be a lot more convincing if you published your source files so that people could replicate your quotes.
In Guangdong standard turnarounds 2020-2022 were 1-2 days (unpopulated) and 3-4 days (fully populated) outside of holiday periods or special cases (>4 layers; exotic substrates; oddball components; custom through-hole soldering). Faster was available for extra money. I'm sure it's accelerated since then. About 9 calendar days international delivery from China is often achieved these days as noted by others and myself.
The biggest latency I feel is in getting through PMO and DFM. Shenzhen doesn't have this issue and neither does circuithub.
I do a fair bit of electronics manufacturing and excited to see this pop up.<p>However I have my reservations because China is incredibly cheap, incredibly fast, and incredibly skilled. Our domestic made boards tend to be lower quality with more mistakes than Chinese made ones (while also costing up to 50x more).<p>I'll run some designs through this later, and I really hope it is broadly viable (not just unique niches that fit their tooling)
Is all this stuff entirely machines nowadays, or do people do it by hand still?<p>I remember documentaries from the 90s/00s showing Chinese factories with people hand soldering stuff onto PCBs, but most components used in electronics seems way too small for that.
Depends what you're doing. Most smaller surface-mount components and these days even a lot of standardized through-hole components can be assembled via pick and place machines and reflow ovens, which are largely automated. Larger components may require some extra steps like a small blob of glue to fix them in place - this comes up a lot for edge connectors, switches, or other larger mechanical components where the weight distribution doesn't allow them to rest flat on the board during reflow. Larger through-hole devices might need assistance with initial insertion or may be paired to other mechanical interfaces like a heatsink which requires some manual interaction. In some cases (particularly for boards with through-hole components all on one side) the soldering step can be automated by wave soldering. There's still some constraints on what can be automated, but it's all a lot less manual than the 90s/00s.<p>Some components, particularly transformers, might also be constructed by hand for custom/complex structures. That's component assembly rather than board assembly, but it's a consistent source of manual labor involvement in the supply chain.<p>Design for manufacturability is one of the important goals being considered in any PCB design. High-volume or low-cost boards will optimize for automated assembly and find ways to substitute or eliminate components with higher assembly costs. Extremely high-volume boards like in smartphones can justify custom tooling if it helps automate assembly.
The assembly is almost all automated with pick and places machines and the board fabrication is mostly chemistry. The problem is changing tooling between each run: PNPs need their feeders changed to the right parts for each board and there’s limited space for them so they all have to be changed for every design that runs through. Same with the tooling for the board etching. This stuff is precision equipment and has to be properly aligned so it’s not just a simple matter of plugging and unplugging some parts.
Even deeper - go have a look at the huge catalog of basic parts of jlcpcb. There is no procurement process and delay needed, those seem to be already on the shop floor or maybe even on a feeder of a pick and place machine!<p>The integration of lcsc is incredible.. let's see how they beat this in practice
Not being familiar with this, I'm curious where the humans are still required in the process of doing a dozen or hundred of each board. I assume the parts still arrive from distributors on rolls inside boxes or on pallets and a human has to scan, open, unpack and load them in some feeder?
Pretty much, yes. Is it why JLCPCB has a bunch of "standard parts" which are always already present on the assembly machine, and charges a $3/part loading fee for the stuff which isn't.
"Not being familiar with this, I'm curious where the humans are still required in the process of doing a dozen or hundred of each board."<p>Some components have large amounts of mass and need to be manually placed because the PNP doesn't have the vertical space for pickup and movement to the pad or do not have feeders which can successfully hold onto the part.<p>And some times it's just faster to have the human place the part because they're faster than the machine due to physical limitations (like needing to move slowly so as to not drop the component or throw it at the end of travel.) Many board shops will have the PNP places the ICs/Caps/Resistors/diodes and then the placement of connectors (especially zierich) or inductors gets done manually. That is how it worked where I worked. This also provided an opportunity mid-process to do quality checks instead of just letting things go from the PNP straight into the oven.
We have hundreds of thousands of parts in stock ready to go on The Grid. It's actually way more integrated than JLC.
A lot of PCBs will have one or two manual steps but they really try to minimise it. I think anything through-hole is still manual? They can be wave-soldered, but aligning them to the holes is a problem. Surface-mount components (no holes) can be placed and soldered by a fully automated process that self-aligns them to the solder pads.
Through-hole <i>can</i> be done fully automated, for a decent chunk of the parts. The problem is that the automation is quite a bit more involved to set up, and might even need adjustments to the board design to work smoothly. No problem for mass manufacturing, but for small prototype runs it is usually cheaper and faster to do it manually.
There is actually still quite a bit of hand work done. For standard surface mount designs it's mostly all automated, but there is still a good amount of through hole out there.<p>Through hole can be automated, but it doesn't really make sense until you have pretty good volume. So that leaves it still mostly to hand.<p>Then there are also all the unique customizations, like non-standard mounting specs or running jumper wires.
It's not (just) about cheap labor. The sheer density of resources and knowledge in Shenzhen is just insane.<p>Manufacturing at small to medium scales is so heavily determined by small blockers/latencies. Missing some component, or need a modified PCB? In the US or Europe you'd be happy to find a replacement within a week, or more likely have to wait a month for it to come from China. In Shenzhen you can probably walk 2km and pick it up yourself in under an hour.
Aseembly is mostly done by machines now, even for low volume its generally done by a pick and place machine setup. But depending on your product, things like thick power terminals may still be hand soldered as not every manufacturer/equipment can handle these.
The review (design for assembly) is done by hand.
... which it really shouldn't be.<p>I mean VLSI (chip design) DFM is automated and that's a <i>much</i> harder problem.<p>I think the availability of cheap humans in China kinda nerfed the drive to automate this (for comparison you can't hand-DFM a chip even if every human on earth worked on it), but it still needs to happen.
In China, it mostly isn't already.<p>JLCPCB is so cheap because <i>everything</i> is standardized and automated. Their tooling analyzes your input, gives a big fat warning if it spots something it knows it can't manufacture, and renders their processing output for final approval <i>by you</i>. Chinese labor might be cheaper than Western labor, but it is not even <i>remotely</i> cheap enough to babysit every hobbyist's one-off board.<p>They also assume you know what you are doing. You order a board with a part rotated 180 degrees? Well, it physically fits, so they <i>will</i> make it like that. The final board not working as you intended is a you-problem. You put a via inside a pad and it wicks away all the solder? Not their problem. You forgot to re-render the area fills and short ground to power? Not their problem.
China is super impressive for sure. I agree the existing domestic options are not great and we founded CircuitHub to fix that :-)
Pretty strict board requirements. They give an example motor controller, but then require your board to be 1oz copper. Motor controllers in particular often use 2oz for high current. No buried vias is an interesting requirement too. I'm not sure how often our guys use them but dense designs probably need them.<p>Still, looks super cool and I don't think the price difference is very high for a company doing prototypes.
I didn't like the way the example 4 layer motor controller table displayed the data. The bottom row, which says "No customs" under the image then has "5 days sooner" under their box for "The Grid", but then under Shenzen it says "$165 more", then in a tiny font "than the Shenzen shop".<p>I don't think it was meant to be misleading because the small font style was used throughout, and the bottom row wasn't really designed as part of the table, but it sure looks like it at first glance.
How do I select parts? That has been a historic limitation; Shenzen (What this article compares to) has vertically integrated systems. What library do I select from?<p>I'm not expecting it to be cheaper than China, but in the same general range, and being able to at small quantity/fast turnaround is important. Overall: I'm skeptical of the cost and time claims in the article. I am thinking "What assumptions" are here. Do they mean some part of the process is faster than that same part from China, etc. So I'm curious about what the real-world order-to-arrival time is; what the final CC charge is, and then compare that with China. They advertise faster turnaround: Is that really true than 10 days order to arrival we are used to?
Just uploaded KiCad files for a board I designed for fabrication at JLCPCB. I have `LCSC` part number properties on everything. CircuitHub didn't recognize any of them. Would be nice if they had mappings of footprint-equivalent parts from JLCPCB's "basic" library, so I didn't have to spend hours re-sourcing (and possibly re-footprinting) everything.<p>Love that it's fully self-serve and not "please call sales", and will give this another shot with new board designs when I still have total flexibility in part selection. But for existing projects I'm probably just going to re-order from Shenzhen.
OK, Its a cool video, and wish there was more joined up thinking about keeping sovereign control of designs/manufacture - but the concept isn't new. I know the UK better, but 24 hour pcbs are a thing, we have <a href="https://www.pcbtrain.co.uk" rel="nofollow">https://www.pcbtrain.co.uk</a> (which might outsource to china anyway) but I usually prefer <a href="https://www.eurocircuits.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.eurocircuits.com/</a> which builds in Poland. There are plenty more CEMs<p>Sadly neither really compete on price with jlcpcb and despite a hemisphere of delivery advantage jlcpcb can be quicker! I once got in a discussion with a Project Manager about whether the design was worth keeping some level of traceability for ~$50... he just wanted it cheaper.
Faster than Shenzen, fine ... but quite a bit more expensive, even taking into account the USA tariffs, which we do not have in the rest of the world.<p>Seems to me that Shenzen still wins at least for the non-USA world.
Costs come down at scale. Vote with your wallet, tell your friends, and we just might have our faster+better+cheaper problem solved.
I don't see why non-US companies should "vote with their wallet" by over-spending so that they can have a US supply chain instead of a Chinese supply chain. They're both foreign, outside their control and vulnerable to political stunts.
> vulnerable to political stunts.<p>They are different political stunts though. If your supply chain is vulnerable to politics then you want options so that any one stunt cannot hurt you.<p>Also, while there are political stunts, my current reading is the US stunts are more temporary and the next president won't continue them. While China's are likely longer term - there is a reasonably possibly China will attack Taiwan and Europe will join with the US and defending. Only time will tell, but that is my read on the situation.
China has not threatened to invade Canada yet.
“The next president won’t continue this” is what I’ve been hearing since the 90s.
Trump was elected twice. This time, his vice-president is absolutely someone who would continue the same policies, albeit in a more sober way.<p>I am not sure you understand the damage this administration has done.
I think their point is that non-US regions should set up their own non-China supply chain.<p>And here in Europe we're busy divesting from both. The priority for now is getting rid of the US simply because of the erratic President but if you read between the lines, a lot of the plans also aim for getting rid of the dependence on China.
This is HN. Asking people here to consider any long-term geopolitical ramifications associated with their economic activity is futile.
I ordered <i>2</i> power supplies from China for work, and they power supplies were $60/each, and the tariffs were $45/ea. I am all for manufacturing in the US, but holy hell, give industry time to develop the skills and infrastructure
For now.<p>I'd imagine that just because they've decided it's good enough to go public with it, doesn't mean it's done getting better. Or that someone else can't do it better, now that it's been shown to work.
But for prototyping, paying extra for quick turnaround is often very sensible
I'm surprised they don't offer next day turn around (whenever fedex's last pickup plus however long to build). Even same day if you live close to their factory.<p>Meanwhile as a hobbyist I'd be glad for the discount "we will get around to it sometime in the next two weeks discount"
Because the US doesn't have the supply lines for that. You simply can't compete with a Shenzhen where there are a dozen PCB factories and a warehouse for virtually every part you can imagine within a 30-minute drive.<p>In Shenzhen you can have Some Guy in a truck doing a parts pickup round around town a couple of times a day. In the US you're waiting for overnight Fedex from Digikey. And sure, there's a lot you can stock in advance, but virtually every board will have this <i>one</i> weird part you don't stock yet.
Right.<p>Plus if you can get someone on the phone there can be value in that.<p>And if a sales engineer comes out and sees your operation you might get more than a free lunch…
We need this for fab runs
"...supply chain you can count on"<p>Except the components are mostly coming from China anyways, so the same disruptions are potentially in play.<p>Still, cool to see domestic options.
Congratulations on this automation, which I know from first-hand experience is very difficult to pull off.<p>Is the robot really working with individual boards and not panels? How do you deal with balancing copper area, and varying etch times?<p>People often focus on the assembly side as “hard” but quick-turn manufacturing of the PCB is vicious.
I hope you move your fab to somewhere in the middle of the country. Part of the appeal of your concept to me is speed, but now I'm looking at cross-country FedEx, which is so expensive that it makes your service unpalatable. A plant in, say, Kansas, is a couple of days of UPS Ground from a huge portion of the country.
> A plant in, say, Kansas.<p>While logistics and delivery (both inbound parts and outbound product) are a key factor, time and cost don't map linearly to distance. Rather than being exactly central, the optimal solve is often somewhat geographically central but leverages proximity to transport corridors, ports and other factors such as weather variability.<p>KCI isn't a central air hub and winter weather can disrupt flow. Being further south near an East-West hub like DFW can be better (or Houston if an Atlantic port is valuable). Or if bidirectional delivery is everything, base near a Super-Hub like Memphis (Fedex) or UPS WorldPort (Louisville, KY) and go all-in on reaching lower rate tiers with one preferred domestic delivery partner.<p>For high-automation physical plants, scale can tend to chunk into increments beyond which 'one double-size plant' isn't meaningfully cheaper than two 'single-size' plants. Then an optimal build-out end game can be East and West plants that are each one air-hop from all major metros on that coast and a one-day truck/rail hop from 50% of customers on that coast. If it's a rapid-turn tech product, Reno can work well - half-day road trip from bay area for outbound and a Pacific port for inbound (Stockton). I don't know the quick-turn PCB assembly biz but maybe basing across the street from Digi-Key's biggest distribution center is a 'checkmate' move that beats all other advantages?<p>Logistics strategy is fun!
>A plant in, say, Kansas, is a couple of days of UPS Ground from a huge portion of the country.<p>80% of the US population lives east of the 100th meridian, which bisects Kansas.<p>It's probably not best to optimize for the lowest maximum ship time in the lower 48, but something more weighted for population. Lowest average transit time. I would have guessed something like Nashville, TN. Claude is telling me Nashville is up there but Dayton, OH is the best. 14% <= 1 day, 46% reached in <= 2 days and 74% reached in <= 3 days. 2.83 average.<p>Compared to Kansas City, KS at 5%, 25%, 61%. 3.11 average.<p>This fab is in South Deerfield, MA which is 15%, 26%, 52%, 3.32 avg.<p>I guess population is also technically not the best measure. It would be better to measure the potential customers. Which is interesting because those are going to be skewed towards the coasts to some degree.<p>Maybe your Kansas suggestion is more correct than I thought. I'd still wager its more like the midwest than the plains though.
I hear you. We need more locations. I'm hoping we can do a bit better than ground actually as drone delivery comes online.
I'm willing to bet most of that delay is shipping and most will wait a few days to save $100.
Awesome. Wish I could work on a project like this. I wonder how it scales compared to a long linear assembly line with lots of preloaded pick and place machines. I've been expecting the next stage of electronics automation to look more like an amazon warehouse. Parts distribution and assembly happening under the one roof, fully automated.
Logically having a robot is great, but doesn't Shenzen still have a massive supply chain for the actual stuff that goes on the boards?
Broadly speaking, there's a western supply chain and a china supply chain, lots of like for like MCU's and such in each. The western parts supply chains are actually pretty robust and built over many years so you don't hear much about them.
How long until you've built the Grid into a shipping container and are selling those?<p>Can't wait to see how quickly I can get boards next time I need a batch! The adage 'hardware is hard' is getting less true every day
> So you pay about $165 more than the Shenzhen shop and get your boards five days sooner, with no customs and a supply chain you can count on.<p>A supply chain that also comes from Shenzhen... last time I checked, North America doesn't make chips or other components either.
North America doesn't make chips or components?<p>That's never been true (at least since the first chips or components). A lot of my Shenzhen orders have to wait on international airfreight on US-made chips because the ones I spec'd (basically the only ones that would do the job) are US-manufactured and warehoused.<p>Recommend you look at a world map of Intel fabs. Or Micron Fabs.
Lots of use cases are more speed than cost sensitive. I.e. yes if you are paying a bunch of engineers in Boston who graduated from MIT to work on robotics $165 is a rounding error if you aren’t producing at scale.<p>Basically anything aerospace and defense related will care more about speed and compliance than cost.
This is great! Are you able to do IFA for UL certification? That would be a killer for us!
Interesting, kind of reminds me of SendCutSend
Great news, wish you all the best. I just wish the PCB sizes could stretch a bit to 330mm by 330mm.
You don't accept industry standard formats and require source... that rules you right out of the aerospace company I work for. That's billions of dollars gone from your potential pool.<p>You spent 5 years developing this fab and somehow ignored regular industry standards the entire time? That does not instill confidence in your services, at least from my standpoint.<p>Needing to sign up for a quote? Who are you selling this data to?
We work with many of the worlds largest companies, speak to our account management team for custom contracts and such. We also support Gerbers, ODB++ and IPC-2581 if you like, the flow is just a little less slick.
TIL "parity" is now measured on a logarithmic scale.
Amazing. Is something like this available now, or in the future, for hobbyists? Happy to pay retail prices.
Glad to see some homegrown companies competing with the chinese, especially with PCBs.
The link back to your home page is a dead link. At least on mobile.
rids proto fully booked. so they have no o capacity. we cannot even get a quote to know the pricing of grids proto.
This is great, especially as easypcbusa is being absorbed into a much more expensive conglomerate. Looking forward to seeing if they do just-pcb pricing as well
can we use an older version of ultiboard
"The Grid. A digital frontier."
kudos! for solving a hardwares, hardware problem, but especialy for the open, matter of fact demenour devoid of rhetoric.
aaaand the web site renders perfectly on my less than standard browser, fast too.
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