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39c3: In-house electronics manufacturing from scratch: How hard can it be? [video]

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Re: 39c3: In-house electronics manufacturing from scratch: How hard can it be? [video]

#31

Post by bratwurst3000 »

lnsru wrote: post #8
Animats wrote: post #2

This is painful. They got a used solder mask holder, a Lumen pick and place machine, a bunch of old Siemens feeders, and a small automatic reflow oven. All these tools needed major work. Everything with firmware needed firmware mods. Everything else needed assembly or major cleaning. Everything needed adjustment. They had to 3D print their own solder paste squeegee. They're six months in and still trying to produce o…

Electronics in Europe is so dead. It is past the point where where it can be revived. One thing is sick overregulation to spin hardware product. Last nail in the coffin today is Cyber Resilience Act. It dwarfs all the regulations before it. Second thing is talent. People can’t hardware anymore. I mean putting a 0402 capacitor on the printed circuit board is not hard. But doing that in meaningful way gets hard. As a c…

i was looking it up and the 12th biggest pcb manufacture is in austria. which is europa afaik. Its not that dead

"In Leoben befindet sich das weltweite Headquarter von AT&S. Derzeit gibt es drei Produktionslinien, die eine Reihe von verschiedenen ML/HDI Highend-Leiterplatten, Embedded Lösungen für Power Applikationen vor allem im Server Bereich und Cores für die IC-Substratwerke herstellen. Weiteres werden spezielle Technologien für Aviation & Satellites, Industrie, Automotive und den IC-Markt entwickelt und gefertigt.

Mitarbeiter: 1.759 Eröffnung: 1982 Fokus: Automotive, Aviation, Industrial, Medical, Communication, Consumer, Computer, Semicon Ein neues Werk, das derzeit gebaut wird, wird auch die Produktion von IC-Substraten nach Leoben bringen, einschließlich bedeutsamer Kapazitäten für Forschung und Entwicklung. Mit dem neuen Werk werden rund 700 neue Arbeitsplätze geschaffen, wodurch sich die Zahl der Mitarbeiter:innen nahezu verdoppeln wird.

Fabriksgasse 13, 8700 Leoben, Österreich"

https://ats.net/

Re: 39c3: In-house electronics manufacturing from scratch: How hard can it be? [video]

#32

Post by abielefeld »

micw wrote: post #23

What I really would love is a JLCPCB equivalent in Europe. Slightly higher prices are OK, but I want to have the the Same amount of process automation and flexibility. Should be good for a scale of a few thousend per year.

Hi! Have you every checked out aisler.net? In my opinion they do an amazing job, it's not quite JLCPCB prices, but maybe only 20% higher depending on what service you take, and they deliver faster since they are based in europe.

Their business model is pooling small orders and sending them to board fabs in europe, mainly germany and some in the east.

Re: 39c3: In-house electronics manufacturing from scratch: How hard can it be? [video]

#33

Post by Fnoord »

Animats wrote: post #2

This is painful. They got a used solder mask holder, a Lumen pick and place machine, a bunch of old Siemens feeders, and a small automatic reflow oven. All these tools needed major work. Everything with firmware needed firmware mods. Everything else needed assembly or major cleaning. Everything needed adjustment. They had to 3D print their own solder paste squeegee. They're six months in and still trying to produce o…

Learning by mistake isn't painful; it is how you learn best. I keep iterating on that point to my children. But that isn't merely what these guys were doing. They were doing more, since they were documenting their (expensive!) learning process. Documenting your learning process and sharing it freely is allowing others to not make the very same mistakes, but to do better instead. It lowers the barrier of entry for competition, taunting competition who hopefully also share back. Like many talks on 39c3 (esp. the lightning talks), it is an invitation to collaboration.

Sharing the documentation is also an act of compassion, and very much in the spirit of FOSS & OSHW.

This talk was hands down my favourite talk (and not even in a subject I am familiar with!). These two guys shared a lot of info in little time, and were very humble. It was also a presentation which contains a political component (Europe's lack of independence, specifically hardware-wise), but it managed to avoid that discussion. Why, because it is assumed the attending public shares the same value. Instead, it maintains focus on the taking action part. I am not sure everyone here shares said value, but I do, and for whatever it is worth: USA is in a similar boat.

Re: 39c3: In-house electronics manufacturing from scratch: How hard can it be? [video]

#34

Post by nebula8804 »

Joel_Mckay wrote: post #19
crote wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That depends on your definition of "competitive", doesn't it? Being 3x as expensive as China but 0.1x as expensive as current small-scale EU manufacturing can be extremely competitive. Plenty of people looking for <1000 unit runs would be willing to pay extra for a "made in EU" label.

If the only service a CM brings to the table is cost reduction, than its a doomed business model. Rule #23: Don't compete to be at the bottom, as you just might actually win. Have a great day =3

Technically the differentiation isn't cost reduction its in shored manufacturer. That can become an important requirement as firms become more wary of IP theft and other issues.

Besides other than that what can you really differentiate in this field that isn't cost? Its a service that is standardized regardless of country. Maybe you can provide different "styles" of boards (ie. different specs) or improve the entire submit to production pipeline but thats about it.

Re: 39c3: In-house electronics manufacturing from scratch: How hard can it be? [video]

#35

Post by abielefeld »

sschueller wrote: post #3
Animats wrote: post #2

This is painful. They got a used solder mask holder, a Lumen pick and place machine, a bunch of old Siemens feeders, and a small automatic reflow oven. All these tools needed major work. Everything with firmware needed firmware mods. Everything else needed assembly or major cleaning. Everything needed adjustment. They had to 3D print their own solder paste squeegee. They're six months in and still trying to produce o…

Hobbyist vapour phase reflow ovens exist although not cheap: https://eleshop.eu/vaporflow-275-vapour-phase-reflow-oven.ht...

Hi! Augustin here, one of the presenters of the talk: Alex actually built a vapour phase soldering oven from scratch a few years ago! Indeed they are not exactly practical for series production, though they are amazing for small runs of very challenging to solder board though.

Main issues is solvent recovery: as another commenter pointed out, Galden is very expensive, and it is also extremely greenhouse inducing and we were not confident in our ability to recover it completely, especially at "scale" (100 boards per month or so).

In our case, we picked a hot-air convection oven, which, while not as good as VPS, is still a lot better than IR at not burning components. Our main challenge is always space, so we went for a production batch oven which already has more throughput than we need for us to get to profitability.

The plan is to upgrade to a long and big conveyor oven once we move to a bigger facility, these are quite cheap and they are compatible with a fully automated production line.

Re: 39c3: In-house electronics manufacturing from scratch: How hard can it be? [video]

#36

Post by crote »

pjc50 wrote: post #27
crote wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The regulations argument is a red herring: those mostly apply to electronics products sold in the EU, not manufactured in the EU. You have exactly the same burden trying to sell CN-manufactured hardware in the EU. Worker's shortage is a real problem in China as well. Their approach? Automate everything . Focus on manufacturing 1000s of designs using a handful of standard formulas, instead of treating every design as…

> You have exactly the same burden trying to sell CN-manufactured hardware in the EU. Not if you're a Chinese OEM: you just mail it in, and thanks to the arcane operation of international postage it's cheaper to post to Germany from China than from Germany. CE is such a European type of regulation, there's almost no enforcement, while at the same time it's so vague that simply working out what directives you might ne…

Europe is starting crack down on individual CN import - for exactly this reason. But that's still not going to solve the real problems EU-based hardware companies run into.

The whole problem is that the EU electronics industy is laser-focused on those defence and aerospace runs. They expect everything to be bespoke and complicated, so their entire business model is built around it.

But the vast majority of hardware isn't that complicated. I don't want a two-month ordering process with a "call for pricing" and a €1500 "engineering fee" - I want a JLCPCB-like instant quote and click-to-order for my dime-a-dozen 4-layer 10x10cm prototype!

The fact that a handful of industy giant are still doing production in Europe while moving at a glacial pace is not that relevant when China is rapidly out-innovating the West. If it continues like this, they will eventually die too.

Re: 39c3: In-house electronics manufacturing from scratch: How hard can it be? [video]

#37

Post by alextousss »

Reminds me that comma.ai has its own line. While their setup is quite expensive they do run production for a smartphone-level of difficulty in-house. They detail it incredibly well at commacon [0].

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iiBSN224w4

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LE-QlIWMHxM

Re: 39c3: In-house electronics manufacturing from scratch: How hard can it be? [video]

#38

Post by nebula8804 »

lnsru wrote: post #8
Animats wrote: post #2

This is painful. They got a used solder mask holder, a Lumen pick and place machine, a bunch of old Siemens feeders, and a small automatic reflow oven. All these tools needed major work. Everything with firmware needed firmware mods. Everything else needed assembly or major cleaning. Everything needed adjustment. They had to 3D print their own solder paste squeegee. They're six months in and still trying to produce o…

Electronics in Europe is so dead. It is past the point where where it can be revived. One thing is sick overregulation to spin hardware product. Last nail in the coffin today is Cyber Resilience Act. It dwarfs all the regulations before it. Second thing is talent. People can’t hardware anymore. I mean putting a 0402 capacitor on the printed circuit board is not hard. But doing that in meaningful way gets hard. As a c…

>Who wants to be manufacturing technician when you can be lifestyle influencer!?

Before influencers people wanted to be actors. It predates the time before Electronics was 'lost' in Europe so thats not a convincing argument.

What you are saying really is that the world enjoys what we have on the backs of inadequately paid production engineers in China. As their demographic crisis does not produce a similar sized replacement generation, that benefit will go away as experts retire and no one replaces them. So one way or another wages will go up meaning inflation will go up and some of those 'lifestyle influencers' will now consider the field because it is a viable career path in terms of pay.

Re: 39c3: In-house electronics manufacturing from scratch: How hard can it be? [video]

#39

Post by magicalhippo »

abielefeld wrote: post #32
micw wrote: post #23

What I really would love is a JLCPCB equivalent in Europe. Slightly higher prices are OK, but I want to have the the Same amount of process automation and flexibility. Should be good for a scale of a few thousend per year.

Hi! Have you every checked out aisler.net? In my opinion they do an amazing job, it's not quite JLCPCB prices, but maybe only 20% higher depending on what service you take, and they deliver faster since they are based in europe. Their business model is pooling small orders and sending them to board fabs in europe, mainly germany and some in the east.

> maybe only 20% higher depending on what service you take

For higher-end board that seems likely. For cheap hobby-grade boards just the job fee[1] is more than 10 boards delivered is from JLCPCB.

That said, thanks for reminding me. Will definitely compare next time I need boards.

[1]: https://community.aisler.net/t/our-simple-pricing/102#p-124-...

Re: 39c3: In-house electronics manufacturing from scratch: How hard can it be? [video]

#40

Post by clacktronics »

micw wrote: post #23

What I really would love is a JLCPCB equivalent in Europe. Slightly higher prices are OK, but I want to have the the Same amount of process automation and flexibility. Should be good for a scale of a few thousend per year.

Eurocircuits does the same kind of service (bar the parts library) but has the DRC - but you aren't going to get slightly higher from anyone in Europe
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