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

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

#111

Post by _moof » Mon, Jan 12, 2026, 11:27 PM UTC

If you're interested in assembling PCBs at home, but you're looking at all this expensive hardware and thinking it's impossible, I've had great success with:

  1. Stencil jig: two bare boards taped to stiff cardboard (the kind stencils are shipped in)
  2. Squeegee: an old debit card
  3. Pick and place: ESD tweezers, a magnifying glass, and some tunes
  4. Reflow: a toaster oven modified with a kit (the expensive part: https://whizoo.com/products/controleo3-reflow-oven-build-kit)

I've made tons of boards with this setup and they work great. Are there limitations? Sure. Doing pick-and-place by hand will set a lower bound on the size of components you can design with. It also forces you to keep your part count down (but you should probably be doing that anyway). For my projects, these are never even close to the biggest problems.

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

#112

Post by solidsnack9000 » Tue, Jan 13, 2026, 2:00 AM UTC

abielefeld wrote: post #80

atwrk wrote: post #67

The comments here seem to show a typical US-EU divide in perspectives, people talk past each other. Yes, mass-market low-margin consumer products (the US view) probably won't be produced much in the EU in the next few years. But much of the electronics industry in the EU is B2B and centers around producing high-margin products where 10.000 units of a product would be huge. The company I work for, for example, usually…

Hey, talk speaker here, that's a great point! A discussion that got cut from the talk at the early draft process was defining what "small-series" and "large-series" mean. To me, at a human scale and without dystopian monopolies, a small series is anything under 1k, a medium series around 50k and a large series 100-500k. I wanted to define a special class of series, because to an american a small series is probably mo…

How would this marketplace be regulated? Is the idea that there would be an open app format (so that devices from different vendors could run these apps) or a regulated OS?

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

#113

Post by ProllyInfamous » Tue, Jan 13, 2026, 2:41 AM UTC

_moof wrote: post #111

If you're interested in assembling PCBs at home, but you're looking at all this expensive hardware and thinking it's impossible, I've had great success with: 1. Stencil jig: two bare boards taped to stiff cardboard (the kind stencils are shipped in) 2. Squeegee: an old debit card 3. Pick and place: ESD tweezers, a magnifying glass, and some tunes 4. Reflow: a toaster oven modified with a kit (the expensive part: http…

I've been an early employee at two separate small-scale US manufacturing facilities, each making only a few hundred products annually ($x,xxx, each). Their PCBs contain several hundred components, mostly surface-mounted.

Making PCBs outside of SE Asia is not economical. You cannot afford to train labor on such a small scale, and would be foolish to manufacture more than a few of your own prototype boards.

>2. Squeegee: an old debit card

This works really well

>3. Pick and place

Even with a cheaper optical pick-&-place, you still need to examine every board thoroughly (the placements aren't optimal).

>4. Reflow: a toaster oven w/ mods

The problem with this approach is that the low thermal mass of a toaster oven results in inconsistent temperature profiles (e.g. sporadically burnt / un-soldered). I have used this setup and much prefer a larger reflow oven (with conveyer).

----

A repeated problem with this in-house PCB manufacturing dream is that the EE designer the circuit board cannot work more profitably when he has to make all the PCBs himself — which he'll have to, because he also cannot afford most American training/labor to make reliable boards.

¢¢

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

#114

Post by nebula8804 » Tue, Jan 13, 2026, 5:47 AM UTC

rangestransform wrote: post #104

nebula8804 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 repl…

Kids in china also want to be lifestyle influencers instead of manufacturing technicians

Yeah I didn't say that Chinese people didn't want to go down the same route, infact lifestyle influencers have a better shot there (probably 0.1% better).

There is so much overproduction of engineers that you are possibly working a customer support role with that degree.

Another reason SASS supposedly never took off there, why pay some company when you can just hire from the batch of overproduced STEM graduates and make any software you need.

When I can have an experienced engineer correct my garbage designs for free as part of a manufacturing service you know I am benefiting off of a lucky circumstance that will go away one day: https://youtu.be/ljOoGyCso8s?t=98

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

#115

Post by nebula8804 » Tue, Jan 13, 2026, 6:06 AM UTC

crote wrote: post #46

nebula8804 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The pipeline is a massive one - especially for PCBA. Being able to get an instant quote and order in 5 minutes is worth a lot . Nobody wants a 2-week-long back-and-forth with sales and engineering for a basic prototype run.

I don't know how much real innovation can happen there that the Chinese haven't done. In fact the Chinese haven't really innovated, that have optimized existing processes. Think about it: If you break it down: a "2-week-long back-and-forth with sales and engineering for a basic prototype run" is the same stuff happening in the background as the "get an instant quote and order in 5 minutes"...just much faster.

Thats not the innovation I was talking about: Let me give an example. When the Xbox was being developed, there was a push within Microsoft to create a standard CD‑based game console that was a more refined version of the existing competitors. The Xbox team pushed back and said: No, you don't enter a market and just copy the incumbents. You need to do something different and differentiated. So they innovated by adding a hard drive and standard networking to every console. The addition of these components as standard in each console opened up a new paradigm of gaming with Xbox Live and was a different vision compared to what the others were offering at the time. They eventually ended up moving the market in a fundamental way.

Now, going back to manufacturing, how do we translate that to PCB manufacturing? Again, I don’t know how you could possibly truly innovate the pipeline process more than it has already been done. Even just adding an AI‑handled pipeline process, it's just further optimizing what has already been done. There may or may not be an opportunity to truly move the market but if there is, then thats something the West can do to really compete.

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

#116

Post by nebula8804 » Tue, Jan 13, 2026, 6:11 AM UTC

Joel_Mckay wrote: post #62

nebula8804 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Consumer hardware like the iPhone would not do well when the next model is 20% slower with a 35% retail price reduction. >what can you really differentiate in this field that isn't cost? Don't worry about it... =3

>Consumer hardware like the iPhone would not do well when the next model is 20% slower with a 35% retail price reduction.

Yes, American companies know this already: Apple managed to ship $1000 phone even the Chinese coveted for a long while and their innovation at the time was Face ID and the applications it enabled like Memoji.

Just improving spec sheets is a race to 0 profits.

>Don't worry about it... =3

There has got to be something that can move the market as relying on China is just a mirage anyway. Those demographic issues will catch up to everyone eventually. Im not knowledgeable enough to know what this magical innovation will be. (or else I'd pull my savings and get into the business :P )

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

#117

Post by physarum_salad » Tue, Jan 13, 2026, 7:01 AM UTC

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…

"This approach is not going to revive electronics in Europe."

Revive what exactly? There's ASML, IMEC and many others. Then a host of PCB fabs that are expensive but are present and perfectly useful such as Eurocircuits and many others. This project is typical of these conferences where people find it interesting and fun to do things from scratch.

Given the economics, it is not possible for anywhere other than a couple of south east asian countries to be competitive at scale with Chinese manufacturers. This presentation hasn't a hope of replacing that using the methods outlined but it doesn't mean its a waste of time!

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

#118

Post by f1shy » Tue, Jan 13, 2026, 7:03 AM UTC

joe_mamba wrote: post #106

f1shy wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that had problems employing people. If possible I would like to know what positions and how much they were offering. I had offerings for a manager position, 15 people, responsibility for the 15, including in house training of them, and part responsibility in the 5 different projects these people were working on. They wanted somebody with background in HW development, 10 years experience in FPGA, experience of at le…

>Wait for it… they offered 80k/year. I don’t know… seems little bit low somebody with like 20 years experience. In which country? The sad thing is the state of supply and demand in the economy, doesn't really care how many years of experience you have, or how hard you worked, or how difficult the job is. It'll pay as little as they can get away with. Sucks, but welcome to being a tax cattle in Europe, where someone o…

> In which country?

South Germany. In a capital city. And that was “tops”

And as you say, 40% is out of the bat off. Then you have expensive energy also plagued with taxes… plus of course 19% VAT, etc, etc, etc… if somebody in USA could tell me what would you earn for that there would be nice.

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

#119

Post by physarum_salad » Tue, Jan 13, 2026, 7:11 AM UTC

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…

To be more specific: PCB manufacture anywhere other than China is, given the current economics, so dead. This includes the USA. The only viable alternative is SE asian countries (e.g. Malaysia) but that's not at a comparable scale. The reason is simply economics (e.g. labour costs, equipment, etc).

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

#120

Post by Joel_Mckay » Tue, Jan 13, 2026, 7:25 AM UTC

nebula8804 wrote: post #116

Joel_Mckay wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consumer hardware like the iPhone would not do well when the next model is 20% slower with a 35% retail price reduction. >what can you really differentiate in this field that isn't cost? Don't worry about it... =3

>Consumer hardware like the iPhone would not do well when the next model is 20% slower with a 35% retail price reduction. Yes, American companies know this already: Apple managed to ship $1000 phone even the Chinese coveted for a long while and their innovation at the time was Face ID and the applications it enabled like Memoji. Just improving spec sheets is a race to 0 profits. >Don't worry about it... =3 There has…

>Just improving spec sheets is a race to 0 profits.

If and only if people chase the low-margin markets. Some people want the best value they can afford, and the ones that don't usually are not worth the sales effort.

Note, most current Apple products are just information-appliances tied to their media service businesses.

>Im not knowledgeable enough to know what this magical innovation will be

Whatever a unique imagination comes up with will probably be just as good or better. Don't worry about it... =3