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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]

#51

Post by abielefeld »

Animats wrote: post #7
napkinartist wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are saying the same thing they said -- it doesn't scale. It's not how you build a large factory. They acknowledge this and pretty quickly move on to say that they are aiming for smaller and sustainable. They even specifically call out why they chose not to use a conveyor based oven in the video. Basically they believe they can be price reasonable at small scales, small batches. Build process knowledge and experti…

It's not possible to make a competitively priced product that way. What are you going to do, sell artisanal circuit boards on Etsy? Here's a small US-based PCB board and assembly facility in the US, in Hesperia, California.[1] Looks like it might have 20 to 30 employees from the building picture. This is probably about as small as a viable business of this type gets. It doesn't have to be done in a huge plant like JL…

Hey, I'm one of the two speakers :)

The commenter above you phrased it well: "Price-reasonable", to us, it's first about breaking even.

I will look into the companies you linked, looks interesting!

Though to give you food for though, I will tell you about a french drone manufacturing company, they manufacture in house, they turn over probably around 10 million € a year.

I know first hand they stencil print around 10k boards a year using a "machine" that is 2x4's from the hardware store, and a credit card :)

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

#52

Post by abielefeld »

bloggie wrote: post #49
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…

Yes this makes CCC look bad. You can tell they were not serious because they used OpenPNP. From the video - "most importantly, it is open, hackable, and extensible." not mentioned: able to assemble electronics!

Hi, talk speaker here, we are hoping to assemble our first products this year.

OpenPnP is currently more than able to assemble electronics, Opulo and LumenPnP are used by many profitable companies (many I know first hand).

Our opinion (shared in the talk) is that there is a little bit of work to bring it from "able to assemble electronics" to "entreprise-ready" in the sense of adding features like access rights (operators and admins shoudl have different rights) and integration to Inventree, our inventory and parts management software.

Investing in even new production devices is a dead end, and our vision is that owning 100% of the software is owning 100% of the capability. China essentially developed their solutions themselves, and I believe that is the reason why they are so advanced.

Entire business needs are locked behind aging software, licensing hell, an junk fees, both in europe and the US.

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

#53

Post by fock »

crote wrote: post #30
PinguTS wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work with companies, which have a more like small scale production. They are about 100 or so workers. Yes, this is also possible. They grew their business in the last 25 years, when it was even harder to produce something than these days. At least one of these business have PCB suppliers in the EU, which helped them in the post COVID crises where everybody struggled with supply. I just named some big name brands. I…

Could you perhaps share those PCBA businesses with us? I tried quite hard to find them when I was still in the hardware world, and I never managed to find anything even remotely close to what China offers at less than 10x the price. I'd love to give it another shot for some hobby projects if the industry has indeed changed in the last few years!

probably the likes of Enics and GPV - nowadays this is likely a field overrun by military demand and private equity squeezing the supply side... Also I doubt that they can/want to compete with jlcpcb et al.

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

#54

Post by zettabomb »

bloggie wrote: post #49
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…

Yes this makes CCC look bad. You can tell they were not serious because they used OpenPNP. From the video - "most importantly, it is open, hackable, and extensible." not mentioned: able to assemble electronics!

Given the context (CCC) I would find it far less interesting if they did NOT use OpenPNP. It is also, coincidentally, able to assemble PCBs, even if it's perhaps not the best software out there.

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

#55

Post by abielefeld »

crote wrote: post #30
PinguTS wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work with companies, which have a more like small scale production. They are about 100 or so workers. Yes, this is also possible. They grew their business in the last 25 years, when it was even harder to produce something than these days. At least one of these business have PCB suppliers in the EU, which helped them in the post COVID crises where everybody struggled with supply. I just named some big name brands. I…

Could you perhaps share those PCBA businesses with us? I tried quite hard to find them when I was still in the hardware world, and I never managed to find anything even remotely close to what China offers at less than 10x the price. I'd love to give it another shot for some hobby projects if the industry has indeed changed in the last few years!

I think the original commenter means companies that manufacture their own products but do not offer manufacturing services.

You can't beat JLC because the model from JLC is that they lose money on all order less than 100 boards, so that they win order of 10 to 100k+

If you work in germany in engineering, you know a lot of mittelstand (SMEs) actually have some production machinery, as said, usually they have between 50 and 200 employees, and they manufacture pretty niche products up to 10k units a year or so.

They do not advertise this, as their business model is not manufacturing, it's selling their own products.

I am actually the speaker of the talk, and for us, manufacturing is not a business model either, it's just the capability we want to develop. Our business model would be to sell products. We shared our knowledge and results because we were curious about people's thoughts, and because if we fail and disapear we want this stuff to be online where other can find it.

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

#56

Post by bArray »

magicalhippo wrote: post #39
abielefeld wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-...

> 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.

Just checked myself using a board I already had manufactured, and can confirm it's a lot higher than JLCPCB or PCBWay.

Maybe for rapid prototyping it is okay, but at scale, to make one board is more than the entire selling point of the whole device.

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

#57

Post by pbhjpbhj »

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

The schtick for Capitalism is that it is supposed to push all companies to the top of optimal resource production, the place you call the bottom.

Was it always the case that Western Capitalism was about optimising profits for an over-class, the optimising of resources was always just propaganda, or did it once have ethics?

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

#58

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

magicalhippo wrote: post #39
abielefeld wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-...

The job fee seems to include shipping, which makes it more reasonable. But Aisler's "estimated dispatch" for the budget service is Jan 26. That's 10 business days + shipping, making it not very competitive with JLCPCB's 10-15 business days including the slowest/cheapest shipping.

Express service adds ~20 EUR, roughly the same cost as picking DHL express delivery on JLCPCB.

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

#59

Post by lnsru »

abielefeld wrote: post #44
lnsru wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Hi, Augustin here, one of the presenters. As other commenters pointed out, the electronics industry is quite big in Europe, on paper it generates a lot of money and sustains a lot of jobs. The issue is a bit more complex, and you point it out when you say people around you are old and old-fashioned. Like I said in the talk: We used to laugh at the chinese products for how low quality they were 20 years ago, who's lau…

I am afraid, that when it gets too bad and too obvious it will be too late.

For me first steps would be turning bureaucratic ship around and making regulatory framework simpler and cheaper. With some exceptions for startups/small companies during very first months or years. The industry would be more attractive and with more demand for European electronics manufacturing. With more demand it would slowly start growing domestically. It’s insane that the rules for my 1 person company are the same as for Bosch or Siemens. I can praise good lobbyists work. There are two engineers at my dayjob that are writing mandatory documents about cadmium amount in screws or calculating sustainability parameters…

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

#60

Post by Joel_Mckay »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #57
Joel_Mckay wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The schtick for Capitalism is that it is supposed to push all companies to the top of optimal resource production, the place you call the bottom. Was it always the case that Western Capitalism was about optimising profits for an over-class, the optimising of resources was always just propaganda, or did it once have ethics?

Brands shifted away from garnering customer goodwill, and prioritized shareholder value by siphoning intangible assets accrued over decades of prior works.

There was little utility in judging if it was ethical, but merely to profit by the shortsighted stewards. =3

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