Any idea what pricing will be like? The fact that you call out Drone and Defense industries on your page suggests to me this is extremely expensive.
I recently priced out getting a PCB done in China and its insanely cheap. My design isnt complicated, a few ICs, a few connectors, an a dozen or so passives. PCB manufacturing, parts, and soldering/assembly is on the order of $10-20 total per board and that is with zero volume discounts. The parts alone would cost that much in the US, and I suspect the sort of companies that you contract out to also aren't really interested in tiny orders so they would probably quote huge setup fees (looks like your average order so far is ~$7000).
Think of this service basically for the same purpose as why Crye pants and stuff are manufactured domestically in the USA. But applied to circuit boards.
More specifically there are a number of new wide-spanning bans on import of mainland china made drone components such as flight controller boards, ESCs, power distribution boards, motors.
The definition of "Blue UAS" pre-dates recent more aggressive changes made by the current US executive branch of the government, but is still relevant:
This is exactly our initial market. We realized you can't beat China for a long time, so what do you do in that time? Service demand where you have a structural advantage.
Can I ask if you are working with any established US defense-oriented electronics firms that go further up the supply chain in auditing/documenting sources and chain of custody of components and the whole BOM? Having US made circuit boards is great but if a certain model of microcontroller only comes from one or two sources and they're in mainland CN, that's a known caveat that has to be documented somewhere... Or if the same product is available at a higher price from a different location. That sort of thing.
One example I could offer is APD, the ESC manufacturer in Australia. They sell ESCs used both in the commercial cinema/filming industry (big quads and coaxial octos carrying RED Komodo size cameras), but also for defense...
Haven't yet worked with them, but that is one of our goals. We produce documentation to trace all components up the supply chain. In cases where the part is truly only available in CN, we clearly state this.
Yes, pricing is much higher than China over here, mainly due to the non-existent support for high-mix low-volume work. NRE adds a lot, and so the prices are high right now. This is why we need to own the stack, optimize for high-mix, and drive down costs over time. It will take a lot of work.
It will definitely be expensive, and if you raised any eyebrow, you will get “made in the US” remarks immediately. Regarding “drone”, it’s a buzz word, in the past two years everyone is piggy backing on it like how all industries did with “crypto” years ago and “cyber” years before, or others with “AI” in software world now, “drone” is the word for hardware related, any new product or startup that has hardware involved, you will see this word quickly. I hate it and I hate how they ruined this amazing hobby with all their corporate defense BS, but oh well.
It's important to focus on where real innovation in the space is happening, and to me that's in drones. Some of the hype is overstated but drones are the new additions to conflict, and they're clearly not going away.
A lot of the hype is overstated, and I have been in drone world since 2014, but because of the weaponization of them and the global atmosphere of militarization, there’s a LOT of money pouring in now, so everyone wants a piece of that cake. In reality, their (the fpv ones specifically) success rates are around 1/10, but only the successful ones are shown for obvious reasons.
Also, I did mention back in 2020 that drones are the only practical type of robotics compared to others, although I meant in good purposes not how they are used right now.
It's also the immense know-how Chinese manufacturers have accumulated at this point. For a 5-piece hobby order $25 shipped, I got feedback confirming a wrong-looking part of my design before they printed.
> Drones and defense have nothing to do with expense
I would disagree? Look at Helsing, the german manufacturer of loitering munitions, and its direct competitors who are trying hard to get per-unit costs way down. Without even mentioning the myriad of Ukrainian manufacturers who are building cheap and cheerful things under $10,000 per unit (or even under $2500 per unit). There is a very real push within all NATO militaries now to basically copy many of the capabilities the Ukrainians have built in the last 4-5 years.
Not saying that we won't still have lots of huge dollar items and massive programs like the AGM-158 JASSM, but there's a reason why the US paid a company to basically clone the Shahed-136 as the LUCAS at under $50k per unit.
I absolutely agree, if you have just a few people who are each paid 180k a year sitting around waiting for something to arrive because the low-quantity prototyping vendor is slow, it's not the best use of resources at all. One of the reasons why certain companies spend a lot of money buying their own laser sintering 3D printers for low volume test-fit protoypes in the aerospace industry, or invest in their own small-scale CNC stuff to do similar.
I ran a hardware startup for about a decade. We ended up doing all PCB assembly in China. We did try to find this in the USA, but it was indeed too slow and expensive.
The bottleneck in assembling a PCB is usually component sourcing. My product was not the most complicated, and even then, to assemble in Shenzhen, China, it often took a few weeks to get all the components.
The core issue here is that latency is determined by the outliers. Assembly can't start until you have all units, and the hardest to source one is the bottleneck!
To me, the core innovation here is to plug into the design software to source these long tail items ahead of time.
It's pretty interesting that usually when the PCB is being designed, the designer has no awareness of supply chain. They'll bake in a chip that has a 4 week lead time without even realizing it, when a similar component might be one cent more expensive with much faster lead time.
When you say PCB at the beginning are you referring to raw PCBs or PCBAs? Presumably your service will be sourcing raw PCBs from China still and just doing PCBA?
When my pal’s raw PCB company went out of business, you could buy a finished PCB from China for less than the cost of FR4, which also came from China. How do you intend to address this supply chain risk? Once China raises your cost of raw PCBs your price argument no longer works.
Also, are you sourcing components from US sources or using China? Recently I stopped purchasing from Digikey and Mouser because their services are much slower than they used to be, and I now get components much faster and for lower cost in China.
Your timing could not have been better. Yesterday I was talking to a friend about starting a company to tap into the domestic solar inverter market that is about to have a healthy growth due to FCC banning foreign made inverters with radios.
We are planning to build it around STM32 or ESP32 with US parts sourcing and manufacturing.
We are in the project scoping phase. Hopefully we can get something going soon.
They all have this service, but they don't often stick to these lead times in my experience. We help hold them accountable and in the long term we are opening a facility to bring the cost down further.
> Suddenly we were spending 90% of our time assembling circuit boards instead of growing the business
> When you look at the full process, you realize that assembly is not the bottleneck.
I’m confused, which one is it?
I assume the growth story isn’t great when you factor in the non-automatable tasks and big capital outlays, so your product leaves that to existing CMs and scales the software stack instead?
Do you see this product as being beneficial to subcontractors (presumably still doing the 90% manual work), or does this legitimately reduce the actual workload/costs at the production level?
Sorry for the confusion, our time was spent doing manual work because we didn't have much automation at all. For the industry, assembly is not the biggest immediate bottleneck, with it being quite commodotized. However, we plan to open an automated assembly facility in the next few months to take stronger advantage of our front-of-house automations.
This would be incredible for innovation if we can bring this back domestically. It's very hard given lack of raw materials and the supply chain around it often also requires robust network but hopefully this spurs something.
This is something that takes real expertise though, kind of a moonshot for an inexperienced team unfortunately. Would be cool if had mission driven backers otherwise will just end up being hobbyist material. Relying on defense (bubble?) gives at least some breathing room as not actually competing against china for better prices.
Agreed. For this to work the entire supply chain has to support it. There are starts like mouser and digikey, but the raw materials and production capabilities are even more important.
We believe starting with defense will give us capabilities that we can then bring to other verticals, and will help us make optimizations that bring the cost down. It's impossible to beat china off the bat though.
I think this is a huge opportunity — speed, domestic production _and_ overall usability of the process - i do think appearing serious business matters a lot in this space, i found your site a little lacking in terms of prose, details, etc. Really great idea though.
I love to see new players in this space! We’ve done a ton of PCBA through Macrofab. My relationship with them goes back far enough to have been a beta customer and I’ve chatted on the phone with the CEO a few times. It’s interesting comparing what you’re offering and what they offer. When I started using them, the fact that you could just upload Eagle or KiCAD files, get an instant quote, and verify MPN/BOM and parts placement online… without having to zip up and email Gerbers was extraordinary. Their lead-time is longer than yours, around 3 weeks, but the pricing has always kinda hit a sweet spot.
I noticed your KiCAD plugin there too. I am super curious to see what your workflow and pricing looks like. There are definitely times when the 7-day turnaround will be a game changer for us.
I guess one gate there: do you ship to Canada? We do have a US branch that could do the export-import for us, but way easier if we don’t have to route it through them as far as end-to-end delivery time goes.
This is an exciting project! My main feedback: you can definitely tell the website content is AI-generated. It's okay to vibe code the design, but I really hesitate when I see vibed writing.
Curious how the pricing compares to overseas fabs once you factor in the 7-day turn — is that gap closing enough for non-defense teams to switch too, or is this mainly aimed at people who need the domestic supply chain regardless of cost?
Circuit hub has something very interesting in the works. They're a few steps ahead of us.
We however plan to own the full stack, from design to board bring-up and testing. We believe that design is becoming commoditized with AI tools, but these systems need manufacturers that are involved from the start to bring down lead times.
We're trying to make electronic manufacturing (PCB & PCBA) simple, affordable and speedy. A high grade of automation allows prices starting at 12.20 Euros including VAT and shipping. Our software platform is completely built in-house, including state-of-the-art ODB++ integration.
Let me know if you've any questions, happy to answer.
LibrePCB from Aisler seems to be most like jlcpcb.
You do pay a lot more though due to industrial regulations. Only lead free solder is allowed in the EU, and chemical regulations and waste disposal laws will drive up the price a lot compared to similar services in China and the USA.
I've used https://aisler.net/en (based in Aachen) plenty of times. I like their quality and I was able to pull off some stupidly toleranced layouts. (This is as a hobbyist building some one-off circuit boards). I haven't used their assembly service.
The upstream BOM feedback seems especially useful: surfacing availability and lead-time alternatives before layout is final should prevent many avoidable redesign loops. Showing those trade-offs directly in the plugin would make the value easy to evaluate.
You guys should really be making an end to end PCB machine, sourcing the parts and part inventory for custom PCBs really should be the responsibility of the end user.
I'm not the expert but Gemini doesn't say anything exists besides the Voltera V-One (which obviously doesn't work for complex PCBs). I am imagining something like a PCB microfactory the size of a container (or even smaller) that completely handles PCB etch and drill, solder paste application, PnP, baking, and testing.
PCBA lines are largely automated as of today, issues start when you do high-mix work. Most time ends up being spent switching between jobs and programming machines, meaning that tool usage time is low.
I work in a building with a board assembly line that sits idle most of the time. They have tried securing outside contract work to fill in the gaps. No takers yet.
The only domestic drivers for board fab and assembly are autmotive and defense. They already have their supply chains running.
Makes sense. Is it that most of the time is spent switching jobs or that there's just not enough jobs going through it?
You're right that automotive and defense make up most of the demand. We also see demand from teams who can't use JLC/PCBway due to the difficulty of cosigning parts outside their catalogue.
I hate to ask this..but how exactly do you plan to turn this into a scalable business beyond being yet another Oshkosh? Sure it's profitable but there's a reason hardware manufacturing is generally outsourced to the lowest bidder. Outside of targeting specific sectors e.g. defence, how else do you plan to remain competitive globally? Manufacturing hardware (especially if you are not Apple) is generally a capital intensive, low profit margin business that is extremely sensitive to labor costs. The fact that the past two decades of growth in the US is dominated by tech companies is precisely because software and the associated network effects are able to drive disproportionate amount of growth, unlike hardware. The further down the value chain in hardware the more commoditized you are.
> scalable business beyond being yet another Oshkosh
OSH Park is fabulous for what they do, but they don’t do PCBA.
I’m not OP, but I think I can provide some insight anyway:
> Outside of targeting specific sectors e.g. defence, how else do you plan to remain competitive globally
I think that trying to be competitive globally would be a dumb play for these folks, they’re optimizing for something different.
Defence is one sector where this model works, no doubt. But there’s a bigger market that doesn’t have a great domestic story yet (I’m in Canada and work with a variety of CA and US PCB/PCBA houses): fast-turn low-volume PCBA, either for prototype iteration or for industrial one-offs. While I work on a specific “sort of defence adjacent” project right now, my past consulting work would’ve benefitted quite a bit from being able to turn around full PCBA work in 7 days. Macrofab end-to-end was usually 3-4 weeks and cutting that iteration time down would’ve had a solid effect on reducing project timelines if it could’ve happened for a reasonable price. There are domestic manufacturers who have optimized for that… but the price was not something my clients were willing to pay to accelerate their projects. If this hits a sweet spot there… that’ll be really exciting for me.
(I’ve already sent it to my team to start looking at)
Defense adjacent work is another place where we're seeing some strong pull.
> scalable business beyond being yet another Oshkosh
Yes, OSH Park is awesome. They could add PCBA, but we see the long-term value in owning the full stack (from design to testing of finished boards). Stops us from having a knife fight all the way down.
> I hate to ask this..but how exactly do you plan to turn this into a scalable business beyond being yet another Oshkosh?
There are a number of small but very specialized US based defense sub-component manufacturers that support 15 to 20 people with very good paying jobs, building stuff exactly like NDAA compliant UAS flight controllers. Not everything needs to become gargantuan to be a success.
There can also be very good money in manufacturing specialized things that require the work to be done by US citizens with a TS or TS/SCI clearance if you can get into that market.
Any idea what pricing will be like? The fact that you call out Drone and Defense industries on your page suggests to me this is extremely expensive.
I recently priced out getting a PCB done in China and its insanely cheap. My design isnt complicated, a few ICs, a few connectors, an a dozen or so passives. PCB manufacturing, parts, and soldering/assembly is on the order of $10-20 total per board and that is with zero volume discounts. The parts alone would cost that much in the US, and I suspect the sort of companies that you contract out to also aren't really interested in tiny orders so they would probably quote huge setup fees (looks like your average order so far is ~$7000).
Think of this service basically for the same purpose as why Crye pants and stuff are manufactured domestically in the USA. But applied to circuit boards.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berry_Amendment
More specifically there are a number of new wide-spanning bans on import of mainland china made drone components such as flight controller boards, ESCs, power distribution boards, motors.
The definition of "Blue UAS" pre-dates recent more aggressive changes made by the current US executive branch of the government, but is still relevant:
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=blue+UAS+...
This is exactly our initial market. We realized you can't beat China for a long time, so what do you do in that time? Service demand where you have a structural advantage.
Can I ask if you are working with any established US defense-oriented electronics firms that go further up the supply chain in auditing/documenting sources and chain of custody of components and the whole BOM? Having US made circuit boards is great but if a certain model of microcontroller only comes from one or two sources and they're in mainland CN, that's a known caveat that has to be documented somewhere... Or if the same product is available at a higher price from a different location. That sort of thing.
One example I could offer is APD, the ESC manufacturer in Australia. They sell ESCs used both in the commercial cinema/filming industry (big quads and coaxial octos carrying RED Komodo size cameras), but also for defense...
Haven't yet worked with them, but that is one of our goals. We produce documentation to trace all components up the supply chain. In cases where the part is truly only available in CN, we clearly state this.
Yes, pricing is much higher than China over here, mainly due to the non-existent support for high-mix low-volume work. NRE adds a lot, and so the prices are high right now. This is why we need to own the stack, optimize for high-mix, and drive down costs over time. It will take a lot of work.
It will definitely be expensive, and if you raised any eyebrow, you will get “made in the US” remarks immediately. Regarding “drone”, it’s a buzz word, in the past two years everyone is piggy backing on it like how all industries did with “crypto” years ago and “cyber” years before, or others with “AI” in software world now, “drone” is the word for hardware related, any new product or startup that has hardware involved, you will see this word quickly. I hate it and I hate how they ruined this amazing hobby with all their corporate defense BS, but oh well.
It's important to focus on where real innovation in the space is happening, and to me that's in drones. Some of the hype is overstated but drones are the new additions to conflict, and they're clearly not going away.
A lot of the hype is overstated, and I have been in drone world since 2014, but because of the weaponization of them and the global atmosphere of militarization, there’s a LOT of money pouring in now, so everyone wants a piece of that cake. In reality, their (the fpv ones specifically) success rates are around 1/10, but only the successful ones are shown for obvious reasons.
Also, I did mention back in 2020 that drones are the only practical type of robotics compared to others, although I meant in good purposes not how they are used right now.
It's also the immense know-how Chinese manufacturers have accumulated at this point. For a 5-piece hobby order $25 shipped, I got feedback confirming a wrong-looking part of my design before they printed.
Which manufacturer was that?
Drones and defense have nothing to do with expense. It is 100% about getting on the approved vendor list, at which point the prices go up.
It’s not like PCB boards in the defense industry are somehow special, though they probably should be.
> Drones and defense have nothing to do with expense
I would disagree? Look at Helsing, the german manufacturer of loitering munitions, and its direct competitors who are trying hard to get per-unit costs way down. Without even mentioning the myriad of Ukrainian manufacturers who are building cheap and cheerful things under $10,000 per unit (or even under $2500 per unit). There is a very real push within all NATO militaries now to basically copy many of the capabilities the Ukrainians have built in the last 4-5 years.
Not saying that we won't still have lots of huge dollar items and massive programs like the AGM-158 JASSM, but there's a reason why the US paid a company to basically clone the Shahed-136 as the LUCAS at under $50k per unit.
Volume unit costs matter a lot. What matters less is cost during prototyping and development, where speed to iteration becomes way more important.
I absolutely agree, if you have just a few people who are each paid 180k a year sitting around waiting for something to arrive because the low-quantity prototyping vendor is slow, it's not the best use of resources at all. One of the reasons why certain companies spend a lot of money buying their own laser sintering 3D printers for low volume test-fit protoypes in the aerospace industry, or invest in their own small-scale CNC stuff to do similar.
I ran a hardware startup for about a decade. We ended up doing all PCB assembly in China. We did try to find this in the USA, but it was indeed too slow and expensive.
The bottleneck in assembling a PCB is usually component sourcing. My product was not the most complicated, and even then, to assemble in Shenzhen, China, it often took a few weeks to get all the components.
The core issue here is that latency is determined by the outliers. Assembly can't start until you have all units, and the hardest to source one is the bottleneck!
To me, the core innovation here is to plug into the design software to source these long tail items ahead of time.
It's pretty interesting that usually when the PCB is being designed, the designer has no awareness of supply chain. They'll bake in a chip that has a 4 week lead time without even realizing it, when a similar component might be one cent more expensive with much faster lead time.
This is our first step to work more closely with the designer throughout the process.
Currently there's a wall between the designer and the manufacturer, which hurts lead times massively, we're aiming to bring that down.
When you say PCB at the beginning are you referring to raw PCBs or PCBAs? Presumably your service will be sourcing raw PCBs from China still and just doing PCBA?
When my pal’s raw PCB company went out of business, you could buy a finished PCB from China for less than the cost of FR4, which also came from China. How do you intend to address this supply chain risk? Once China raises your cost of raw PCBs your price argument no longer works.
Also, are you sourcing components from US sources or using China? Recently I stopped purchasing from Digikey and Mouser because their services are much slower than they used to be, and I now get components much faster and for lower cost in China.
We source PCBs from both China and USA. Some of our customers want incredibly fast turn where Chinese shipping times don't cut it.
> How do you intend to address this supply chain risk?
Haven't yet figured it out. Options are opening bare board fabs or partnering with US fabs and panelizing orders.
Congratulations!
Your timing could not have been better. Yesterday I was talking to a friend about starting a company to tap into the domestic solar inverter market that is about to have a healthy growth due to FCC banning foreign made inverters with radios.
We are planning to build it around STM32 or ESP32 with US parts sourcing and manufacturing.
We are in the project scoping phase. Hopefully we can get something going soon.
Interesting stuff, definitely a lot of new demand due to the FCC rules. Curious to see how they hold up though.
Each of these pretty established suppliers offer this service:
- Sunstone
- Advanced Assembly
- Sierra Circuits
- Osh Park
They all have ~7 day lead time or shorter. It all comes down to choosing simple processes with generic parts.
Do you have your own machines or just outsource these orders and ensure the supply chain stuff moves along quickly?
I like the idea, more heads in the game makes it cheaper for everyone, but this seems like another hat in the ring.
They all have this service, but they don't often stick to these lead times in my experience. We help hold them accountable and in the long term we are opening a facility to bring the cost down further.
> Suddenly we were spending 90% of our time assembling circuit boards instead of growing the business
> When you look at the full process, you realize that assembly is not the bottleneck.
I’m confused, which one is it?
I assume the growth story isn’t great when you factor in the non-automatable tasks and big capital outlays, so your product leaves that to existing CMs and scales the software stack instead?
Do you see this product as being beneficial to subcontractors (presumably still doing the 90% manual work), or does this legitimately reduce the actual workload/costs at the production level?
Sorry for the confusion, our time was spent doing manual work because we didn't have much automation at all. For the industry, assembly is not the biggest immediate bottleneck, with it being quite commodotized. However, we plan to open an automated assembly facility in the next few months to take stronger advantage of our front-of-house automations.
This would be incredible for innovation if we can bring this back domestically. It's very hard given lack of raw materials and the supply chain around it often also requires robust network but hopefully this spurs something.
This is something that takes real expertise though, kind of a moonshot for an inexperienced team unfortunately. Would be cool if had mission driven backers otherwise will just end up being hobbyist material. Relying on defense (bubble?) gives at least some breathing room as not actually competing against china for better prices.
Agreed. For this to work the entire supply chain has to support it. There are starts like mouser and digikey, but the raw materials and production capabilities are even more important.
We believe starting with defense will give us capabilities that we can then bring to other verticals, and will help us make optimizations that bring the cost down. It's impossible to beat china off the bat though.
I think this is a huge opportunity — speed, domestic production _and_ overall usability of the process - i do think appearing serious business matters a lot in this space, i found your site a little lacking in terms of prose, details, etc. Really great idea though.
Site is not cutting it anymore, going to dedicate some better effort to bring it up to standard.
I love to see new players in this space! We’ve done a ton of PCBA through Macrofab. My relationship with them goes back far enough to have been a beta customer and I’ve chatted on the phone with the CEO a few times. It’s interesting comparing what you’re offering and what they offer. When I started using them, the fact that you could just upload Eagle or KiCAD files, get an instant quote, and verify MPN/BOM and parts placement online… without having to zip up and email Gerbers was extraordinary. Their lead-time is longer than yours, around 3 weeks, but the pricing has always kinda hit a sweet spot.
I noticed your KiCAD plugin there too. I am super curious to see what your workflow and pricing looks like. There are definitely times when the 7-day turnaround will be a game changer for us.
I guess one gate there: do you ship to Canada? We do have a US branch that could do the export-import for us, but way easier if we don’t have to route it through them as far as end-to-end delivery time goes.
Thanks for the feedback. We can ship to Canada, haven't done it yet, but open to it!
This is an exciting project! My main feedback: you can definitely tell the website content is AI-generated. It's okay to vibe code the design, but I really hesitate when I see vibed writing.
You're right, putting more attention to that now.
Curious how the pricing compares to overseas fabs once you factor in the 7-day turn — is that gap closing enough for non-defense teams to switch too, or is this mainly aimed at people who need the domestic supply chain regardless of cost?
Non-defense teams find value in getting fab done overseas and then turning to us for assembly and procurement. Bare boards are super expensive here.
how does it compare to https://www.circuithub.com ?
Circuit hub has something very interesting in the works. They're a few steps ahead of us.
We however plan to own the full stack, from design to board bring-up and testing. We believe that design is becoming commoditized with AI tools, but these systems need manufacturers that are involved from the start to bring down lead times.
Nice but the USA are not our global friends anymore.
Anything available in the EU?
Disclaimer: CTO & Co-Founder of AISLER here
We're trying to make electronic manufacturing (PCB & PCBA) simple, affordable and speedy. A high grade of automation allows prices starting at 12.20 Euros including VAT and shipping. Our software platform is completely built in-house, including state-of-the-art ODB++ integration. Let me know if you've any questions, happy to answer.
I've only found B2B oriented companies in the EU.
Edit: https://aisler.net/en/partners/librepcb
https://www.eurocircuits.com
https://beta-layout.com
LibrePCB from Aisler seems to be most like jlcpcb.
You do pay a lot more though due to industrial regulations. Only lead free solder is allowed in the EU, and chemical regulations and waste disposal laws will drive up the price a lot compared to similar services in China and the USA.
FYI: Aisler is the PCB manufacturer and assembler (based in Aachen iirc). LibrePCB is CAD software.
China mostly produces ROHS compliant PCBA anyways. This is a non-issue
I've used https://aisler.net/en (based in Aachen) plenty of times. I like their quality and I was able to pull off some stupidly toleranced layouts. (This is as a hobbyist building some one-off circuit boards). I haven't used their assembly service.
Not as familiar with the EU market, but have heard good things about Eurocircuits
The upstream BOM feedback seems especially useful: surfacing availability and lead-time alternatives before layout is final should prevent many avoidable redesign loops. Showing those trade-offs directly in the plugin would make the value easy to evaluate.
You guys should really be making an end to end PCB machine, sourcing the parts and part inventory for custom PCBs really should be the responsibility of the end user.
Possibly, but our users find value in not having to kit, store, or ship parts to CMs.
I'm skeptical this is a cost effective for low volume prototyping which is where the speed of made in America matters.
whats the closest to this that exists today? (??? + pick and place?)
I'm not the expert but Gemini doesn't say anything exists besides the Voltera V-One (which obviously doesn't work for complex PCBs). I am imagining something like a PCB microfactory the size of a container (or even smaller) that completely handles PCB etch and drill, solder paste application, PnP, baking, and testing.
That would be super cool. Difficulty comes with multi-layer PCBs, hard to find a solution for laminating.
PCBA lines are largely automated as of today, issues start when you do high-mix work. Most time ends up being spent switching between jobs and programming machines, meaning that tool usage time is low.
I work in a building with a board assembly line that sits idle most of the time. They have tried securing outside contract work to fill in the gaps. No takers yet.
The only domestic drivers for board fab and assembly are autmotive and defense. They already have their supply chains running.
Makes sense. Is it that most of the time is spent switching jobs or that there's just not enough jobs going through it?
You're right that automotive and defense make up most of the demand. We also see demand from teams who can't use JLC/PCBway due to the difficulty of cosigning parts outside their catalogue.
What are minimums?
Minimum board count: 5
Releasing detailed capability docs on our website today or tomorrow.
> Drone and defense teams get boards back in 7 days
Oh
I hate to ask this..but how exactly do you plan to turn this into a scalable business beyond being yet another Oshkosh? Sure it's profitable but there's a reason hardware manufacturing is generally outsourced to the lowest bidder. Outside of targeting specific sectors e.g. defence, how else do you plan to remain competitive globally? Manufacturing hardware (especially if you are not Apple) is generally a capital intensive, low profit margin business that is extremely sensitive to labor costs. The fact that the past two decades of growth in the US is dominated by tech companies is precisely because software and the associated network effects are able to drive disproportionate amount of growth, unlike hardware. The further down the value chain in hardware the more commoditized you are.
I think you’re actually asking good questions!
> scalable business beyond being yet another Oshkosh
OSH Park is fabulous for what they do, but they don’t do PCBA.
I’m not OP, but I think I can provide some insight anyway:
> Outside of targeting specific sectors e.g. defence, how else do you plan to remain competitive globally
I think that trying to be competitive globally would be a dumb play for these folks, they’re optimizing for something different.
Defence is one sector where this model works, no doubt. But there’s a bigger market that doesn’t have a great domestic story yet (I’m in Canada and work with a variety of CA and US PCB/PCBA houses): fast-turn low-volume PCBA, either for prototype iteration or for industrial one-offs. While I work on a specific “sort of defence adjacent” project right now, my past consulting work would’ve benefitted quite a bit from being able to turn around full PCBA work in 7 days. Macrofab end-to-end was usually 3-4 weeks and cutting that iteration time down would’ve had a solid effect on reducing project timelines if it could’ve happened for a reasonable price. There are domestic manufacturers who have optimized for that… but the price was not something my clients were willing to pay to accelerate their projects. If this hits a sweet spot there… that’ll be really exciting for me.
(I’ve already sent it to my team to start looking at)
Defense adjacent work is another place where we're seeing some strong pull.
> scalable business beyond being yet another Oshkosh
Yes, OSH Park is awesome. They could add PCBA, but we see the long-term value in owning the full stack (from design to testing of finished boards). Stops us from having a knife fight all the way down.
> I hate to ask this..but how exactly do you plan to turn this into a scalable business beyond being yet another Oshkosh?
There are a number of small but very specialized US based defense sub-component manufacturers that support 15 to 20 people with very good paying jobs, building stuff exactly like NDAA compliant UAS flight controllers. Not everything needs to become gargantuan to be a success.
There can also be very good money in manufacturing specialized things that require the work to be done by US citizens with a TS or TS/SCI clearance if you can get into that market.
HN allows ads now?
Do you know where you are lol? HN is ran by YC. All of the ads are YC ads for that reason