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.
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.
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.
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.
I wish you well, domestic electronic production is something we need very badly.
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.
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.
Looks interesting. As a US manufacturer/designer I will be keeping an eye on this closely.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
"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).
$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.
I will reply to this post to clarify (although I will be responding to several).
"Living wage" in my area is $40/hr. That is just to live, not thrive or gain.
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".
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)
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.
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.
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).
> 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.
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.
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.
So therefore, creating a job at any wage is better for your economy than not creating the job at all.
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.
Making boards for the Smoothieware/Smoothieboard project. [1]
> 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.
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).
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".
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.
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").
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.
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.
> And how many people will be willing to pay a premium when the locally made products are worse quality than foreign products?
Why are you assuming the American and locally made products are worse than foreign products? Sometimes they are, sometimes they aren't.
> Eventually there's a high possibility you won't be able to buy anything in the product category you want.
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 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.
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)
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).
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.
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.
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 (https://lf.co/blog/deloitte-fast500-2024), 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.
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?
"Never put any friction between your customer and giving you money"
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.
A longer list of accounts is not 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.
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.
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..
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.
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?
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? https://www.circuithub.com/case-studies
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.
Not familiar with the issue, but that has to be $1m minimum order, correct? And you would get a production run in 1-10k. How many revs does that include?
My understanding is that Shenzhen dominance so far is from 3 pillars - low minimum order size, low per-part price, and fast response. They can do that because they have lot of highly trained labor that work mad hours. So to compete you would need to leverage a lot of automation... which would be a lot less flexible and very rocky at the start. Would love to get a correction from someone more familiar with the situation.
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
I've done a lot of PCBA sourcing from Shenzhen so I have domain knowledge here.
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.
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?
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.
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.
I do a fair bit of electronics manufacturing and excited to see this pop up.
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).
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?
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.
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.
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!
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?
"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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I mean VLSI (chip design) DFM is automated and that's a much harder problem.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
Or, frankly, the way in which the rotation between the Democrats and the republicans works and is critical to the overall direction the US is heading and has been heading since the 80s.
Indeed, the current White House occupant is much louder and more annoyingly abrasive with some bizarre one-off impulses vs the usual occupants, but it's now clear that over the last ~30 years, career politicians, corporate vested interests, lobbyists and the administrative state have increasingly subverted the two-party duopoly into pure political theater.
It's a little sad that Trump is such a divisive train-wreck spectacle that many haven't noticed that Clinton, Obama and Biden were achieving many of the same outcomes as Bush/Trump, just more smoothly and with more appealing rationalizations.
The best thing about Trump is that he's such an obvious self-interested kleptocrat and he doesn't even care to hide it (in fact, he seems to enjoy flaunting it). But is it really that much better to be sold out by a more likeable persona who seems like part of our tribe and has the skills to mask the long con more deftly? I guess maybe at least then we won't notice as much or feel as bad about the same outcome?
I think their point is that non-US regions should set up their own non-China supply chain.
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.
I ordered 2 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
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.
It's not a prototype. The Grid has been running for customers for five years. It already builds tens of millions of dollars of electronics a year. Across CircuitHub we've shipped more than 2.2 million boards, placed more than 150 million parts and served more than 26,000 engineers.
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.
Meanwhile as a hobbyist I'd be glad for the discount "we will get around to it sometime in the next two weeks discount"
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 https://www.pcbtrain.co.uk (which might outsource to china anyway) but I usually prefer https://www.eurocircuits.com/ which builds in Poland. There are plenty more CEMs
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.
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?
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?
It’s kinda funny - half the parts on my boards are TI, but the Sherman fab only does rad-hardened components. It’s cheaper to ship me components from halfway around the world than it is to run a 120mm process node in north america.
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.
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.
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.
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?
>A plant in, say, Kansas, is a couple of days of UPS Ground from a huge portion of the country.
80% of the US population lives east of the 100th meridian, which bisects Kansas.
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.
Compared to Kansas City, KS at 5%, 25%, 61%. 3.11 average.
This fab is in South Deerfield, MA which is 15%, 26%, 52%, 3.32 avg.
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.
Maybe your Kansas suggestion is more correct than I thought. I'd still wager its more like the midwest than the plains though.
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.
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.
Recommend you look at a world map of Intel fabs. Or Micron Fabs.
Lets be realistic.. components meaning 0805 capacitors and resistors, small digital ICs. I can almost guarantee those aren't made in the US... and are WAY cheaper on a site like LCSC.
While I agree in principle that most chips aren't made in the US, tons of 0805 capacitors and resistors are made in the US. Vishay does a lot of that here, as well as a few other manufacturers. Mouser lists country of origin and you can search that way.
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.
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.
Needing to sign up for a quote? Who are you selling this data to?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I wish nothing but the best for the project.
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.
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.
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.
"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).
$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.
They sure have a lot of that capital.
"Living wage" in my area is $40/hr. That is just to live, not thrive or gain.
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".
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)
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.
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.
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).
[1] https://www.zillow.com/rental-manager/market-trends/coeur-d-... [2] https://www.zillow.com/home-values/136166/coeur-dalene-id/
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.
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.
So therefore, creating a job at any wage is better for your economy than not creating the job at all.
Making boards for the Smoothieware/Smoothieboard project. [1]
Mostly small SMT stuff on there. 0402, BGA, etc.
[1]https://github.com/Smoothieware/Smoothieboard2
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).
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".
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.
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.
No clue, but there are millions. Just depends on the product.
Here are two examples. One made in France, the other in America:
[1] https://www.debuyer-usa.com
[2] https://smithey.com
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.
> And how many people will be willing to pay a premium when the locally made products are worse quality than foreign products?
Why are you assuming the American and locally made products are worse than foreign products? Sometimes they are, sometimes they aren't.
> Eventually there's a high possibility you won't be able to buy anything in the product category you want.
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.
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!
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).
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?
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?
"Never put any friction between your customer and giving you money"
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.
A longer list of accounts is not worth more than a longer list of orders.
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.
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?
The app feels very vibe-coded, and gives impression it's not well tested and polished for a new user/project.
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.
My understanding is that Shenzhen dominance so far is from 3 pillars - low minimum order size, low per-part price, and fast response. They can do that because they have lot of highly trained labor that work mad hours. So to compete you would need to leverage a lot of automation... which would be a lot less flexible and very rocky at the start. Would love to get a correction from someone more familiar with the situation.
Zimbabwean dollars I hope because 1 million usd PER BOARD?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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).
I'll run some designs through this later, and I really hope it is broadly viable (not just unique niches that fit their tooling)
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.
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.
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 integration of lcsc is incredible.. let's see how they beat this in practice
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.
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.
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.
Then there are also all the unique customizations, like non-standard mounting specs or running jumper wires.
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.
I mean VLSI (chip design) DFM is automated and that's a much harder problem.
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.
Still, looks super cool and I don't think the price difference is very high for a company doing prototypes.
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.
Seems to me that Shenzen still wins at least for the non-USA world.
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.
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.
https://www.ctvnews.ca/vancouver/article/canadian-military-e...
I am not sure you understand the damage this administration has done.
It's a little sad that Trump is such a divisive train-wreck spectacle that many haven't noticed that Clinton, Obama and Biden were achieving many of the same outcomes as Bush/Trump, just more smoothly and with more appealing rationalizations.
The best thing about Trump is that he's such an obvious self-interested kleptocrat and he doesn't even care to hide it (in fact, he seems to enjoy flaunting it). But is it really that much better to be sold out by a more likeable persona who seems like part of our tribe and has the skills to mask the long con more deftly? I guess maybe at least then we won't notice as much or feel as bad about the same outcome?
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.
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.
It's not a prototype. The Grid has been running for customers for five years. It already builds tens of millions of dollars of electronics a year. Across CircuitHub we've shipped more than 2.2 million boards, placed more than 150 million parts and served more than 26,000 engineers.
Meanwhile as a hobbyist I'd be glad for the discount "we will get around to it sometime in the next two weeks discount"
Plus if you can get someone on the phone there can be value in that.
And if a sales engineer comes out and sees your operation you might get more than a free lunch…
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.
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?
Except the components are mostly coming from China anyways, so the same disruptions are potentially in play.
Still, cool to see domestic options.
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.
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.
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?
Logistics strategy is fun!
80% of the US population lives east of the 100th meridian, which bisects Kansas.
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.
Compared to Kansas City, KS at 5%, 25%, 61%. 3.11 average.
This fab is in South Deerfield, MA which is 15%, 26%, 52%, 3.32 avg.
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.
Maybe your Kansas suggestion is more correct than I thought. I'd still wager its more like the midwest than the plains though.
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
A supply chain that also comes from Shenzhen... last time I checked, North America doesn't make chips or other components either.
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.
Recommend you look at a world map of Intel fabs. Or Micron Fabs.
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.
Needing to sign up for a quote? Who are you selling this data to?