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People don’t really appreciate what a miracle the quick-turn electronics industry is. You can upload a Gerber file and get boards back in 24 hours. 2 layers, 4

by romed 8y ago

People don’t really appreciate what a miracle the quick-turn electronics industry is. You can upload a Gerber file and get boards back in 24 hours. 2 layers, 4 layers, 6 layers whatever. Tiny little holes all over the board. Boards two feet square. If I order a huge box of stuff from Digi-key right now I’ll have it on my desk at 8am tomorrow. Or I can drop-ship it to the PCB place and get stuffed boards, inspected and reworked, in a couple days. It’s incredible, and all this has been up and running for at least 20 years.

bacon_waffle 8y ago
I 100% agree that these services are incredible, but I think you're downplaying the changes in the last few years a bit much, considering the tooling improvements and plummeting prices. As an example: last week at work, we had a situation where some product designer types and some engineers were having a hard time thrashing out aspects of a particular thing we've been talking about. It literally took me one working day and ~$300USD, to go from an email thread, to an order of custom PCBs and parts to make 10 physical widgets, which will be in our hands this week. In the meantime, I can nut out the firmware on a dev board from the pile of such things in my desk drawer, with free tools, easy-to-get docs, etc. That dev board costs about the same as two or three pints at the local pub. I think in 1998, an engineer at my level would've spent an equal or greater amount of time on making a document and illustrations to explain the concept and tradeoffs that go in to it, then meetings to talk over that document, and possibly still no concrete conclusion. Instead, we get a small pile of working prototypes to fuss with and iterate on - if we go in this direction then we're already a substantial step toward the real product. And, our main office is in California, the factory is in China, and I'm in a small city in New Zealand. Sure, this was something that could be done back then, but only if you were in the right place, and had the relevant parts pretty well figured out, and it would've cost a fair bit more money.
- setquk 8y ago
  Spot on all points there. Back in 98 the company I was working for was paying three salaries for EDA software licenses and $2-3k for a 48 hour turnaround on a couple of eurocards.

by romed 8y ago

bacon_waffle 8y ago

I 100% agree that these services are incredible, but I think you're downplaying the changes in the last few years a bit much, considering the tooling improvements and plummeting prices. As an example: last week at work, we had a situation where some product designer types and some engineers were having a hard time thrashing out aspects of a particular thing we've been talking about. It literally took me one working day and ~$300USD, to go from an email thread, to an order of custom PCBs and parts to make 10 physical widgets, which will be in our hands this week. In the meantime, I can nut out the firmware on a dev board from the pile of such things in my desk drawer, with free tools, easy-to-get docs, etc. That dev board costs about the same as two or three pints at the local pub. I think in 1998, an engineer at my level would've spent an equal or greater amount of time on making a document and illustrations to explain the concept and tradeoffs that go in to it, then meetings to talk over that document, and possibly still no concrete conclusion. Instead, we get a small pile of working prototypes to fuss with and iterate on - if we go in this direction then we're already a substantial step toward the real product. And, our main office is in California, the factory is in China, and I'm in a small city in New Zealand. Sure, this was something that could be done back then, but only if you were in the right place, and had the relevant parts pretty well figured out, and it would've cost a fair bit more money.

setquk 8y ago
Spot on all points there. Back in 98 the company I was working for was paying three salaries for EDA software licenses and $2-3k for a 48 hour turnaround on a couple of eurocards.