3 ms·
I am a solo founder building a hardware startup and my least favorite thing to do is developing and prototyping a new PCB. Soldering by hand takes hours but I d
by move_the_sun 3y ago
I am a solo founder building a hardware startup and my least favorite thing to do is developing and prototyping a new PCB. Soldering by hand takes hours but I don't make enough of the same kind of board to justify getting any commercial PnP system. I wish there was a tool where I could:
1. Upload a BOM
2. Receive a DXF for laser cutting that arranged all my tapes (off Mouser/Digikey) in some rows or columns
3. Place my board in some spot on a Cartesian motion system
4. Peel open the tapes
5. Upload coordinates of each part
6. Press play
Does anyone know if such a thing exists?
- sokoloff 3y agoI would look into JLCPCB's PCBA service. (PCBWay and others also offer similar.) Assuming you're not trying to do multiple spins of the same project per week and your parts are relatively common, outsourcing this to them seems entirely doable. (I only use them for hobby projects where I'm under no deadline at all, but with DHL I can get about one cycle per week.) If you're editing the PCB between revs, you're already paying almost all of that latency already. If you can skip the "soldering by hand takes hours" step, you can get back a lot of time as you know; that might be enough to pay for the once-per-week cycle. This also gives you a very clear and fast path to go from "I had 1 unit that worked on my bench last week" to "I have 20 test units ready now" to "I can have 1000 for the Kickstarter in a month." Last time I used their PCBA service, they had a terrible treatment of connectors, meaning I had to hand-solder those still. I understand that's improved, but not ordered in over a year. No connection, other than satisfied customer: https://jlcpcb.com/smt-assembly https://jlcpcb.com/smt-assembly