6 ms·
It really is wild what you can do in your garage these days. Since the early 2010’s there has been a true revolution in this space that has only accelerated ove
by SOLAR_FIELDS 3y ago
It really is wild what you can do in your garage these days. Since the early 2010’s there has been a true revolution in this space that has only accelerated over the last few years. I have an injection molding machine that I built in my garage for less than $1500 USD that has a 3 cubic inch injection volume, able to make a large variety of plastic components at small production scale using a mold I printed from my $500 USD resin printer. A guy I met at the maker space has a literal pick and place and wave soldering machine in his garage and he is etching wafers on his desktop CNC. Hardware has never been more accessible.
Hardware is still really hard. But it’s definitely something someone with a software salary can bootstrap in their garage these days. Especially because I can go to JLCPCB and get some reasonably complex fully assembled prototype boards shipped to me in a week or two for $5-20 USD per unit. Ridiculously nice
- brailsafe 3y agoI wonder where I could get the salary needed to have a garage, seems like that's the important bit ;)
- DontchaKnowit 3y agoLive somewhere cheaper and you can make enough to have a garage by painting houses or mowing lawns.
- OccamsMirror 3y agoNot in Australia. Even rural is expensive.
- ekianjo 3y agoLeave Australia :-)
- 111111101101 3y agoThis is the answer. Young people especially need to realise that this country doesn't want them.
- dottjt 3y agoInterestingly, as a young Australian, I've thought about this a lot and I genuinely struggle to find a better country to live in. We have our share of problems, but compared to the problems of other countries, I can't help but feel they're significantly less. A large part of it being how isolated we are from the rest of the world and all the benefits that provides. Not to mention the low population density of the country as a whole.
- flask_manager 3y agoIt really depends what specific circumstances you are comparing. If you are looking at trades, low skill full time, or casual work, I dont think there is a better place to be. If you are comparing the lifestyle available from a full time skilled job (tech especially) its honestly not great. Work anywhere in Asia, and while your wage may be lower, what you get for it goes a whole lot further. Restaurants are a focus, but things like a regular cleaner, doorman, club memberships are a whole lot more accessible. Things that are really only available in Australia to generational wealth these days, are available to skilled employees. Work in western Europe, and the wages are slightly higher, and the cost of living is slightly lower; however the expectation for work-life balance is far better. 38hr weeks are very strict, with an expectation of flex time and time in lieu. with more weeks off, and better access to things like parental leave and study accommodations. People make poor comparisons to America, because its a very hard thing to generalize. From my personal experience as a skilled full time worker, there is not one metric where Australia is a clear winner, and many where its far behind. The top end of healthcare is better in the USA, and if you factor in the lower taxes cheaper too. Crime statistics are worse, but localized to places I have no reason to go... I would say that USA as country is worse, but if you only look at the experience of someone who already has a skilled job, then you come out far ahead in the states.
- kiwih 3y agoHow about the following list of 10 cities/towns in Australia with property around 100-300k AUD? https://www.mpamag.com/au/mortgage-industry/guides/what-are-the-10-most-affordable-places-to-live-in-australia/417503 https://www.mpamag.com/au/mortgage-industry/guides/what-are-...
- catmanjan 3y agoGood luck painting houses and mowing lawns in Coober Pedy haha
- roganartu 3y agoThe first town on the list is a place famous for building houses underground due to the heat on the surface being too extreme. It’s also in the middle of nowhere. The rest are country towns, not suburban ones. Where you need to drive hours to get to anything approaching what you might think of as “downtown”, and even then there’s not gonna be a lot there. The reality in Australia is that the vast majority of the population lives within 100km of the east coast. It’s not like America where there are literally thousands of decent-sized small towns (tens of thousands of people), there just isn’t enough population for that. Almost half the population lives in two cities (Melbourne and Sydney) and neither of these are affordable places no matter how far out into the suburbs you go.
- stephen_g 3y agoIf you work remotely (but don’t need a great internet connection to do so), don’t mind having absolutely minimal amenities, cultural activities (apart from a few tourist traps), international airports etc. within a day or two’s drive… then sure. Usually these places are cheap because there is little economy (so few jobs), so most of the even slightly ambitious youth escape to the cities or larger towns in the area, which leaves them with ‘interesting’ demographics. This is an interesting inversion actually, because things like meth and then the associated crime are much more of a problem in the country than the cities here, which is kind of the opposite of what you hear about the cities being dangerous in places like the US.
- _kb 3y agoHere's a write up of number #4: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-12-18/tara-isolated-rural-blocks-spotlight-police-shooting/101781734 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-12-18/tara-isolated-rural-b.... There's a reason for that pricing.
- ChainOfFools 3y agoRecently moved into a four-bedroom home in a moderately desirable suburb of Los Angeles. I myself work in tech field and my spouse is university faculty. Our subdiv is a large tract of homes built 15-25 years ago, all in the mid six figures to just a hair over seven. At least three of the neighbors within sight of my own house are some sort of residential construction or property trade contractor. Two are public school teachers. At least one paints houses for a living. It is apparently totally possible to work a trade and live a recently comfortable lifestyle. I'm not saying it's easy, and I'm not saying that there is a straightforward path to break in to that lifestyle but it is evidently more than abundantly possible.
- reactordev 3y agoMost tradespeople I know can’t afford “hair over seven” figures for a home. Everyone in your neighborhood is house poor. They are banking on equity. They had a sizable upfront down payment. Like I said, all the tradespeople I know are struggling with lower 6, much less hair over 7.
- kjkjadksj 3y agoBut do you work in the trades in places where the median home is $800k? Trade wages are probably better in socal.
- reactordev 3y agoThey do. Median home value here is $950k. All of my trades friends are house poor and asking family for assistance.
- kjkjadksj 3y agoHouse poor and asking for family assistance is something thats common even where homes are $200k. More than half of american home buyers use family assistance. The fact they are in the market at all at nearly $1m median prices on trade wages is incredible, family assistance or being house poor while you pay down to get rid of pmi or not.
- _fizz_buzz_ 3y agoI don’t quite get why Australia is so expensive. It’s basically all empty land (bigger than the EU and the population of the Netherlands). Shouldn’t it be dirt cheap?
- literalAardvark 3y agoThe bits that aren't a desert and people want to live in are actually fairly populated.
- kjkjadksj 3y agoHonestly the big stark difference between Australia and the US seems to be immigration. There might be a fundamental lack of a labor pool that might have been building out comparable infrastructure and housing supply that we see in similarly geographic sized US.
- amelius 3y agoOther options: 1. Find a job where you have a workspace or a lab to tinker in. 2. Find a makerspace/hackerspace in your neighborhood.
- moffkalast 3y agoSimple, just inherit a house with a garage :P
- darkclouds 3y ago[dead]
- hoc 3y agoThe main issue I have with all that is that one could have had/home-built most of that in the 80s already (except for the resins). So in a way this all is more about online orders as well as global access and visibility than about the actual tech. Wasted decades in a way. Guess we needed to build the interwebs first.
- thfuran 3y agoWhat would you have used in the 80s to make molds?
- hoc 3y agoI still see that part as the most complicated and work-intensive in a small/home setting. I've been looking at ways, effort and prices for several years now and I'm still split between resin plus injection or just resin prints. And I am still end up with outsourcing as the result. But I'd really like to own that process... frustrating. If anyone has a really feasible/well working solution for enclosures etc. please post them :) That said, while I excluded the molding part explicitly, since I thought about CNC milling, pick /place and other computer-cobtrolled multi-axis applications, I think one could have used CNC and/or some kind of "sand" baking (negative) appoach. Not sure what kind of hard wood solutions might also have worked as some kind of medium for subtractive designing the negative for a small production run. Still not something I would see as easily implementable. But I also have no lazy solution with nice results today. E.g. for implementing display windows some kind of professionally color-coated clear case seems the way to go to get to something that ressembles current standards (always the main problem, anyway). Hard to do that with limited space and without a professional absorber solution.
- xyzzy123 3y ago> he is etching wafers on his desktop CNC Wait do you mean etching wafers, or milling PCBs? One of those things you listed is not like the others.
- fragmede 3y agoGiven the linked article is about a 22 year old making a 1,500 transistor IC, etching wafers for a 40 year old with a FAANG salary doesn't seem that far fetched! It'd have to be a really clean garage tho
- georgeburdell 3y agoI think the CNC part is what’s interesting. A wet etch, or even a plasma etcher, is conceivable in a garage and are the traditional tools of the trade.
- stephen_g 3y agoI assumed that they must have meant milling PCBs, because the only kind of “cnc-ish” way of manipulating things on wafers I can think of would be atomic manipulation with a scanning tunnelling microscope, which really doesn’t seem likely!
- AussieWog93 3y agoMay I ask how you do this, specifically? What machine do you use for injection molding, and how do you make the moulds? Very interested in doing this myself. (Also interested in specific recommendations for a desktop pick n place if anyone has some)
- 15155 3y agohttps://www.smallsmt.biz/products/ https://www.smallsmt.biz/products/ or any similar Shenzhen special. Buy bigger over smaller. Buy, don't build. There will be a handful of recommendations for the Opulo Lumen/OpenPNP: avoid them. Avoid everything but ballscrew designs: you will spend an annoying amount of time trying to calibrate a belt-driven design and calibration will never stick. Please, do not make the mistake I did: get something with CL feeders, make this investment. Drag feeders are not good - they are slow and the stylus will violently shake parts out of reels (or you'll spend time calibrating it to try and avoid this issue - don't waste the time.) Get something that can do 0201, even if you don't use it. Ideally, get something that uses a separate, commodity host machine.
- simultsop 3y agoI thought the entire plan of independence is building yourself and not buying at all.
- 15155 3y agoIndependence is having the knowledge, skills, equipment to do it yourself if you had to - not doing something just because. I didn't build my vapor phase reflow oven, either. I'm trying to solve my own problems, not craft a basic piece of equipment for bragging rights; I just don't have the kind of free time to have things not work perfectly.
- toast0 3y agoThat works, maybe, if you're a giant of indusrtry... Hyundai doesn't have to buy ram for its cars, it can build it. But if you're small, you can't build most of what you need, and you should not build what you can buy that's better than whaf you can build, and you may as well buy things that you can build as good unless the cost to build is much less. Sometimes it's fun to build things instead of buying them, and that'a ok. But if your goal is to do X, you're better off spending time on X than spending time building tools you could have bought. (Unless building the tools builds requisite knowledge)
- georgeburdell 3y agoI would be interested to know more about that “etching wafers on his desktop CNC”
- dvh 3y agoHow do you get fully assembled PCBs at JLCPCB for $5. I just ordered one and it was $4.10 for bare PCB, assembly would cost additional $8 so minimum for assembled pcb is $12.
- _Microft 3y agoThey are waiving the assembly setup fee at the moment. https://jlcpcb.com/blog/4-Free-Assembly-for-Your-PCB https://jlcpcb.com/blog/4-Free-Assembly-for-Your-PCB The GP commenter also wrote about a price "per unit": > get some reasonably complex fully assembled prototype boards shipped to me in a week or two for $5-20 USD per unit.
- devwastaken 3y agoIt's the software and IC knowledge that defines modern hardware. It's expensive IP and there's few open source references. You have to gain a lot of specific experience and by chance have an idea people will pay for. Even then, it's likely already patented.