5 ms·

You say all of this, but where in the US can I go get a PCB made, a housing injection molded, rubber seals custom cut, and have a contract manufacturer assemble

You say all of this, but where in the US can I go get a PCB made, a housing injection molded, rubber seals custom cut, and have a contract manufacturer assemble everything for a modest price? If you order a small batch of custom PCBs with a five day turnaround from a fab house in the USA it costs over $500. If you order it from China they cost $15. And it's not just due to cheaper labor. They have better higher volume equipment. Edit: I’d love to find a non-state source but China claims $5T per year in manufacturing output for 2021. I wonder where the US would be if we had focused on manufacturing growth instead of offshoring production. http://english.scio.gov.cn/m/pressroom/2022-03/01/content_78077749.htm http://english.scio.gov.cn/m/pressroom/2022-03/01/content_78...

konschubert 3y ago
And better processes.
quailfarmer 3y ago
You can get a pretty high quality PCB built at Bay Area Circuits in Fremont, and assembled at Sierra in Sunnyvale. The speed is marginally slower than JLC, the cost is marginally higher and quality marginally lower than Compeq. But, you can drive there, and be on a first-name basis with your supplier. Given the extreme efficiency of international shipping logistics, I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect any given metro area to have competitive world class manufacturing of every type. The cost of real estate alone makes it hard to compete.
- TaylorAlexander 3y ago
  Last time I got a quote at Sierra it was hundreds of dollars for a basic PCB order, but that was 15 years ago. Have they gotten more competitive? And I’m not saying “every metro should have competitive world class manufacturing of every type”, which is such a strong claim as to feel strawman-ish (but I get the sense you didn’t mean to do so). I do however deeply wish we had Shenzhen-like manufacturing hubs on the east and west coasts.
  - dharma1 3y ago
    If the initial outlay for setting up Shenzen like manufacturing/electronics hub in the US was partially incentivised with govt subsidies to get it going, could it become competitive (cost/quality/scale wise) with Chinese hubs on a reasonable time horizon? There is of course a large labour cost delta and probably a skills shortage in the US that might be an obstacle for making something like this be economically sustainable/competitive - but if it could be automated sufficiently so that labour cost is less of an issue, is this even feasible in theory? I know there are some fabs being built, but beyond that is some kind of broader electronics manufacturing hub in the US conceivable? From the article it sounds like the manufacturing is staying in Asia but moving to politically allied countries where new infra is being built for this. Is it still mainly a labour cost issue?
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - petsfed 3y ago
    Its been a couple of years since I last went to Sierra with an order, but they're pretty competitive with other domestic board houses. About 7 years ago, they were were the cheapest for quick-turn turn-key builds of low-complexity boards in ultra low-volumes (>50), so I had them do a lot of stuff for me.
    - TaylorAlexander 3y ago
      > they're pretty competitive with other domestic board houses My complaint is that domestic board houses are super expensive, so I meant competitive with Chinese production. The person replying to me above said they are "marginally more expensive" but another commenter here went through the full quoting process and got a price that is about 8x higher than a reputable fab in China, which is not "marginally more expensive".
      - petsfed 3y ago
        If your only constraint is cost, there's basically no argument for using a domestic PCB manufacturer or assembly house. You can't beat them. The closest you might get is "offshoring" to Mexico, and even then, you'll probably still spend more than going with a Chinese manufacturer. If you go through Sierra, I seem to recall that they contract with a Taiwanese PCB fab for the bare boards, but I could be wrong. They should have a domestic partner, not sure who, for e.g. ITAR boards. So why go domestic? For us, there were IP concerns (that we'd already seen with non-electronic products), there were concerns about shipments getting held up in customs, and there were concerns about manufacturing support. If you want boards to be flashed and tested at the factory, so you can dropship your assembled product to whatever its final destination, its very valuable to send somebody to the board house to work with their integration engineers to do it. I ended up spending most of a week commuting to a board house in Fremont in 2021, so I could train up their people on operating the programming and testing jig we'd built, and operating the calibration system we'd built. Driving from my home (at the time) in Oakland to Fremont was much much easier than flying to Shenzen (or wherever), I didn't have to contend with the great firewall, and if something went wrong, I could be over in 45 minutes. All during the California (and also China) Covid lockdowns. That is what you're getting with a domestic board house, so if none of that is a concern, there's really no reason to pay the borderline extortionate premium to do it.
- morio 3y ago
  Ok, I'll bite. Uploaded my gerbers using https://instantdfm.bayareacircuits.com/ https://instantdfm.bayareacircuits.com/ Site does not respond for 10 minutes+ which is is not a good start. It's instant on the Chinese sites. Quote for 100 boards (ENIG) on Bay Area Circuits, 10 days lead time, excluding shipping: $1000 ($1244 for 5 days lead time) Todays quote for exact same 100 boards (ENIG) on pcbway.com, _including_ DHL shipping cost, 2 days lead time: $148 (shipping to Bay Area is usually 2 days with DHL, so really 4 days lead time). I've never had any quality issues and my boards have fine pitch 0.4mm BGA parts. Yeah no, not even close. Certainly not marginally higher. It's slightly cheaper than oshpark.com, they want $15 a board.
  - auders 3y ago
    And that is domestic versus imported. In Shenzhen they do production of smaller quantities in 12 hours overnight for $30 extra with local express delivery.
    - jpgvm 3y ago
      I hung out with a friend of mine in Shenzen who does this stuff all the time (and is Chinese not that is super important other than the fact being fluent helps a ton). Together we prototyped a product over a 2 month period, him handling the HW and EE bits and me writing the board firmware and HIL simulator/test-harness. We would get some boards, he would find and correct any issues with the board, get a new file to the board house before 5pm and we would get new boards in the morning at 9am delivered by a motorbike courier for about $20 or something. As a software guy that seemed pretty insane to me. All up we probably did about 6 or 7 HW revisions like that and a few of those probably could have been avoidable if more care was taken but why would we when it's so cheap to iterate so quickly? Unfortunately for various reasons we didn't choose to continue the project but I learnt a hell of a lot and really enjoyed hanging in Shenzhen and getting to understand the hacker culture there a bit more. We burnt overall a pretty small amount of money to learn some important lessons that I think would have been much more expensive anywhere else in the world.
      - grecy 3y ago
- fidotron 3y ago
  What kills me, at least in Canada, is the price of shipping from China is lower than across town, even if willing to accept comparable delays. It completely destroys the potential for any local setup to develop.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - throw0101d 3y ago
    Re: shipping costs, see Universal Postal Union: > The Universal Postal Union set up a fee so richer countries would pay more to have their international mail delivered than countries with developing economies. > "The central idea is that any citizen or business should be able to send mail packages through the Global Postal Network to any destination," said Schoorl. > At the time, China was considered a country with a developing economy, meaning the country would be charged less for international mail than other countries. And that went unchanged for decades. > As e-commerce took off in the 2010s, China found itself with a major competitive advantage. It could ship to North America at a cheap rate. Canada Post and the U.S. Postal Service were delivering packages and not being compensated very well, says Schoorl. * https://www.cbc.ca/radio/costofliving/shipping-canada-china-1.6950967 https://www.cbc.ca/radio/costofliving/shipping-canada-china-... > China is still considered a “transitional” country by the UPU, which means it enjoys a lower rate for sending mail to a developed nation like the US. As a result, mail services from China to the US cost less than Americans are charged by their own postal service for a comparable domestic delivery. This gives Chinese sellers a competitive edge over American sellers, especially in e-commerce platforms like eBay or Amazon, where shipping cost is a major factor for buyers. * https://medium.com/@contact_53404/why-is-it-so-cheap-to-ship-from-china-to-the-usa-b84ef79ff2ab https://medium.com/@contact_53404/why-is-it-so-cheap-to-ship... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Postal_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Postal_Union
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - vel0city 3y ago
dukeyukey 3y ago
> I wonder where the US would be if we had focused on manufacturing growth instead of offshoring production. Probably poorer for one. Every American working in a state-subsidised manufacturing role is one less American working in an industry where the US has a competitive advantage, like software or energy production. Of course if war breaks out that goes out the window.
- bee_rider 3y ago
  Energy production is nice to have if war breaks out. It is unlikely, I think (thankfully) that we’ll have an existential war with China, because we’re both nuclear armed.
  - dukeyukey 3y ago
    It doesn't even have to be a war with China, or involving the US. Like, say Panama has a civil war that shuts down the canal. That adds a huge cost to shipping, going around South America. Or say Europe (but not the US) gets involved in a war with Russia, redirecting the _massive_ European manufacturing capacity to local needs instead of exports.
    - anovikov 3y ago
      But well if that happens, it's so easy to take Panama back over just simply.
      - bee_rider 3y ago
        It is hard to speculate about this sort of stuff. Container ships going through canals and other tight spaces are pretty vulnerable; even if you “take over,” it could be hard to stabilize things to the point where nobody can sneak around shooting rockets and whatnot. See the Red Sea situation, which is different in many ways, but goes to show that small groups with rockets can still be a big pain. All that is just to say, it is nice to have local production of stuff like food and energy that is needed to keep things going.
- 3y ago
imtringued 3y ago
It was three years ago but I got a quote for 10 boards at Aisler and it cost significantly less than 100€, possibly 50€ for all 10 boards. Meanwhile the Chinese competitors always failes the DRC due to laughably bad tolerances. I'm talking about edge mounted through hole connectors, not some deeply buried via barely squeezed in.
jLaForest 3y ago
Sensational nonsense, OSHpark does quick turn custom pcbs for cheap in the US
NegativeK 3y ago
You two might not be disagreeing. America can absolutely lose out on low-cost parts while increasing its manufacturing base. It's an insanely large field.
- TaylorAlexander 3y ago
  Well I'm developing an open source farming robot and I just find myself constantly dreaming of spending a month in china to supercharge development of our product. I need better test equipment, I need to shop motors, I need to iterate on PCB design and test, fab, test, fab, test, fab. And the best I can do is look at a little window on my computer on to aliexpress or alibaba and hope I can find something decent, and wait a week or two or three for it to arrive. I would be SO MUCH FASTER at developing my farming robot if I was in a manufacturing mecca like Shenzhen. That is what I wish we could have here in the US. Not a small number of high value manufacturers, but the whole damn chain. Not only would it make our development faster, it would make our products better and cheaper and it would make our lives better.

konschubert 3y ago

And better processes.

quailfarmer 3y ago

You can get a pretty high quality PCB built at Bay Area Circuits in Fremont, and assembled at Sierra in Sunnyvale. The speed is marginally slower than JLC, the cost is marginally higher and quality marginally lower than Compeq. But, you can drive there, and be on a first-name basis with your supplier. Given the extreme efficiency of international shipping logistics, I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect any given metro area to have competitive world class manufacturing of every type. The cost of real estate alone makes it hard to compete.

TaylorAlexander 3y ago
Last time I got a quote at Sierra it was hundreds of dollars for a basic PCB order, but that was 15 years ago. Have they gotten more competitive? And I’m not saying “every metro should have competitive world class manufacturing of every type”, which is such a strong claim as to feel strawman-ish (but I get the sense you didn’t mean to do so). I do however deeply wish we had Shenzhen-like manufacturing hubs on the east and west coasts.
- dharma1 3y ago
  If the initial outlay for setting up Shenzen like manufacturing/electronics hub in the US was partially incentivised with govt subsidies to get it going, could it become competitive (cost/quality/scale wise) with Chinese hubs on a reasonable time horizon? There is of course a large labour cost delta and probably a skills shortage in the US that might be an obstacle for making something like this be economically sustainable/competitive - but if it could be automated sufficiently so that labour cost is less of an issue, is this even feasible in theory? I know there are some fabs being built, but beyond that is some kind of broader electronics manufacturing hub in the US conceivable? From the article it sounds like the manufacturing is staying in Asia but moving to politically allied countries where new infra is being built for this. Is it still mainly a labour cost issue?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- petsfed 3y ago
  Its been a couple of years since I last went to Sierra with an order, but they're pretty competitive with other domestic board houses. About 7 years ago, they were were the cheapest for quick-turn turn-key builds of low-complexity boards in ultra low-volumes (>50), so I had them do a lot of stuff for me.
  - TaylorAlexander 3y ago
    > they're pretty competitive with other domestic board houses My complaint is that domestic board houses are super expensive, so I meant competitive with Chinese production. The person replying to me above said they are "marginally more expensive" but another commenter here went through the full quoting process and got a price that is about 8x higher than a reputable fab in China, which is not "marginally more expensive".
    - petsfed 3y ago
      If your only constraint is cost, there's basically no argument for using a domestic PCB manufacturer or assembly house. You can't beat them. The closest you might get is "offshoring" to Mexico, and even then, you'll probably still spend more than going with a Chinese manufacturer. If you go through Sierra, I seem to recall that they contract with a Taiwanese PCB fab for the bare boards, but I could be wrong. They should have a domestic partner, not sure who, for e.g. ITAR boards. So why go domestic? For us, there were IP concerns (that we'd already seen with non-electronic products), there were concerns about shipments getting held up in customs, and there were concerns about manufacturing support. If you want boards to be flashed and tested at the factory, so you can dropship your assembled product to whatever its final destination, its very valuable to send somebody to the board house to work with their integration engineers to do it. I ended up spending most of a week commuting to a board house in Fremont in 2021, so I could train up their people on operating the programming and testing jig we'd built, and operating the calibration system we'd built. Driving from my home (at the time) in Oakland to Fremont was much much easier than flying to Shenzen (or wherever), I didn't have to contend with the great firewall, and if something went wrong, I could be over in 45 minutes. All during the California (and also China) Covid lockdowns. That is what you're getting with a domestic board house, so if none of that is a concern, there's really no reason to pay the borderline extortionate premium to do it.
morio 3y ago
Ok, I'll bite. Uploaded my gerbers using https://instantdfm.bayareacircuits.com/ https://instantdfm.bayareacircuits.com/ Site does not respond for 10 minutes+ which is is not a good start. It's instant on the Chinese sites. Quote for 100 boards (ENIG) on Bay Area Circuits, 10 days lead time, excluding shipping: $1000 ($1244 for 5 days lead time) Todays quote for exact same 100 boards (ENIG) on pcbway.com, _including_ DHL shipping cost, 2 days lead time: $148 (shipping to Bay Area is usually 2 days with DHL, so really 4 days lead time). I've never had any quality issues and my boards have fine pitch 0.4mm BGA parts. Yeah no, not even close. Certainly not marginally higher. It's slightly cheaper than oshpark.com, they want $15 a board.
- auders 3y ago
  And that is domestic versus imported. In Shenzhen they do production of smaller quantities in 12 hours overnight for $30 extra with local express delivery.
  - jpgvm 3y ago
    I hung out with a friend of mine in Shenzen who does this stuff all the time (and is Chinese not that is super important other than the fact being fluent helps a ton). Together we prototyped a product over a 2 month period, him handling the HW and EE bits and me writing the board firmware and HIL simulator/test-harness. We would get some boards, he would find and correct any issues with the board, get a new file to the board house before 5pm and we would get new boards in the morning at 9am delivered by a motorbike courier for about $20 or something. As a software guy that seemed pretty insane to me. All up we probably did about 6 or 7 HW revisions like that and a few of those probably could have been avoidable if more care was taken but why would we when it's so cheap to iterate so quickly? Unfortunately for various reasons we didn't choose to continue the project but I learnt a hell of a lot and really enjoyed hanging in Shenzhen and getting to understand the hacker culture there a bit more. We burnt overall a pretty small amount of money to learn some important lessons that I think would have been much more expensive anywhere else in the world.
    - grecy 3y ago
fidotron 3y ago
What kills me, at least in Canada, is the price of shipping from China is lower than across town, even if willing to accept comparable delays. It completely destroys the potential for any local setup to develop.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- throw0101d 3y ago
  Re: shipping costs, see Universal Postal Union: > The Universal Postal Union set up a fee so richer countries would pay more to have their international mail delivered than countries with developing economies. > "The central idea is that any citizen or business should be able to send mail packages through the Global Postal Network to any destination," said Schoorl. > At the time, China was considered a country with a developing economy, meaning the country would be charged less for international mail than other countries. And that went unchanged for decades. > As e-commerce took off in the 2010s, China found itself with a major competitive advantage. It could ship to North America at a cheap rate. Canada Post and the U.S. Postal Service were delivering packages and not being compensated very well, says Schoorl. * https://www.cbc.ca/radio/costofliving/shipping-canada-china-1.6950967 https://www.cbc.ca/radio/costofliving/shipping-canada-china-... > China is still considered a “transitional” country by the UPU, which means it enjoys a lower rate for sending mail to a developed nation like the US. As a result, mail services from China to the US cost less than Americans are charged by their own postal service for a comparable domestic delivery. This gives Chinese sellers a competitive edge over American sellers, especially in e-commerce platforms like eBay or Amazon, where shipping cost is a major factor for buyers. * https://medium.com/@contact_53404/why-is-it-so-cheap-to-ship-from-china-to-the-usa-b84ef79ff2ab https://medium.com/@contact_53404/why-is-it-so-cheap-to-ship... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Postal_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Postal_Union
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - vel0city 3y ago

dukeyukey 3y ago

> I wonder where the US would be if we had focused on manufacturing growth instead of offshoring production. Probably poorer for one. Every American working in a state-subsidised manufacturing role is one less American working in an industry where the US has a competitive advantage, like software or energy production. Of course if war breaks out that goes out the window.

bee_rider 3y ago
Energy production is nice to have if war breaks out. It is unlikely, I think (thankfully) that we’ll have an existential war with China, because we’re both nuclear armed.
- dukeyukey 3y ago
  It doesn't even have to be a war with China, or involving the US. Like, say Panama has a civil war that shuts down the canal. That adds a huge cost to shipping, going around South America. Or say Europe (but not the US) gets involved in a war with Russia, redirecting the _massive_ European manufacturing capacity to local needs instead of exports.
  - anovikov 3y ago
    But well if that happens, it's so easy to take Panama back over just simply.
    - bee_rider 3y ago
      It is hard to speculate about this sort of stuff. Container ships going through canals and other tight spaces are pretty vulnerable; even if you “take over,” it could be hard to stabilize things to the point where nobody can sneak around shooting rockets and whatnot. See the Red Sea situation, which is different in many ways, but goes to show that small groups with rockets can still be a big pain. All that is just to say, it is nice to have local production of stuff like food and energy that is needed to keep things going.
3y ago

imtringued 3y ago

It was three years ago but I got a quote for 10 boards at Aisler and it cost significantly less than 100€, possibly 50€ for all 10 boards. Meanwhile the Chinese competitors always failes the DRC due to laughably bad tolerances. I'm talking about edge mounted through hole connectors, not some deeply buried via barely squeezed in.

jLaForest 3y ago

Sensational nonsense, OSHpark does quick turn custom pcbs for cheap in the US

NegativeK 3y ago

You two might not be disagreeing. America can absolutely lose out on low-cost parts while increasing its manufacturing base. It's an insanely large field.

TaylorAlexander 3y ago
Well I'm developing an open source farming robot and I just find myself constantly dreaming of spending a month in china to supercharge development of our product. I need better test equipment, I need to shop motors, I need to iterate on PCB design and test, fab, test, fab, test, fab. And the best I can do is look at a little window on my computer on to aliexpress or alibaba and hope I can find something decent, and wait a week or two or three for it to arrive. I would be SO MUCH FASTER at developing my farming robot if I was in a manufacturing mecca like Shenzhen. That is what I wish we could have here in the US. Not a small number of high value manufacturers, but the whole damn chain. Not only would it make our development faster, it would make our products better and cheaper and it would make our lives better.