6 ms·

39c3: In-house electronics manufacturing from scratch: How hard can it be? [video]

270 points by fried-gluttony 9mo ago

Animats 9mo ago
This is painful. They got a used solder mask holder, a Lumen pick and place machine, a bunch of old Siemens feeders, and a small automatic reflow oven. All these tools needed major work. Everything with firmware needed firmware mods. Everything else needed assembly or major cleaning. Everything needed adjustment. They had to 3D print their own solder paste squeegee. They're six months in and still trying to produce one simple board. I've been down this road of populating a surface mount board. There is a minimum size for a practical board-stuffing operation, and they are below it. They are using prototype techniques for 100 units or so, not techniques that scale. Surface mount soldering requires applying hot air in a very controlled way, with the temperature ramping up, holding at the high temp for a few seconds, and then ramping down. On a small scale, you have a programmable oven which tries to do that. Those always have heat distribution problems. For production, you have a tunnel oven, with about six sections at different temperatures and a chain conveyor to take the boards through the tunnel. With the tunnel oven, you let the whole thing warm up and stabilize, and when all zones are at the right temperature, you can repeatably solder boards successfully. They're using a hobbyist-grade pick and place machine. Slow, but cheap. Plus the software isn't ready for prime time. They looked at a used production machine. Runs Windows XP and wouldn't fit through the door. Rejected that. They're about EUR 30,000 into this, not counting their own labor. This approach is not going to revive electronics in Europe.
- sschueller 9mo ago
  Hobbyist vapour phase reflow ovens exist although not cheap: https://eleshop.eu/vaporflow-275-vapour-phase-reflow-oven.html https://eleshop.eu/vaporflow-275-vapour-phase-reflow-oven.ht...
  - Animats 9mo ago
    The working fluid for that thing costs EUR205/liter. Ouch.
  - utopiah 9mo ago
    Bit pricier https://www.crowdsupply.com/pcb-arts/vapor-phase-one https://www.crowdsupply.com/pcb-arts/vapor-phase-one
    - nubinetwork 9mo ago
      Ngl, everything on crowd supply is overpriced. I bought an sdr through them several months ago, and the antenna I bought with it could be found on mouser for at least $10 cheaper.
      - utopiah 9mo ago
        Eh... well yes CS is not cheap but also... CS is Mouser. They got acquired 7 years ago https://www.crowdsupply.com/announcements/crowd-supply-has-been-acquired https://www.crowdsupply.com/announcements/crowd-supply-has-b... . You can buy the exact same products if they have enough in stock on either platform so price should be about the same e.g. https://www.crowdsupply.com/mouser-electronics https://www.crowdsupply.com/mouser-electronics and the opposite https://eu.mouser.com/manufacturer/crowd-supply/ https://eu.mouser.com/manufacturer/crowd-supply/ They might have big margins on generic products but nothing obvious to me. FWIW bought uSDR with antennas just last month.
        nubinetwork 9mo ago
        Ah... good to know... I don't have anything to shop for right now, but if they're the same, I'll just go to the source.
        utopiah 9mo ago
        Well the "source" is arguable. If you want stock parts it's definitely Mouser (or their suppliers) but if you want a project, namely something new made out of parts provided by Mouser then it's still CrowdSupply. I didn't take the time to compare but I imagine prices are roughly comparable and maybe you get projects slightly faster on CS, I'd hope so at least. You definitely get to follow the evolution of the project though, which is positive (your learn how it goes) and negative (you can get frustrated by delays).
  - abielefeld 9mo ago
    Hi! Augustin here, one of the presenters of the talk: Alex actually built a vapour phase soldering oven from scratch a few years ago! Indeed they are not exactly practical for series production, though they are amazing for small runs of very challenging to solder board though. Main issues is solvent recovery: as another commenter pointed out, Galden is very expensive, and it is also extremely greenhouse inducing and we were not confident in our ability to recover it completely, especially at "scale" (100 boards per month or so). In our case, we picked a hot-air convection oven, which, while not as good as VPS, is still a lot better than IR at not burning components. Our main challenge is always space, so we went for a production batch oven which already has more throughput than we need for us to get to profitability. The plan is to upgrade to a long and big conveyor oven once we move to a bigger facility, these are quite cheap and they are compatible with a fully automated production line.
- napkinartist 9mo ago
  You are saying the same thing they said -- it doesn't scale. It's not how you build a large factory. They acknowledge this and pretty quickly move on to say that they are aiming for smaller and sustainable. They even specifically call out why they chose not to use a conveyor based oven in the video. Basically they believe they can be price reasonable at small scales, small batches. Build process knowledge and expertise over time, and then incrementally scale up after assessing bottlenecks. I think the route of local sustainable, grow as needed or collaborate to expand capacity is pretty reasonable.
  - Animats 9mo ago
    It's not possible to make a competitively priced product that way. What are you going to do, sell artisanal circuit boards on Etsy? Here's a small US-based PCB board and assembly facility in the US, in Hesperia, California.[1] Looks like it might have 20 to 30 employees from the building picture. This is probably about as small as a viable business of this type gets. It doesn't have to be done in a huge plant like JLCPCB in Shenzhen. Here's a company in India, Invariance, which makes low-cost semi-automatic machines to do exactly the same operations 39c3 is doing.[2] They have three machines - a solder paste spreader, a pick and place machine, and a mini tunnel reflow oven. They make all three machines. These machines intended for small companies who want to assemble their own boards in house. The solder paste spreader is just automated enough to do a consistent job, with pressure and timing controlled. The pick and place machine uses their own feeder design which runs off strips of component tape. The tunnel oven is small, only about a meter long. That's close to a viable minimum production solution. [1] https://mermarinc.com/ https://mermarinc.com/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_VCJyeqa-A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_VCJyeqa-A
    - crote 9mo ago
      That depends on your definition of "competitive", doesn't it? Being 3x as expensive as China but 0.1x as expensive as current small-scale EU manufacturing can be extremely competitive. Plenty of people looking for <1000 unit runs would be willing to pay extra for a "made in EU" label.
- lnsru 9mo ago
  Electronics in Europe is so dead. It is past the point where where it can be revived. One thing is sick overregulation to spin hardware product. Last nail in the coffin today is Cyber Resilience Act. It dwarfs all the regulations before it. Second thing is talent. People can’t hardware anymore. I mean putting a 0402 capacitor on the printed circuit board is not hard. But doing that in meaningful way gets hard. As a contractor I designed few boards and optimized for production in China. In my dayjob colleagues are stuck in the last century. No recent knowledge about parts, design rules, testing principles… No willingness to learn and talk to Chinese manufacturers about optimization. Just copy paste bad decisions from old boards to new designs. Honestly I wouldn’t even try to revive anything in Europe. Chinese electronics factories are way too far in the future. The suppliers for my workplace are all stuck in the past. Even the ones with new equipment struggle to use full potential due to worker’s shortage. Which is probably a problem in whole western world. Who wants to be manufacturing technician when you can be lifestyle influencer!?
  - PinguTS 9mo ago
    Funfact: If you are working in the industry, you know that there are many companies who produce electronics in Europe in general and some even in Germany. Bosch, Continental, Siemens, Palfinger, FAUN, Webasto, Phoenix Contact, Beckhoff, …
    - crote 9mo ago
      The problem is the gap between hobbyist project and hundred-thousand-unit production run. You can't easily and cheaply get 10, 100, or 1000 units manufactured in the EU the way you can in China. This pretty much kills hardware startups and scaleups wanting to do local manufacturing. If you're not a multinational or have an essentially-unlimited budget for your small-scale run, you have to outsource it to China.
      - PinguTS 9mo ago
        I work with companies, which have a more like small scale production. They are about 100 or so workers. Yes, this is also possible. They grew their business in the last 25 years, when it was even harder to produce something than these days. At least one of these business have PCB suppliers in the EU, which helped them in the post COVID crises where everybody struggled with supply. I just named some big name brands. I also know mid-size and smaller brands. Building your business and getting your stuff together is hard for any startup in any business field.
- Fnoord 9mo ago
  Learning by mistake isn't painful; it is how you learn best. I keep iterating on that point to my children. But that isn't merely what these guys were doing. They were doing more, since they were documenting their (expensive!) learning process. Documenting your learning process and sharing it freely is allowing others to not make the very same mistakes, but to do better instead. It lowers the barrier of entry for competition, taunting competition who hopefully also share back. Like many talks on 39c3 (esp. the lightning talks), it is an invitation to collaboration. Sharing the documentation is also an act of compassion, and very much in the spirit of FOSS & OSHW. This talk was hands down my favourite talk (and not even in a subject I am familiar with!). These two guys shared a lot of info in little time, and were very humble. It was also a presentation which contains a political component (Europe's lack of independence, specifically hardware-wise), but it managed to avoid that discussion. Why, because it is assumed the attending public shares the same value. Instead, it maintains focus on the taking action part. I am not sure everyone here shares said value, but I do, and for whatever it is worth: USA is in a similar boat.
  - deleted 9mo ago
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  - abielefeld 9mo ago
    Hey! Talk speaker here, thank you so much for these words. This is exactly what we wanted to convey: Let's act, our way isnt the best way, but it is the path we're on, and there is little we can do on our own to get to another path. We don't want to build the european JLCPCB, we don't even know what our company will be in 20 years if it still exists. What we want is to give knowledge and see more people get into the business of electronics. We also want to give meaningfull jobs to engineers and factory workers which will eventually join us. We are not going to change the world, I would settle for selling 1 unit of 1 well made product to 1 customer. I would settle for giving one person a job that they love working with cool guys to make electronics. I would settle for the ability to pay my rent from this, from bringing value in the world.
    - markus_zhang 9mo ago
      Just curious, is it possible to get some basic production "kit" from China and go from there? I'd assume it's going to be new and cheaper and more "modular", and you only rely them on these basic items. I have never been into electronics manufacturing so not sure if it makes sense.
- bloggie 9mo ago
  Yes this makes CCC look bad. You can tell they were not serious because they used OpenPNP. From the video - "most importantly, it is open, hackable, and extensible." not mentioned: able to assemble electronics!
  - abielefeld 9mo ago
    Hi, talk speaker here, we are hoping to assemble our first products this year. OpenPnP is currently more than able to assemble electronics, Opulo and LumenPnP are used by many profitable companies (many I know first hand). Our opinion (shared in the talk) is that there is a little bit of work to bring it from "able to assemble electronics" to "entreprise-ready" in the sense of adding features like access rights (operators and admins shoudl have different rights) and integration to Inventree, our inventory and parts management software. Investing in even new production devices is a dead end, and our vision is that owning 100% of the software is owning 100% of the capability. China essentially developed their solutions themselves, and I believe that is the reason why they are so advanced. Entire business needs are locked behind aging software, licensing hell, an junk fees, both in europe and the US.
  - zettabomb 9mo ago
    Given the context (CCC) I would find it far less interesting if they did NOT use OpenPNP. It is also, coincidentally, able to assemble PCBs, even if it's perhaps not the best software out there.
  - ipdashc 9mo ago
    Given it's CCC, a hobbyist hacker con, OpenPNP and especially those three things you mentioned seem perfect, I'm not sure why you'd think it makes the con look bad. I've heard this talk mentioned repeatedly as one of the coolest ones there, and I certainly enjoyed it myself. It's not an industry seminar on how to start a board house, it's two guys explaining how they automated the basics of production on a low budget and with space constraints, etc.
- deleted 9mo ago
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- physarum_salad 9mo ago
  "This approach is not going to revive electronics in Europe." Revive what exactly? There's ASML, IMEC and many others. Then a host of PCB fabs that are expensive but are present and perfectly useful such as Eurocircuits and many others. This project is typical of these conferences where people find it interesting and fun to do things from scratch. Given the economics, it is not possible for anywhere other than a couple of south east asian countries to be competitive at scale with Chinese manufacturers. This presentation hasn't a hope of replacing that using the methods outlined but it doesn't mean its a waste of time!
micw 9mo ago
What I really would love is a JLCPCB equivalent in Europe. Slightly higher prices are OK, but I want to have the the Same amount of process automation and flexibility. Should be good for a scale of a few thousend per year.
- rcxdude 9mo ago
  Have you looked at Eurocircuits? Not quite as big, but similar kind of thing.
  - magicalhippo 9mo ago
    Similar in how you order, not similar in price at all. Order of magnitude more expensive for hobby-grade boards.
  - micw 8mo ago
    Thank you for the hint. I tried but the pricing is a bit disappointing. I started with an LTE modem mini-PCIe card that contains a modem module and some simple components (coils, a voltage regulator, U.FL connector). The offer from JLC for 1500 pieces (without the modem module) was 2000€ + Tax + Shipping, so way less than 3000€. The comparable best offer from Eurocircuits was 11000€, so a factor of 4. JLC can even be optimized further (e.g. panelizing, daves another 500€). I hoped that I can produce here in europe with a maximum price factor of 2 in comparison to JLC which seems not be possible. It's cheaper for us to employ someone who manages JLC than producing in europe - especially when going to mass production.
- abielefeld 9mo ago
  Hi! Have you every checked out aisler.net? In my opinion they do an amazing job, it's not quite JLCPCB prices, but maybe only 20% higher depending on what service you take, and they deliver faster since they are based in europe. Their business model is pooling small orders and sending them to board fabs in europe, mainly germany and some in the east.
  - magicalhippo 9mo ago
bubbasugga 9mo ago
[flagged]
alextousss 9mo ago
Reminds me that comma.ai has its own line. While their setup is quite expensive they do run production for a smartphone-level of difficulty in-house. They detail it incredibly well at commacon [0]. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iiBSN224w4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iiBSN224w4 [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LE-QlIWMHxM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LE-QlIWMHxM
rkagerer 9mo ago
I used a Voltera V-One for a few small projects that otherwise would have been breadboarded, and it wasn't bad.
atwrk 9mo ago
The comments here seem to show a typical US-EU divide in perspectives, people talk past each other. Yes, mass-market low-margin consumer products (the US view) probably won't be produced much in the EU in the next few years. But much of the electronics industry in the EU is B2B and centers around producing high-margin products where 10.000 units of a product would be huge. The company I work for, for example, usually produces a few hundred units of a product before the next revision replaces it. Whether or not the PCB costs 20€ more or not really isn't that important if you only plan to sell 100 devices of it per year for 10k€ each. Aspects like quality and regulatory conformity are way more important here.
- grumbelbart2 9mo ago
  That is an excellent point. The development costs of such low-volume projects are often way higher than the production costs. Having production in house or close often allows tighter, thus faster, prototyping and feedback during development, which in turn saves money. The whole "But how can this be scaled and monetized" crowd here also does not seem to understand the point of such projects and Germany's Hacker community. It is about learning and just doing it, much less about building a high–revenue business.
  - abielefeld 9mo ago
    I think so too, because the bar to economic sustainability is not incredibly high. I know a lot of one-man businesses operating with one Siplace pick and place machine and making a good living out of it. Many people don't have the desire to expand forever. In my case I hope the company grows o 20 or 30 employees, and then I would work stabilizing it so it can last 50+ years. e.g. setting up a trust to oversee the well being of employees, the quality of the products, etc. This is completely alien to most american founders and businessmen, in the words of Larry Elison: "it's not enough for me to win, it's about everybody else losing"
- abielefeld 9mo ago
  Hey, talk speaker here, that's a great point! A discussion that got cut from the talk at the early draft process was defining what "small-series" and "large-series" mean. To me, at a human scale and without dystopian monopolies, a small series is anything under 1k, a medium series around 50k and a large series 100-500k. I wanted to define a special class of series, because to an american a small series is probably more like 100k, and a large one 1 million or more, last year something like 230 million iphones were sold globally and that's an absurd number imo. Because my vision of a healthy electronics industry is 200 companies each selling competing runs of 1 million units, rather than apple selling all 230 million. In my ideal world then, the only way for apps to be distributed is a marketplace that is regulated and prevents apple from imposing their 30% tax on every dollar spent on the app store.
pikkoloassembly 9mo ago
This is the approach we're taking at Pikkolo! (pikkoloassembly.com). Heavy focus on low-capex and machines we can easily scale and hack up specifically for high-mix/low-volume work.
- abielefeld 9mo ago
  Hey! Don't hesitate to get in touch with us, I read your website but there isnt so much information yet, but Alex and I would love to hear more :)
  - jacquesm 9mo ago
    What I really loved about the talk is that you got a good insight into the actual complexities of manufacturing and drew all the right conclusions from it, rather than to throw your hands up and ordering stuff from China after all. Friends of mine - with a bit more practical experience - are doing something similar, they realize that if there ever is a real demand for their product it might be at a time when the cheap alternatives simply are no longer available and have set up from day #1 to do everything in Europe. They are - like you - quite talented but the difference is that they have access to a lot more funding and if they need a particular machine they will simply go get it rather than to make their own. You are resource constrained and that brings out a lot of creativity, which in the longer term will turn into a competitive advantage.
dwa3592 9mo ago
This was a wonderful talk. Thank you for sharing.
jcjn 9mo ago
Everything John Nagle said is true. But to have a meaningful discussion about it on HN is futile because we need to come together and first admit and agree that exporting everything to China has ruined the economy and culture in the West. That isn’t happening. The best we can do is remind ourselves to follow the guidelines while we get downvoted by brigades. I watched the video and sent it to family members who are deeply involved and ve$ted in manufacturing in the West. These two boys are unlikely to see anything like this at scale in Europe. That ship has sailed while no one was looking, and it’s not coming back. Major multi-decade fuckup.
belval 9mo ago
It's impressive how JLCPCB somehow made this process seem so seamless and easy for PCBs but also for other random components one might want. Recently needed an 4 adapters in sheet metal for a project, two fabrication shops near me quoted >100$. Got JLCPCB to do them all for 12$ with 20$ of shipping. Got them in less than 2 weeks.
_moof 9mo ago
If you're interested in assembling PCBs at home, but you're looking at all this expensive hardware and thinking it's impossible, I've had great success with: 1. Stencil jig: two bare boards taped to stiff cardboard (the kind stencils are shipped in) 2. Squeegee: an old debit card 3. Pick and place: ESD tweezers, a magnifying glass, and some tunes 4. Reflow: a toaster oven modified with a kit (the expensive part: https://whizoo.com/products/controleo3-reflow-oven-build-kit) I've made tons of boards with this setup and they work great. Are there limitations? Sure. Doing pick-and-place by hand will set a lower bound on the size of components you can design with. It also forces you to keep your part count down (but you should probably be doing that anyway). For my projects, these are never even close to the biggest problems.
- ProllyInfamous 9mo ago
  I've been an early employee at two separate small-scale US manufacturing facilities, each making only a few hundred products annually ($x,xxx, each). Their PCBs contain several hundred components, mostly surface-mounted. Making PCBs outside of SE Asia is not economical. You cannot afford to train labor on such a small scale, and would be foolish to manufacture more than a few of your own prototype boards. >2. Squeegee: an old debit card This works really well >3. Pick and place Even with a cheaper optical pick-&-place, you still need to examine every board thoroughly (the placements aren't optimal). >4. Reflow: a toaster oven w/ mods The problem with this approach is that the low thermal mass of a toaster oven results in inconsistent temperature profiles (e.g. sporadically burnt / un-soldered). I have used this setup and much prefer a larger reflow oven (with conveyer). ---- A repeated problem with this in-house PCB manufacturing dream is that the EE designer the circuit board cannot work more profitably when he has to make all the PCBs himself — which he'll have to, because he also cannot afford most American training/labor to make reliable boards. ¢¢
  - _moof 9mo ago
    Oh, I would never recommend my setup for assembly of actual products. I've spent enough time in avionics to know where that line is. :) My "lab" is strictly for side projects.

270 points by fried-gluttony 9mo ago

This is painful. They got a used solder mask holder, a Lumen pick and place machine, a bunch of old Siemens feeders, and a small automatic reflow oven. All these tools needed major work. Everything with firmware needed firmware mods. Everything else needed assembly or major cleaning. Everything needed adjustment. They had to 3D print their own solder paste squeegee. They're six months in and still trying to produce one simple board. I've been down this road of populating a surface mount board. There is a minimum size for a practical board-stuffing operation, and they are below it. They are using prototype techniques for 100 units or so, not techniques that scale. Surface mount soldering requires applying hot air in a very controlled way, with the temperature ramping up, holding at the high temp for a few seconds, and then ramping down. On a small scale, you have a programmable oven which tries to do that. Those always have heat distribution problems. For production, you have a tunnel oven, with about six sections at different temperatures and a chain conveyor to take the boards through the tunnel. With the tunnel oven, you let the whole thing warm up and stabilize, and when all zones are at the right temperature, you can repeatably solder boards successfully. They're using a hobbyist-grade pick and place machine. Slow, but cheap. Plus the software isn't ready for prime time. They looked at a used production machine. Runs Windows XP and wouldn't fit through the door. Rejected that. They're about EUR 30,000 into this, not counting their own labor. This approach is not going to revive electronics in Europe.

sschueller 9mo ago
Hobbyist vapour phase reflow ovens exist although not cheap: https://eleshop.eu/vaporflow-275-vapour-phase-reflow-oven.html https://eleshop.eu/vaporflow-275-vapour-phase-reflow-oven.ht...
- Animats 9mo ago
  The working fluid for that thing costs EUR205/liter. Ouch.
- utopiah 9mo ago
  Bit pricier https://www.crowdsupply.com/pcb-arts/vapor-phase-one https://www.crowdsupply.com/pcb-arts/vapor-phase-one
  - nubinetwork 9mo ago
    Ngl, everything on crowd supply is overpriced. I bought an sdr through them several months ago, and the antenna I bought with it could be found on mouser for at least $10 cheaper.
    - utopiah 9mo ago
      Eh... well yes CS is not cheap but also... CS is Mouser. They got acquired 7 years ago https://www.crowdsupply.com/announcements/crowd-supply-has-been-acquired https://www.crowdsupply.com/announcements/crowd-supply-has-b... . You can buy the exact same products if they have enough in stock on either platform so price should be about the same e.g. https://www.crowdsupply.com/mouser-electronics https://www.crowdsupply.com/mouser-electronics and the opposite https://eu.mouser.com/manufacturer/crowd-supply/ https://eu.mouser.com/manufacturer/crowd-supply/ They might have big margins on generic products but nothing obvious to me. FWIW bought uSDR with antennas just last month.
      - nubinetwork 9mo ago
        Ah... good to know... I don't have anything to shop for right now, but if they're the same, I'll just go to the source.
        utopiah 9mo ago
        Well the "source" is arguable. If you want stock parts it's definitely Mouser (or their suppliers) but if you want a project, namely something new made out of parts provided by Mouser then it's still CrowdSupply. I didn't take the time to compare but I imagine prices are roughly comparable and maybe you get projects slightly faster on CS, I'd hope so at least. You definitely get to follow the evolution of the project though, which is positive (your learn how it goes) and negative (you can get frustrated by delays).
- abielefeld 9mo ago
  Hi! Augustin here, one of the presenters of the talk: Alex actually built a vapour phase soldering oven from scratch a few years ago! Indeed they are not exactly practical for series production, though they are amazing for small runs of very challenging to solder board though. Main issues is solvent recovery: as another commenter pointed out, Galden is very expensive, and it is also extremely greenhouse inducing and we were not confident in our ability to recover it completely, especially at "scale" (100 boards per month or so). In our case, we picked a hot-air convection oven, which, while not as good as VPS, is still a lot better than IR at not burning components. Our main challenge is always space, so we went for a production batch oven which already has more throughput than we need for us to get to profitability. The plan is to upgrade to a long and big conveyor oven once we move to a bigger facility, these are quite cheap and they are compatible with a fully automated production line.
napkinartist 9mo ago
You are saying the same thing they said -- it doesn't scale. It's not how you build a large factory. They acknowledge this and pretty quickly move on to say that they are aiming for smaller and sustainable. They even specifically call out why they chose not to use a conveyor based oven in the video. Basically they believe they can be price reasonable at small scales, small batches. Build process knowledge and expertise over time, and then incrementally scale up after assessing bottlenecks. I think the route of local sustainable, grow as needed or collaborate to expand capacity is pretty reasonable.
- Animats 9mo ago
  It's not possible to make a competitively priced product that way. What are you going to do, sell artisanal circuit boards on Etsy? Here's a small US-based PCB board and assembly facility in the US, in Hesperia, California.[1] Looks like it might have 20 to 30 employees from the building picture. This is probably about as small as a viable business of this type gets. It doesn't have to be done in a huge plant like JLCPCB in Shenzhen. Here's a company in India, Invariance, which makes low-cost semi-automatic machines to do exactly the same operations 39c3 is doing.[2] They have three machines - a solder paste spreader, a pick and place machine, and a mini tunnel reflow oven. They make all three machines. These machines intended for small companies who want to assemble their own boards in house. The solder paste spreader is just automated enough to do a consistent job, with pressure and timing controlled. The pick and place machine uses their own feeder design which runs off strips of component tape. The tunnel oven is small, only about a meter long. That's close to a viable minimum production solution. [1] https://mermarinc.com/ https://mermarinc.com/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_VCJyeqa-A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_VCJyeqa-A
  - crote 9mo ago
    That depends on your definition of "competitive", doesn't it? Being 3x as expensive as China but 0.1x as expensive as current small-scale EU manufacturing can be extremely competitive. Plenty of people looking for <1000 unit runs would be willing to pay extra for a "made in EU" label.
lnsru 9mo ago
Electronics in Europe is so dead. It is past the point where where it can be revived. One thing is sick overregulation to spin hardware product. Last nail in the coffin today is Cyber Resilience Act. It dwarfs all the regulations before it. Second thing is talent. People can’t hardware anymore. I mean putting a 0402 capacitor on the printed circuit board is not hard. But doing that in meaningful way gets hard. As a contractor I designed few boards and optimized for production in China. In my dayjob colleagues are stuck in the last century. No recent knowledge about parts, design rules, testing principles… No willingness to learn and talk to Chinese manufacturers about optimization. Just copy paste bad decisions from old boards to new designs. Honestly I wouldn’t even try to revive anything in Europe. Chinese electronics factories are way too far in the future. The suppliers for my workplace are all stuck in the past. Even the ones with new equipment struggle to use full potential due to worker’s shortage. Which is probably a problem in whole western world. Who wants to be manufacturing technician when you can be lifestyle influencer!?
- PinguTS 9mo ago
  Funfact: If you are working in the industry, you know that there are many companies who produce electronics in Europe in general and some even in Germany. Bosch, Continental, Siemens, Palfinger, FAUN, Webasto, Phoenix Contact, Beckhoff, …
  - crote 9mo ago
    The problem is the gap between hobbyist project and hundred-thousand-unit production run. You can't easily and cheaply get 10, 100, or 1000 units manufactured in the EU the way you can in China. This pretty much kills hardware startups and scaleups wanting to do local manufacturing. If you're not a multinational or have an essentially-unlimited budget for your small-scale run, you have to outsource it to China.
    - PinguTS 9mo ago
      I work with companies, which have a more like small scale production. They are about 100 or so workers. Yes, this is also possible. They grew their business in the last 25 years, when it was even harder to produce something than these days. At least one of these business have PCB suppliers in the EU, which helped them in the post COVID crises where everybody struggled with supply. I just named some big name brands. I also know mid-size and smaller brands. Building your business and getting your stuff together is hard for any startup in any business field.
Fnoord 9mo ago
Learning by mistake isn't painful; it is how you learn best. I keep iterating on that point to my children. But that isn't merely what these guys were doing. They were doing more, since they were documenting their (expensive!) learning process. Documenting your learning process and sharing it freely is allowing others to not make the very same mistakes, but to do better instead. It lowers the barrier of entry for competition, taunting competition who hopefully also share back. Like many talks on 39c3 (esp. the lightning talks), it is an invitation to collaboration. Sharing the documentation is also an act of compassion, and very much in the spirit of FOSS & OSHW. This talk was hands down my favourite talk (and not even in a subject I am familiar with!). These two guys shared a lot of info in little time, and were very humble. It was also a presentation which contains a political component (Europe's lack of independence, specifically hardware-wise), but it managed to avoid that discussion. Why, because it is assumed the attending public shares the same value. Instead, it maintains focus on the taking action part. I am not sure everyone here shares said value, but I do, and for whatever it is worth: USA is in a similar boat.
- deleted 9mo ago
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- abielefeld 9mo ago
  Hey! Talk speaker here, thank you so much for these words. This is exactly what we wanted to convey: Let's act, our way isnt the best way, but it is the path we're on, and there is little we can do on our own to get to another path. We don't want to build the european JLCPCB, we don't even know what our company will be in 20 years if it still exists. What we want is to give knowledge and see more people get into the business of electronics. We also want to give meaningfull jobs to engineers and factory workers which will eventually join us. We are not going to change the world, I would settle for selling 1 unit of 1 well made product to 1 customer. I would settle for giving one person a job that they love working with cool guys to make electronics. I would settle for the ability to pay my rent from this, from bringing value in the world.
  - markus_zhang 9mo ago
    Just curious, is it possible to get some basic production "kit" from China and go from there? I'd assume it's going to be new and cheaper and more "modular", and you only rely them on these basic items. I have never been into electronics manufacturing so not sure if it makes sense.
bloggie 9mo ago
Yes this makes CCC look bad. You can tell they were not serious because they used OpenPNP. From the video - "most importantly, it is open, hackable, and extensible." not mentioned: able to assemble electronics!
- abielefeld 9mo ago
  Hi, talk speaker here, we are hoping to assemble our first products this year. OpenPnP is currently more than able to assemble electronics, Opulo and LumenPnP are used by many profitable companies (many I know first hand). Our opinion (shared in the talk) is that there is a little bit of work to bring it from "able to assemble electronics" to "entreprise-ready" in the sense of adding features like access rights (operators and admins shoudl have different rights) and integration to Inventree, our inventory and parts management software. Investing in even new production devices is a dead end, and our vision is that owning 100% of the software is owning 100% of the capability. China essentially developed their solutions themselves, and I believe that is the reason why they are so advanced. Entire business needs are locked behind aging software, licensing hell, an junk fees, both in europe and the US.
- zettabomb 9mo ago
  Given the context (CCC) I would find it far less interesting if they did NOT use OpenPNP. It is also, coincidentally, able to assemble PCBs, even if it's perhaps not the best software out there.
- ipdashc 9mo ago
  Given it's CCC, a hobbyist hacker con, OpenPNP and especially those three things you mentioned seem perfect, I'm not sure why you'd think it makes the con look bad. I've heard this talk mentioned repeatedly as one of the coolest ones there, and I certainly enjoyed it myself. It's not an industry seminar on how to start a board house, it's two guys explaining how they automated the basics of production on a low budget and with space constraints, etc.
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physarum_salad 9mo ago
"This approach is not going to revive electronics in Europe." Revive what exactly? There's ASML, IMEC and many others. Then a host of PCB fabs that are expensive but are present and perfectly useful such as Eurocircuits and many others. This project is typical of these conferences where people find it interesting and fun to do things from scratch. Given the economics, it is not possible for anywhere other than a couple of south east asian countries to be competitive at scale with Chinese manufacturers. This presentation hasn't a hope of replacing that using the methods outlined but it doesn't mean its a waste of time!

micw 9mo ago

What I really would love is a JLCPCB equivalent in Europe. Slightly higher prices are OK, but I want to have the the Same amount of process automation and flexibility. Should be good for a scale of a few thousend per year.

rcxdude 9mo ago
Have you looked at Eurocircuits? Not quite as big, but similar kind of thing.
- magicalhippo 9mo ago
  Similar in how you order, not similar in price at all. Order of magnitude more expensive for hobby-grade boards.
- micw 8mo ago
  Thank you for the hint. I tried but the pricing is a bit disappointing. I started with an LTE modem mini-PCIe card that contains a modem module and some simple components (coils, a voltage regulator, U.FL connector). The offer from JLC for 1500 pieces (without the modem module) was 2000€ + Tax + Shipping, so way less than 3000€. The comparable best offer from Eurocircuits was 11000€, so a factor of 4. JLC can even be optimized further (e.g. panelizing, daves another 500€). I hoped that I can produce here in europe with a maximum price factor of 2 in comparison to JLC which seems not be possible. It's cheaper for us to employ someone who manages JLC than producing in europe - especially when going to mass production.
abielefeld 9mo ago
Hi! Have you every checked out aisler.net? In my opinion they do an amazing job, it's not quite JLCPCB prices, but maybe only 20% higher depending on what service you take, and they deliver faster since they are based in europe. Their business model is pooling small orders and sending them to board fabs in europe, mainly germany and some in the east.
- magicalhippo 9mo ago

bubbasugga 9mo ago

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alextousss 9mo ago

Reminds me that comma.ai has its own line. While their setup is quite expensive they do run production for a smartphone-level of difficulty in-house. They detail it incredibly well at commacon [0]. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iiBSN224w4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iiBSN224w4 [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LE-QlIWMHxM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LE-QlIWMHxM

rkagerer 9mo ago

I used a Voltera V-One for a few small projects that otherwise would have been breadboarded, and it wasn't bad.

atwrk 9mo ago

The comments here seem to show a typical US-EU divide in perspectives, people talk past each other. Yes, mass-market low-margin consumer products (the US view) probably won't be produced much in the EU in the next few years. But much of the electronics industry in the EU is B2B and centers around producing high-margin products where 10.000 units of a product would be huge. The company I work for, for example, usually produces a few hundred units of a product before the next revision replaces it. Whether or not the PCB costs 20€ more or not really isn't that important if you only plan to sell 100 devices of it per year for 10k€ each. Aspects like quality and regulatory conformity are way more important here.

grumbelbart2 9mo ago
That is an excellent point. The development costs of such low-volume projects are often way higher than the production costs. Having production in house or close often allows tighter, thus faster, prototyping and feedback during development, which in turn saves money. The whole "But how can this be scaled and monetized" crowd here also does not seem to understand the point of such projects and Germany's Hacker community. It is about learning and just doing it, much less about building a high–revenue business.
- abielefeld 9mo ago
  I think so too, because the bar to economic sustainability is not incredibly high. I know a lot of one-man businesses operating with one Siplace pick and place machine and making a good living out of it. Many people don't have the desire to expand forever. In my case I hope the company grows o 20 or 30 employees, and then I would work stabilizing it so it can last 50+ years. e.g. setting up a trust to oversee the well being of employees, the quality of the products, etc. This is completely alien to most american founders and businessmen, in the words of Larry Elison: "it's not enough for me to win, it's about everybody else losing"
abielefeld 9mo ago
Hey, talk speaker here, that's a great point! A discussion that got cut from the talk at the early draft process was defining what "small-series" and "large-series" mean. To me, at a human scale and without dystopian monopolies, a small series is anything under 1k, a medium series around 50k and a large series 100-500k. I wanted to define a special class of series, because to an american a small series is probably more like 100k, and a large one 1 million or more, last year something like 230 million iphones were sold globally and that's an absurd number imo. Because my vision of a healthy electronics industry is 200 companies each selling competing runs of 1 million units, rather than apple selling all 230 million. In my ideal world then, the only way for apps to be distributed is a marketplace that is regulated and prevents apple from imposing their 30% tax on every dollar spent on the app store.

pikkoloassembly 9mo ago

This is the approach we're taking at Pikkolo! (pikkoloassembly.com). Heavy focus on low-capex and machines we can easily scale and hack up specifically for high-mix/low-volume work.

abielefeld 9mo ago
Hey! Don't hesitate to get in touch with us, I read your website but there isnt so much information yet, but Alex and I would love to hear more :)
- jacquesm 9mo ago
  What I really loved about the talk is that you got a good insight into the actual complexities of manufacturing and drew all the right conclusions from it, rather than to throw your hands up and ordering stuff from China after all. Friends of mine - with a bit more practical experience - are doing something similar, they realize that if there ever is a real demand for their product it might be at a time when the cheap alternatives simply are no longer available and have set up from day #1 to do everything in Europe. They are - like you - quite talented but the difference is that they have access to a lot more funding and if they need a particular machine they will simply go get it rather than to make their own. You are resource constrained and that brings out a lot of creativity, which in the longer term will turn into a competitive advantage.

dwa3592 9mo ago

This was a wonderful talk. Thank you for sharing.

jcjn 9mo ago

Everything John Nagle said is true. But to have a meaningful discussion about it on HN is futile because we need to come together and first admit and agree that exporting everything to China has ruined the economy and culture in the West. That isn’t happening. The best we can do is remind ourselves to follow the guidelines while we get downvoted by brigades. I watched the video and sent it to family members who are deeply involved and ve$ted in manufacturing in the West. These two boys are unlikely to see anything like this at scale in Europe. That ship has sailed while no one was looking, and it’s not coming back. Major multi-decade fuckup.

belval 9mo ago

It's impressive how JLCPCB somehow made this process seem so seamless and easy for PCBs but also for other random components one might want. Recently needed an 4 adapters in sheet metal for a project, two fabrication shops near me quoted >100$. Got JLCPCB to do them all for 12$ with 20$ of shipping. Got them in less than 2 weeks.

_moof 9mo ago

If you're interested in assembling PCBs at home, but you're looking at all this expensive hardware and thinking it's impossible, I've had great success with: 1. Stencil jig: two bare boards taped to stiff cardboard (the kind stencils are shipped in) 2. Squeegee: an old debit card 3. Pick and place: ESD tweezers, a magnifying glass, and some tunes 4. Reflow: a toaster oven modified with a kit (the expensive part: https://whizoo.com/products/controleo3-reflow-oven-build-kit) I've made tons of boards with this setup and they work great. Are there limitations? Sure. Doing pick-and-place by hand will set a lower bound on the size of components you can design with. It also forces you to keep your part count down (but you should probably be doing that anyway). For my projects, these are never even close to the biggest problems.

ProllyInfamous 9mo ago
I've been an early employee at two separate small-scale US manufacturing facilities, each making only a few hundred products annually ($x,xxx, each). Their PCBs contain several hundred components, mostly surface-mounted. Making PCBs outside of SE Asia is not economical. You cannot afford to train labor on such a small scale, and would be foolish to manufacture more than a few of your own prototype boards. >2. Squeegee: an old debit card This works really well >3. Pick and place Even with a cheaper optical pick-&-place, you still need to examine every board thoroughly (the placements aren't optimal). >4. Reflow: a toaster oven w/ mods The problem with this approach is that the low thermal mass of a toaster oven results in inconsistent temperature profiles (e.g. sporadically burnt / un-soldered). I have used this setup and much prefer a larger reflow oven (with conveyer). ---- A repeated problem with this in-house PCB manufacturing dream is that the EE designer the circuit board cannot work more profitably when he has to make all the PCBs himself — which he'll have to, because he also cannot afford most American training/labor to make reliable boards. ¢¢
- _moof 9mo ago
  Oh, I would never recommend my setup for assembly of actual products. I've spent enough time in avionics to know where that line is. :) My "lab" is strictly for side projects.