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Any idea what pricing will be like? The fact that you call out Drone and Defense industries on your page suggests to me this is extremely expensive. I recently
by ac29 2mo ago
Any idea what pricing will be like? The fact that you call out Drone and Defense industries on your page suggests to me this is extremely expensive.
I recently priced out getting a PCB done in China and its insanely cheap. My design isnt complicated, a few ICs, a few connectors, an a dozen or so passives. PCB manufacturing, parts, and soldering/assembly is on the order of $10-20 total per board and that is with zero volume discounts. The parts alone would cost that much in the US, and I suspect the sort of companies that you contract out to also aren't really interested in tiny orders so they would probably quote huge setup fees (looks like your average order so far is ~$7000).
- cryo32 2mo agomedium to large defence companies tend to have in house board fabs. I worked in one.
- willcarkner 2mo agoyes, what was the utilization like?
- cryo32 2mo ago20-40% capacity. Reserve available. Turnaround same day on a board (2 layer). Next day 4 layer. Two days exotic (rogers etc). Pick, place, soldered 2 days or delivered to lab immediately after panel cut. If they had a fast production run in they could extend to 24 hours operation and triple base capacity. They did a fair bit of TH though which was manually stuffed and wave soldered which could slow stuff down considerably.
- willcarkner 2mo agoVery interesting, I'm wondering if that low-utilization rate justifies the capex of building a line.
- cryo32 2mo agoIt's mostly for security reasons. Both supply chain and secrecy.
- yitchelle 2mo agoLow utilisation would be a good thing as they would value availability to the line very highly.
- willcarkner 2mo agoYes and no, I could imagine a system where they have on demand capacity with a company like us and pay for that service.
- yitchelle 2mo agoI see what you did there. :-) Good luck with your venture btw.
- willcarkner 2mo agoYes, pricing is much higher than China over here, mainly due to the non-existent support for high-mix low-volume work. NRE adds a lot, and so the prices are high right now. This is why we need to own the stack, optimize for high-mix, and drive down costs over time. It will take a lot of work.
- walrus01 2mo agoThink of this service basically for the same purpose as why Crye pants and stuff are manufactured domestically in the USA. But applied to circuit boards. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berry_Amendment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berry_Amendment More specifically there are a number of new wide-spanning bans on import of mainland china made drone components such as flight controller boards, ESCs, power distribution boards, motors. The definition of "Blue UAS" pre-dates recent more aggressive changes made by the current US executive branch of the government, but is still relevant: https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=blue+UAS+definition https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=blue+UAS+...
- willcarkner 2mo agoThis is exactly our initial market. We realized you can't beat China for a long time, so what do you do in that time? Service demand where you have a structural advantage.
- walrus01 2mo agoCan I ask if you are working with any established US defense-oriented electronics firms that go further up the supply chain in auditing/documenting sources and chain of custody of components and the whole BOM? Having US made circuit boards is great but if a certain model of microcontroller only comes from one or two sources and they're in mainland CN, that's a known caveat that has to be documented somewhere... Or if the same product is available at a higher price from a different location. That sort of thing. One example I could offer is APD, the ESC manufacturer in Australia. They sell ESCs used both in the commercial cinema/filming industry (big quads and coaxial octos carrying RED Komodo size cameras), but also for defense...
- willcarkner 2mo agoHaven't yet worked with them, but that is one of our goals. We produce documentation to trace all components up the supply chain. In cases where the part is truly only available in CN, we clearly state this.
- irishcoffee 2mo agoDrones and defense have nothing to do with expense. It is 100% about getting on the approved vendor list, at which point the prices go up. It’s not like PCB boards in the defense industry are somehow special, though they probably should be.
- walrus01 2mo ago> Drones and defense have nothing to do with expense I would disagree? Look at Helsing, the german manufacturer of loitering munitions, and its direct competitors who are trying hard to get per-unit costs way down. Without even mentioning the myriad of Ukrainian manufacturers who are building cheap and cheerful things under $10,000 per unit (or even under $2500 per unit). There is a very real push within all NATO militaries now to basically copy many of the capabilities the Ukrainians have built in the last 4-5 years. Not saying that we won't still have lots of huge dollar items and massive programs like the AGM-158 JASSM, but there's a reason why the US paid a company to basically clone the Shahed-136 as the LUCAS at under $50k per unit.
- willcarkner 2mo agoVolume unit costs matter a lot. What matters less is cost during prototyping and development, where speed to iteration becomes way more important.
- walrus01 2mo agoI absolutely agree, if you have just a few people who are each paid 180k a year sitting around waiting for something to arrive because the low-quantity prototyping vendor is slow, it's not the best use of resources at all. One of the reasons why certain companies spend a lot of money buying their own laser sintering 3D printers for low volume test-fit protoypes in the aerospace industry, or invest in their own small-scale CNC stuff to do similar.
- makeset 2mo agoIt's also the immense know-how Chinese manufacturers have accumulated at this point. For a 5-piece hobby order $25 shipped, I got feedback confirming a wrong-looking part of my design before they printed.
- ThePhysicist 2mo agoWhich manufacturer was that?
- makeset 2mo agoJLCPCB.
- mrloopex 2mo agoAnd their ability to pollute without regard for life or the future.
- techbrovanguard 2mo ago[dead]
- tamimio 2mo agoIt will definitely be expensive, and if you raised any eyebrow, you will get “made in the US” remarks immediately. Regarding “drone”, it’s a buzz word, in the past two years everyone is piggy backing on it like how all industries did with “crypto” years ago and “cyber” years before, or others with “AI” in software world now, “drone” is the word for hardware related, any new product or startup that has hardware involved, you will see this word quickly. I hate it and I hate how they ruined this amazing hobby with all their corporate defense BS, but oh well.
- willcarkner 2mo agoIt's important to focus on where real innovation in the space is happening, and to me that's in drones. Some of the hype is overstated but drones are the new additions to conflict, and they're clearly not going away.
- tamimio 2mo agoA lot of the hype is overstated, and I have been in drone world since 2014, but because of the weaponization of them and the global atmosphere of militarization, there’s a LOT of money pouring in now, so everyone wants a piece of that cake. In reality, their (the fpv ones specifically) success rates are around 1/10, but only the successful ones are shown for obvious reasons. Also, I did mention back in 2020 that drones are the only practical type of robotics compared to others, although I meant for good purposes not how they are used right now.
- willcarkner 2mo agoYes even if the success rates are 1/10 they are still causing serious damage for their cost in modern conflicts. Agreed that the hype is overstated.
- tonyarkles 2mo agoAnd if the success rate is 1/10 but the cost is 1/100… that’s still a win as far as the war chest is concerned.
- ford 2mo agoI'll hijack this point to talk about robotics - I think we agree 1) It's not ideal for China to control production for _all_ of the things we use here. 2) What they already are good at they'll continue to improve at, because of domain knowledge & ecosystem 3) The reason they are ahead in the first place is labor cost & the QOL workers will tolerate (and intentional government investment) 4) The only way around this is for the US to invest into robotics (labor) & subsidize american manufacturing (ecosystem)
- willcarkner 2mo agoAgreed completely. The recent bans are one way of doing this but not the most sustainable long term at all. We have two options, give up and allow China to control all production, or start the hard battle to improve manufacturing here.
- veqq 2mo ago> The reason they are ahead in the first place is labor cost & the QOL workers will tolerate That hasn't been accurate in a decade. Chinese labor costs have been higher than Mexico since before Covid. They have more efficient firms, business processes and so much more. The parenthesized "(and intentional government investment)" is related to how they developed nimbler systems, but ignores the totality of industrial policy.
- willcarkner 2mo agoIn this case specifically they also have a huge amount of automation and process learnings from being around for 20+ years.
- philipallstar 2mo agoThey also have a pretty organised society and a strong focus on education, so given money they will run with it a long way.
- apercu 2mo agoI totally agree that we need to reinvigorate manufacturing in the US and that it’s going to take the government (federal level) to make this happen. But for some reason we’d rather give those tax dollars to billionaires and elect incompetents like the current president.
- MSFT_Edging 2mo agoThis is essentially the problem with a lot of US fabs. Many exist only as a technicality for the defense industry to make things domestically. This means they get the "$1,000 hammer" margins. When you approach them for a prototype, they essentially don't want your business.