12 ms·

Cloud-Based Circuit Board Assembly

66 points by seddona 13y ago

pjc50 13y ago
"Cloud based" is a little misleading, but the service they're offering is a very good idea. Batch PCB services have existed for a while and several have settled out as popular choices. Now the hacker / small product dev community can have suitably downscaled assembly services too. Hopefully the part standardisation will also include footprints for the PCB tools; setting that up is a common pain.
- EChrisDenney 13y ago
  "Cloud based" was used because we just couldn't think of a better term. Footprints for part standardization is absolutely the goal. If we get a known footprint then we can guarantee a better yield because we know it's reliable. How many 0603 footprints do you think exist out there? How many times have people created that? So much redundant effort...
z3phyr 13y ago
Though not directly related, ideas like this will inevitibly lead to the mainstream robotics era. Even today, it is very hard to even 'get' the right components for your design. If this works, then the 'first entry' barrier to the field will be removed, and it will be easier for someone to work on the ZX or Apple II of the robots.
- vonmoltke 13y ago
  I think the real first entry barrier is parts for protoyping. Its not as severe, since you can make packaging compromises on brassboard prototypes, but some parts are simply unavailable because manufacturers won't sell them to distributors and insist on NDAs and business plans to even get samples. This service will help tremendously when it is time to jump from brassboard to final CCA. However, it is not feasible for most brassboard development because it requires redesigning and blue-wiring boards on the fly. The engineer working on the prototype needs parts on hand for this.
cottonseed 13y ago
Based on my own design attempts, I think two things are holding back open source hardware design: (1) assembling and reflowing complex boards with parts in small, modern packages (0402 or 0201, QFN, fine-pitch BGAs) and (2) modern CAD features like length matching, differential-pair and multi routing and impedance matching: all the things you'd need to design a fast, wide DRAM interface, for example. (I know some off these features are available in free packages, but IMHO they're just not there yet.) These would open up the kind of designs that are currently only available to elite designers with Altium, things like the RaspberryPi, BBB or bunnie's Novena. I built my own oven and had reasonable luck with two-sided boards with small packages (e.g. 0402) and large 1mm pitch BGAs, but I haven't been able to consistently reflow QFNs. However, it is expensive, time consuming, not buying in bulk kills you, and for complex boards with expensive parts, yield becomes a significant cost factor. I'll be interested to see what their costs are like. A service like this could be transformational.
- seddona 13y ago
  Andrew, co-founder @ https://circuithub.com https://circuithub.com here. Thanks for the support. I agree completely, really simple stuff is 'quite' well catered for already. Ultimately if your board is really basic and you only need one or two you can do it at home. The problem is if you want to do something cutting edge or even mid-range it get's really expensive/complex. We're hoping to help with that.
  - stox 13y ago
    Best wishes, and I hope you are a roaring success!
- EChrisDenney 13y ago
  It's hard to know which is the best option, build a brand new EDA tool and provide this service, or stand on the shoulders of giants in the past. CircuitHub has decided to go the route of allowing you to use your EDA of choice. Right now they support Altium, Eagle, and KiCAD. Reflow is tough. Getting the profile right so as not to damage components is a real pain without very expensive equipment.
iandanforth 13y ago
I feel this kind of service is extraordinarily important. As a software person who's gotten into hardware and robotics I am continually frustrated by the tyranny of choice in electronics. There are so many ways to accomplish a goal and it's so expensive to do things wrong that a huge amount of my time is spent researching parts rather than building things out of those parts. The more companies like this develop a clean pallet of available parts (even if the excuse is price control) the better! While I'm sure many people will be quick to point out that solid EE is hard for good reasons, I think we're light-years from the point where we can say "we can't make useful prototyping any easier." Perhaps this exists and I haven't found it, but I'd love not to have to even think about parts and assembly. I want to write a clean high-level spec for the functions of a board and have part choice, fab, and assembly taken care of for me. I see services like this and ciruits.io as great stepping stones on the way to that goal.
- seddona 13y ago
  Thanks, we started this due to the enormous amount of 'grunt' work involved in getting hardware into production. The essence is this; You as a designer probably have a pretty loose spec for a 3.3V regulator, why not just have the factory tell you the one everybody else is using and better yet here's the symbol and footprint. We were careful not to restrict people though, you can use any parts but we try and gently nudge you onto the more popular stuff!
  - hershel 13y ago
    The part rank is a very good idea. Is there a place we see part rank before starting a design ?
  - HeyLaughingBoy 13y ago
    How much of this is simply because of hobby-level or inexperienced builders, though? When I was a full time EE, answers to questions like this were just a phone call away. The part manufacturer's FAE (Field Applications Engineer) were happy to answer questions like that ("what's a cheap, low-dropout 3.3V regulator that can handle 100mA and won't be on allocation anytime soon?") and would be around the next day with samples. Even for our tiny company, we got excellent service. Hell, I had FAE's visiting me when I was working out of my apartment! Has that changed these days?
ErikRogneby 13y ago
This is great. I look forward to trying it out. Does anyone know of a repository of open designs? Kind of like an http://www.thingiverse.com/ http://www.thingiverse.com/ for PCBs?
- seddona 13y ago
  checkout https://circuithub.com/explore https://circuithub.com/explore
  - cottonseed 13y ago
    Hey seddona, how do you parse Altium files? Did you reverse engineer it? Do they have documentation or a dev kit/API? Thanks!
nnnnni 13y ago
Has anyone used this to make the board for a reprap?
LandoCalrissian 13y ago
This is one of the better ideas I have seen on here in a while. Definitely makes the hardware space far more approachable than in the past. I can't wait to try it out!
- EChrisDenney 13y ago
  LandoCalrissian, this is Chris from Worthington Assembly. So many Star Wars quotes to reference. So little time. We hope so. Have you signed up yet? All you need is a Dropbox account. No CC or anything like that.
sciguy77 13y ago
> Using CircuitHub’s “Part Rank” the community decides which parts should be used. When all of the designers are using the same 10K resistor or Atmel chip, we can buy 10,000 of them instead of just 6 for your project alone. YES! As someone who has bootstrap designed many PCB boards I am still skeptical about how cheap this will actually be, but I'm interested. I've generally kept costs around $100 per prototype board by using OSH Park to make the boards, Pololu for the stencil, and assembly by myself and a toaster oven. The downside of course is that this way takes more time and effort on my part. It would take a HUGE price drop to be cheaper than one night of my time + $100 + 2 week wait for PCBs though.
- EChrisDenney 13y ago
  sciguy77, Chris from Worthington Assembly here. We're interested too. Using this technique though, we've already saved customers thousands (literally thousands, just on one job) vs. quoting it independently. Try uploading your project to see how it compares. No CC or any like that required.
chm 13y ago
Hey, if someone working for CircuitHub is here: Your homepage [1] has a typo. Scaleable should read Scalable. [1]:https://circuithub.com/ https://circuithub.com/
- theunis 13y ago
  Thanks! (Theunis from CircuitHub)

66 points by seddona 13y ago

pjc50 13y ago

"Cloud based" is a little misleading, but the service they're offering is a very good idea. Batch PCB services have existed for a while and several have settled out as popular choices. Now the hacker / small product dev community can have suitably downscaled assembly services too. Hopefully the part standardisation will also include footprints for the PCB tools; setting that up is a common pain.

EChrisDenney 13y ago
"Cloud based" was used because we just couldn't think of a better term. Footprints for part standardization is absolutely the goal. If we get a known footprint then we can guarantee a better yield because we know it's reliable. How many 0603 footprints do you think exist out there? How many times have people created that? So much redundant effort...

z3phyr 13y ago

Though not directly related, ideas like this will inevitibly lead to the mainstream robotics era. Even today, it is very hard to even 'get' the right components for your design. If this works, then the 'first entry' barrier to the field will be removed, and it will be easier for someone to work on the ZX or Apple II of the robots.

vonmoltke 13y ago
I think the real first entry barrier is parts for protoyping. Its not as severe, since you can make packaging compromises on brassboard prototypes, but some parts are simply unavailable because manufacturers won't sell them to distributors and insist on NDAs and business plans to even get samples. This service will help tremendously when it is time to jump from brassboard to final CCA. However, it is not feasible for most brassboard development because it requires redesigning and blue-wiring boards on the fly. The engineer working on the prototype needs parts on hand for this.

cottonseed 13y ago

Based on my own design attempts, I think two things are holding back open source hardware design: (1) assembling and reflowing complex boards with parts in small, modern packages (0402 or 0201, QFN, fine-pitch BGAs) and (2) modern CAD features like length matching, differential-pair and multi routing and impedance matching: all the things you'd need to design a fast, wide DRAM interface, for example. (I know some off these features are available in free packages, but IMHO they're just not there yet.) These would open up the kind of designs that are currently only available to elite designers with Altium, things like the RaspberryPi, BBB or bunnie's Novena. I built my own oven and had reasonable luck with two-sided boards with small packages (e.g. 0402) and large 1mm pitch BGAs, but I haven't been able to consistently reflow QFNs. However, it is expensive, time consuming, not buying in bulk kills you, and for complex boards with expensive parts, yield becomes a significant cost factor. I'll be interested to see what their costs are like. A service like this could be transformational.

seddona 13y ago
Andrew, co-founder @ https://circuithub.com https://circuithub.com here. Thanks for the support. I agree completely, really simple stuff is 'quite' well catered for already. Ultimately if your board is really basic and you only need one or two you can do it at home. The problem is if you want to do something cutting edge or even mid-range it get's really expensive/complex. We're hoping to help with that.
- stox 13y ago
  Best wishes, and I hope you are a roaring success!
EChrisDenney 13y ago
It's hard to know which is the best option, build a brand new EDA tool and provide this service, or stand on the shoulders of giants in the past. CircuitHub has decided to go the route of allowing you to use your EDA of choice. Right now they support Altium, Eagle, and KiCAD. Reflow is tough. Getting the profile right so as not to damage components is a real pain without very expensive equipment.

iandanforth 13y ago

I feel this kind of service is extraordinarily important. As a software person who's gotten into hardware and robotics I am continually frustrated by the tyranny of choice in electronics. There are so many ways to accomplish a goal and it's so expensive to do things wrong that a huge amount of my time is spent researching parts rather than building things out of those parts. The more companies like this develop a clean pallet of available parts (even if the excuse is price control) the better! While I'm sure many people will be quick to point out that solid EE is hard for good reasons, I think we're light-years from the point where we can say "we can't make useful prototyping any easier." Perhaps this exists and I haven't found it, but I'd love not to have to even think about parts and assembly. I want to write a clean high-level spec for the functions of a board and have part choice, fab, and assembly taken care of for me. I see services like this and ciruits.io as great stepping stones on the way to that goal.

seddona 13y ago
Thanks, we started this due to the enormous amount of 'grunt' work involved in getting hardware into production. The essence is this; You as a designer probably have a pretty loose spec for a 3.3V regulator, why not just have the factory tell you the one everybody else is using and better yet here's the symbol and footprint. We were careful not to restrict people though, you can use any parts but we try and gently nudge you onto the more popular stuff!
- hershel 13y ago
  The part rank is a very good idea. Is there a place we see part rank before starting a design ?
- HeyLaughingBoy 13y ago
  How much of this is simply because of hobby-level or inexperienced builders, though? When I was a full time EE, answers to questions like this were just a phone call away. The part manufacturer's FAE (Field Applications Engineer) were happy to answer questions like that ("what's a cheap, low-dropout 3.3V regulator that can handle 100mA and won't be on allocation anytime soon?") and would be around the next day with samples. Even for our tiny company, we got excellent service. Hell, I had FAE's visiting me when I was working out of my apartment! Has that changed these days?

ErikRogneby 13y ago

This is great. I look forward to trying it out. Does anyone know of a repository of open designs? Kind of like an http://www.thingiverse.com/ http://www.thingiverse.com/ for PCBs?

seddona 13y ago
checkout https://circuithub.com/explore https://circuithub.com/explore
- cottonseed 13y ago
  Hey seddona, how do you parse Altium files? Did you reverse engineer it? Do they have documentation or a dev kit/API? Thanks!

nnnnni 13y ago

Has anyone used this to make the board for a reprap?

LandoCalrissian 13y ago

This is one of the better ideas I have seen on here in a while. Definitely makes the hardware space far more approachable than in the past. I can't wait to try it out!

EChrisDenney 13y ago
LandoCalrissian, this is Chris from Worthington Assembly. So many Star Wars quotes to reference. So little time. We hope so. Have you signed up yet? All you need is a Dropbox account. No CC or anything like that.

sciguy77 13y ago

> Using CircuitHub’s “Part Rank” the community decides which parts should be used. When all of the designers are using the same 10K resistor or Atmel chip, we can buy 10,000 of them instead of just 6 for your project alone. YES! As someone who has bootstrap designed many PCB boards I am still skeptical about how cheap this will actually be, but I'm interested. I've generally kept costs around $100 per prototype board by using OSH Park to make the boards, Pololu for the stencil, and assembly by myself and a toaster oven. The downside of course is that this way takes more time and effort on my part. It would take a HUGE price drop to be cheaper than one night of my time + $100 + 2 week wait for PCBs though.

EChrisDenney 13y ago
sciguy77, Chris from Worthington Assembly here. We're interested too. Using this technique though, we've already saved customers thousands (literally thousands, just on one job) vs. quoting it independently. Try uploading your project to see how it compares. No CC or any like that required.

chm 13y ago

Hey, if someone working for CircuitHub is here: Your homepage [1] has a typo. Scaleable should read Scalable. [1]:https://circuithub.com/ https://circuithub.com/

theunis 13y ago
Thanks! (Theunis from CircuitHub)