Unveiling The Grid: PCBs made in America, twice as fast as Shenzhen
circuithub.com23 points by seddona 2 days ago
23 points by seddona 2 days ago
Hi Andrew founder of CircuitHub here. Happy to answer any questions. Hardware design has been in the news a lot lately as it's going through the same AI revolution as coding. We're happy to make it easy to turn those designs into physical products.
The site quotes prices for ≥4 layer board production are on the order of 10x JLCPCB. I can pay for DHL overnight from JLC and still come in from uploading my design to holding it in my hand ~7 business days or less.
A domestic PCB manufacturing pipeline, has been a pipe dream for me an many other Hardware startup EEs for a long time. Until costs are more competitive, CN still gets the business. Hope you can bring costs for small batch prototype PCB manufacturing down further in the future, then you will have our business!
Thanks for the feedback. For 5 units of 2 or 4 layer turnkey assembled boards, so long as you fit in the Grid Proto spec it's a little bit more expensive (not 10x, more like 1.3x) and much faster - we have benchmarked this quite a bit. 7 days to the US with any consistency is not possible, we have a lot of data points on that, median is about 10 days. To other countries it might be faster?
Looks interesting. As a US manufacturer/designer I will be keeping an eye on this closely.
Currently, all assembly is done in house (in the US) but bare PCBs typically are still made in CN. We used to produce everything overseas and just do the QA/test in the US but during the chip shortage I ended up setting up the production line to attempt to eliminate any possible shortages/tariffs.
It is a difficult struggle manufacturing commercial products in the US (doubly so with an openhardware project) since the final cost is the major blocker but I decided it was worth it for many reasons. Big issue though is knowing that even if I pay someone 2x the going rate for an employee it still will not be a living wage. Not sure the fix there. I see you are planning to lean heavily on automation/AI for this, will be watching to see how it all progresses.
There are still some major blockers in the US. Commercial/Industrial real estate being a big one. Costs are not going down...even if employee count is minimized.
I wish nothing but the best for the project.
It’s incredible that you set up an in-house PCBA pipeline. I’m curious about what that looks like, and what you are building/manufacturing, if you don’t mind sharing!
I run some used Manncorp/Autotronik equipment. Pnp, oven, bunch of hand tools and such for rework (Metcal irons). If I didn't have this I would likely build a line using an openpnp based machine.
Making boards for the Smoothieware/Smoothieboard project. [1]
Mostly small SMT stuff on there. 0402, BGA, etc.
We've had a few batches of mostly assembled (minus through hole parts) prototype boards made with y'all recently, pretty stoked how quick it is. Plus no tarrifs vs the last PCBway order.
Curious, why are surface mount USB-C connectors not able to be done as part of the surface mount components (treated as a through hole I think)? Too fiddly?
How long until you've built the Grid into a shipping container and are selling those?
Can't wait to see how quickly I can get boards next time I need a batch! The adage 'hardware is hard' is getting less true every day
Amazing. Is something like this available now, or in the future, for hobbyists? Happy to pay retail prices.
This is great! Are you able to do IFA for UL certification? That would be a killer for us!
kudos! for solving a hardwares, hardware problem, but especialy for the open, matter of fact demenour devoid of rhetoric. aaaand the web site renders perfectly on my less than standard browser, fast too.