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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.

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

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LE-QlIWMHxM

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

This was a wonderful talk. Thank you for sharing.

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.