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Comment by Hasz | Hacker News Reader

Hahaha cost effective design. There's no way in hell that thing is even remotely cheap, or optimized. Chips from TI, Tons of hand assembly, custom aluminum extrusion, seamless, no mold mark shell... This thing was not cheap. They even splurged for an ENIG finish!

That being said, it could be done for waaay less if you're willing to compromise on just a few features.

Single LED COB array at the base. Gets rid of ~7 parts (6 pcb Led array, the custom aluminum extrusion, plus all the flax flexes, plus a fair amount of hand assembly. Everything on a single PCB.

Can still do the twist dimming + everything else, the light will just have an orientation.

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TI chips can be quite affordable.

TBH, 'Custom aluminum extrusion' - this is not a big deal at all. In China, the tool for this is < $1k and for what appears to be about 6 inches, perhaps its a dollar's worth a material if it was WAY overpriced, most likely less than 50 cents. And the tool will last for a long time...

What's said is that, to build this thing in America, it'd cost an absolute fortune because there simply aren't factories here which are really capable of making things like this in high volume cost-effectively. This reminds me of the article I read not long ago about Apple trying to build MacBooks in Texas and having all kinds of problems just finding screws for it, and having to get them from China because the local companies just couldn't do it.

I have quoted for parts in both the US and China. What I have seen is that generally, tooling is noncompetive - I got quotes for 22X the cost in the US...!

That said, the advice we got from most of the people we were quoting with was to get the tools made in China, import them to the US and produce the parts locally. We didn't end up doing that but I remember being amazed at the crazy tool quote arbitrage...

Bingo. Tooling in the US is ridiculously expensive. For other applications (tools for plastics, injection molding, thermoforming) there is often a 3-5x difference in price.

Actual processing is much less of a difference, especially at volume. So it makes sense to do tooling in China, production in the US.

Any resources on who to go to to get custom aluminum extrusion? Always assumed it was too expensive, but I was fortunately wrong!

As far as the chips go... I've had much better luck with Asian chip manufacturers -- generally about 1/3 the cost for similar parts. Most have a decent english datasheet. LCSC is a good place to find them.

We basically just looked on Alibaba for factories that could do all the metal work that we needed, sent them a quotation package, set up a tour, confirmed their ISO:9001, negotiated terms, and were off to the races. If you have a CM where everything is received for final delivery it helps as they can do your IQC so your metal supplier accountability is baked in. At least thats what has worked for us.

Can I ask what you were making?

https://flair.co

ENIG is pretty standard these days and cheap in high volumes. A few cents more per board (the plating is super thin) is offset by more reliable soldering of parts like BGAs due to the superior flatness compared to cheaper HASL.

Agreed, and there are very few accelerometers/gyros available in packages that don't require ENIG for reliability as the market is driven by phone usage, it would almost definitely cost more to get an (obscure/old) accel than just use ENIG.

I agree with the rest of OPs points though, all the seperate LED boards are a bit excessive.

In many board houses Pb-free HASL costs the same as ENIG. And many board houses will try hard to convince you, that OSP is good thing (my experience is that it is not and it is total PITA, unless the board is only wave soldered) and you don't need any plating at all and if you do, ENIG is the cheapest variant.

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