There is now an API to build low-volume hardware products | Hacker News Reader

There is now an API to build low-volume hardware products

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99 pointsseddona53 comments

Having recently designed and produced a low volume (<1000 units), low-complexity (2 layer / 30ish placement) board, I was very happy that my relationship with the assembly house was not fully abstracted behind an API! I suspect this was more of an editorial/marketing flourish..

When there was a problem with the SMT stencil over a connector hole that might have hurt durability, the fab's CTO called me up and then worked with the stencil house to add an aperature. We worked together similarly on balancing cost vs quality when weighing numerous otherwise-equivalent board and parts suppliers. And so on..

That said, it's great to see new stuff in this space. I'm very curious to give CircuitHub a try and see how it compares to my favorite (lower-tech) shop..

Oh yeah i've been there! We hope to eliminate a lot of those types of issues but in future we will be handling that communication from within the web interface.

We're working closely with our first partner CM http://www.worthingtonassembly.com/ to achieve this. They are awesome and even if you dont decide to use CircuitHub you should check them out!

seddona - he has. I'm the CTO he's referring to :)

small world!

Many of these types of issues should be addressed through design rule checkers in your software, though these need to be matched to the capabilities of the PCB manufacturing house...

I couldn't agree more. That's where CircuitHub can help. We're going to work really tightly with them to provide constant feedback. Everytime we learn something it will improve the DRC. And since the DRC will be based directly on our capabilities it should become remarkably accurate.

This gizmo? ("Kegbot") https://s3.amazonaws.com/ksr/assets/001/649/399/e08b61b32c97...

If that's it, and you are at liberty to say, how much was assembly per board?

Kegbot!? googles and then proceeds to run to Kickstarter

Can someone explain the 'normal' production flow for low volume hardware, and how this is different / what steps it removes / why its better?

I'm just getting started with hardware and still don't have a good grasp on the stages from design to production!

Hi Emily. Traditional manufacturing is death by a thousand cuts. Generally this manifests as increased costs and time to get into production. Our aim is to smooth as many of these problems out as we can.

Actually we're thinking about a series of blog posts teaching folks about manufacturing, is this something you would be interested in?

I'd be interested. I've got a small home business making an electronic widget, plus my day job is at a company that uses fairly elaborate PCBA's within industrial products.

I can give the perspective of an extremely small shop. I lay out my printed circuit design, order the boards from a fab, buy all of the parts myself, assemble, test, ship. I'm extremely lucky to have a good understanding of every step, so that when I'm entering my PCB design, I'm thinking ahead about everything from soldering to the mechanical integrity of the board in its enclosure. That's a lot of experience that we don't all possess, plus I deliberately limit myself to technologies that are within my wheelhouse, e.g., manual soldering. Fine pitch digital, or ball grid arrays, would force me to grow up and start paying for assembly, whereupon...

Getting boards made in moderate volume: Death by a thousand cuts describes it nicely. In my view the thousand cuts fall into two categories: First, the minor or major omissions and shortages that cause delays, force you to eat a bunch of scrap, or spending nights and weekends re-working boards by hand to meet your launch date. Imagine programming, but with a "compiler" that takes 12 weeks and you pay for every byte of code that you receive. Second, the number of board houses -- both domestic and overseas -- that will bid on jobs without sufficient skill, capacity, etc. Oh, the stories. Remember "for lack of a nail, a shoe was lost..."

That's what I see at my day job. Things have improved as we've gotten more disciplined about reviewing designs, but again, it's based on experience gained over time.

Having somebody who can provide that level of experience would seem to be a boon to the small to mid sized project.

I'm extremely lucky to have a good understanding of every step

This is really the key and is the reason that many "makers" stumble when they go from a breadboard to small production. There are a lot of steps and you don't always realize how time consuming they are in aggregate, nor which ones to optimize for.

Something as simple as standardizing your designs on an industry standard family of connectors so you can always be assured of a cheap supply and have common assembly processes can be the difference that keeps your inventory and manufacturing costs in control.

I'm also a small (1-man) shop but I had the fortune to work for a very small company right out of college as an EE. As a result, early on I got a lot of experience in every aspect of the business from concept through design, to manufacturing and marketing. I would hate to have earned all that knowledge on my own dime.

You might be interested to read Bunnie Huang's blog [1] and this video series [2]

[1] http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?page_id=2812 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXE_dh38HjU

+1 for Bunnies blog.

This is amazing. Meanwhile, we're struggling to find a non-API'd manufacturer willing to talk to us about a low-volume part we need custom-made: http://blog.automicrofarm.com/post/76020315789/frame-set-aut... The future is unevenly distributed, indeed.

oh cool, are you looking for the metal and laminate? I guess somebody needs to do a CircuitHub for metal!

We found a great supplier for metal frames and fittings, but not the flexible laminated containers.

This looks fantastic. Can't wait for a project to try it on.

Is there any provision for sending components that I either already have in stock, or that require 'exotic' sourcing, to the assembler? Or do I have to add them by hand after I get the boards back?

Also, my Altium parts library has a non-standard name for the manufacturer part number field. Hence most of the parts list didn't automagically populate for my approval. Would be nice to be able to teach Circuithub what field to look at.

Can you do basic mechanical assembly on the board? (stickers, press fits, nuts n bolts, install jumper blocks, etc.)

We dont support consignment of exotic components via the web interface yet but we can handle that via email. Likewise with mechanical assembly, test etc.

We're actually learning what different fields mean as people upload projects. We're kindergarten level but learning fast!

I gave it a go with a small, past project. Overall I think it's an interesting idea, less of an API and more of a matchmaker/de-frictionizer. Some things I'd like to see:

1. Ability to select which files get used. I have a bad habit (from the Orcad days) of saving in-progress board layouts under different names, as insurance against program crashes. Kicad used to be somewhat unstable too (3-4 years ago) but it's gotten much better (kudos for the Kicad support, by the way). In this case CircuitHub actually selected an old backup file.

2. Spreadsheet BOM import. I liked how most of the passives showed up automagically, but there will always be some unique parts out there.

3. DRC. Is it in there somewhere, or is the user fully responsible?

Pricing is nothing special, but I expected that. The interface is light-years ahead of most board/assembly houses out there, though. The SVG board and schematic are a nice touch.

The project is below; note that the main part couldn't be sourced, so the line item was dropped.

https://circuithub.com/projects/mng2222/tcm8240

Thanks for checking us out.

1. We should select the file with the most recent modified date, something went wrong here, i'll look into it.

2. On the way, many people have requested this.

3. You wont get a quote if we cant build it, but exceptionally good DRC, DFM is a goal.

Thanks for the feedback.

While this seems a little silly, it's cool to imagine a future where many physical real-world services are accessible via APIs.

I just went to the site to look around. Definitely interested in the concept. However I only see an option to Login by registering a new/linking with an existing Dropbox account.

Has anybody seen another way to register?

We took the decision to require Dropbox for now. It makes it really easy to sync new revisions and keeps the user flow simple.

We will probably open that up in the future.

What's an API mean in this context? Is this the workflow? Upload a BOM, gerbers, drill files, pick and place files, test plan, and they outsource it to a board house and contract manufacturer?

That's the basic idea yes. We dont just outsource to the CM though, we're integrating deeply with them.

The API statement is a bit premature, right now the only client is our own AngularJS app, but it's coming.

Interesting, any insight into how cost effective this is for small volume runs? Say several hundred to 1k. I've got a simple design I'm going to build and I'm currently weighing just ordering all the boards and components and doing the assembly myself vs outsourcing all the manufacturing not having built physical hardware before it's been really hard for me to get a sense of what the costs will be.

That's exactly the sort of volume we are looking to cost optimise. As for absolute cost it's really difficult to say, it depends so much on the exact configuration of your board.

If you would like to upload a design the quote is pretty much instant!

How about btsync in addition to dropbox?

I tried it and it was easy to upload the design and find the parts. Nice job.

https://circuithub.com/projects/hagna/fivekey (it's five keys on a small board with some wiring) in a volume of 1 will be $919 to assemble, and $95 for just the pcb.

btsync is an interesting option. We are thinking about a GitHub link too so it would track your GitHub project.

Our pricing is high around some edge cases right now (low volumes and simple boards). That's going to get a lot better over the coming weeks as we refine the process.

Github account linking would be fantastic!

Haven't found anything about pricing on their page, so didn't event bothered to register.

Pricing is dynamic depending on the exact specification of your circuit board. We extract hundreds of parameters from your design and use them to figure out how much it's going to cost.

We should probably do a better job of explaining this on the homepage though!

A few examples could also be helpful to get a better impression of cost without uploading a finished design.

noted, we'll get on this. thanks.

I've uploaded an Arduino Uno here:

https://circuithub.com/projects/gbuchholz/arduino_uno

...it's telling me to check back later for the pricing.

The trouble here was sourcing of the ATMEGA16U2-MU part. If you check back now you'll see we suggested the ATmega32U2 as a substitute.

Now that we've learnt the substitute it will happen automatically for all other projects in future.

I did change that to do-not-populate, so you might what to have that not hold up the whole process. Also there should be a way to ignore or delete the autodetected BOM items (which were extracted from the Eagle schematic). The fiducials were detected, and I think I made them "cosmetic" to continue the process. It's not 100% clear what "cosmetic" vs "normal" vs. "accessories". A similar thing happened for a couple of other items, which I simply placed 0-ohm jumpers to short-circuit the process so-to-speak. Also, is there a way to tell circuit-hub what attribute the manufacturer's part numbers is? That wasn't obvious. And you should think about adding the reference designators to the BOM display.

noted, thanks Greg! The whole reconciliation process is something we'll be improving a lot over the coming weeks.

Also, it seems like on your landing page that you'd want to emphasize the "instant" nature of the quote. I didn't realize that until user 0xdeadbeefbabe above kind-of mentioned it. I really didn't give it much though, but I'd assumed you were like every other contract manufacturer, and one you upload something, they'll have someone get back to you in a week. When I realized that wasn't the case, I then went to upload something just to see how it worked. Also, I'd make the "quote breakout" in the lower right corner the default option, and someone could hide the details if they don't like it.

Yep we need to do a much better job of explaining that! Thanks for the feedback.

One of the things I've been seeking out are the PCB capabilities. I have two boards I need to make, one 4 layer and one 6 layer, the 6 layer having 0.4mm pitch BGA's if I can cost benefit justify it.

I'm not finding that information easily so it's a barrier to me getting past the intro.

Are there links to this as well as a component library FAQ?

Very useful idea though.

Yes, and if they support blind/buried vias, etc. they'll also need to have various options to select enig/hasl, lead/lead-free, board outlines, cutouts allowed, soldermask colors, etc.. And presumably they've got the price baked in for various combinations of through-hold and smd components on both sides of the board. And 16 days of lead time seems like not necessarily a rush job, but some things can take longer, and I won't care, but it might be an opportunity to save money.

I assume this will be coming in the future?

Most of the parameters are contained in the EDA files, so we extract track/gap, pcb height, via config etc. This is pretty cool as you can make sure your design file is the master for all this info.

Unfortunately there are a few things most tools don't support yet, like finish and solder mask colour, so we will be adding GUI to change them.

Nonetheless it would be useful to know whether you can service requirements like sub 0.1mm track width, HDI, sub 0.2mm hole size and so on. I'll experiment and put something small but tricky through and see what comes out.

The super high end board spec's will have delayed quoting for now (probably an hour or two). But each time we quote we learn from it, over time all specs will be instant.

oh btw we account for how different parameters effect lead time. You'll for instance see if you simplify your design you might get a quicker lead time.

Circuithub looks very interesting. Has anybody used their service ? How is it?

Hi Hershel, Andrew co-founder of CircuitHub here. Thanks for checking us out. We have a few early beta users that have manufactured with us and to my knowledge are really happy.

We've got a lot to do though and any feedback is much appreciated!

Thanks

Are there plans to automate the soldering of components in to place for me?

The quote is for full turnkey, so it's pcb + parts + assembly.

That's really exciting, I will definitely check it out!

awesome, thanks, any feedback appreciated.

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