I read it twice to see if there was any mention of the word 'Shenzhen'. It's difficult to not keep that in the loop, for a hardware startup anywhere in the world. Even SF.
So, let's say now you need 10,000 of them. For 1/4 the price. Delivered next month.
That's where Shenzhen starts looking really nice.
Especially if you've already got reliable contacts there, like Bolt does with Dragon Innovation.
Didn't YC move?
sounds very scalable
What about vias, or soldermasks?!
That machine is great for CNCing plastics and metals however.
You don't get soldermasks and vias are normally riveted (good enough). For most people, two layers is enough and if you can design the board well you shouldn't need much routing on the second layer.
I can't imagine mounting even a simple ATTiny, let alone a quad-flat anything or a bunch of 0603s without a solder mask.
I'm sure that some use cases can get by with all DIP, through-hole, and similar-sized parts, but it's hard to design a product that can later scale up cost-effectively without being able to use surface-mount parts. There's a reason the mass production all switched over to SMD->cost.
Simple power/control boards (weird voltage, multiple outputs) that aren't available off the shelf from RS or Farnell. None of those boards need to be more than two layers. I've designed lens focus control boards that only required a single layer.
Yes of course if you're doing RF or fast serial you'd be daft to do it on a milled board, but they are convenient sometimes.
You can get two layer boards for $25-$40 depending on size in two three days, in US from many sources such as Pentalogix.
If anyone can recommend a good, cheap fab house in the UK I'd be interested to know about it!
Perfboard is fine up to a point, but I find it tends to get messy, even for simple boards, and it's not terribly optimal with regard to space. You're out of luck (without bodging) if any component is surface mount or isn't 2.54mm pitch.
Milling is a nice stopgap when you need a single copy of a board that's a bit too complicated for perfboard (i.e. different pitch/smt parts) but isn't worth spending 10x the cost for a professionally made board. With milled boards you can have custom shapes, cutouts and so on. If you're trying to design a board to fit inside some housing with a funny shape and standoff points, milling the board to fit is a nice and cheap.
Not even close.
Your other comments are factually true, but i don't think they're totally fair. To play devil's advocate: China acknowledge they've got a pollution problem and introduced several methods to start addressing it [1][2][3]. USA also ignores human rights[4][5][6][7], supports dictators and totalitarian governments[8], fights proxy wars and arms terrorists[9][10]. "These are good reasons to not do business with" the USA.
[citations http://pastebin.com/d5UGRB1Z]
That said, I was vastly more impressed with the infra in SZ than Bangalore. SZ is a modern metropolis where Bangalore, well... It has pockets of shiny corporate havens I the suburbs. (FWIW, I personally prefer the grit of downtown BGL to SZ anyway)