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Comment by shashanksamala | Hacker News Reader

The resources listed here are geared for prototyping that allows rapid iteration of designs and ideas. From electronics prototyping (Tempo Automation) to mechanical (Fictiv). Having been to Shenzhen for manufacturing, it is absolutely great once you get to large volume - you can't beat the robust ecosystem anywhere. For initial runs of designs (quantity 1-10 of something), TIME is absolutely key: dealing with Shenzhen takes extensive communication and long lead times for each production run that a startup or even a big company can't afford.

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Absolutely. At Other Machine Co., (https://othermachine.co/) our volumes just aren't big enough to go to Shenzhen yet. Not to mention the fact that the upfront costs require significant upfront capital investments. That's why we make a product that lets companies (including our own) prototype PCBs and other parts themselves.

You can't mill any serious PCBs. Not for prototype and certainly not for production.

What about vias, or soldermasks?!

That machine is great for CNCing plastics and metals however.

Why not? I've used milled PCBs for commercial prototypes as they're an order of magnitude cheaper than a fab given the turnaround time. You can get down to 0.5mm pitch easily.

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.

What commercial products are you using that you don't do multilayer boards? Nothing that involves RF, or fast buses.

Remember there are plenty of companies who need the odd PCB, but aren't in the PCB business.

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.

If your board is that simple then why not use a perfboard or a breadboard!?

You can get two layer boards for $25-$40 depending on size in two three days, in US from many sources such as Pentalogix.

In the UK, you're looking at ~£50 for a short turnaround from a fab house like PCBTrain. From there a single small two-layer board, 50x60mm, 15 weekday turnaround is £33 plus shipping . It scales very well, but that's not the point for a prototype. Want that board this week? £90. Oshpark is great, but only if you can afford to wait the 20 or so days it takes to get to you.

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.

There are huge gap between Hobby and Productization

vias are normally riveted (good enough).

Not even close.

Without a soldermask, how do you mount anything SMD finer than about a SOT-23? (only a slight exaggeration)

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.

Interesting, I like that it uses a NTM brushless motor from HobbyKing. Really cheap and easy to replace.

Assembling is being democratized, PCBs are being made available faster than ever, but that still doesn't level up with the ecosystem that is China. Especially, when you are prototyping. Link i posted in earlier comment points out exactly this : http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4297 It's a great initiative by YC, but hopefully there is more to come.

We decided to do all of our prototyping and short runs in the valley. You're risking your company's failure if you wait around for months dealing with logistics in China for each design iteration.

PCB manufacturing and assembly is one part of the equation. The other important thing that we are missing out on (by not being wired into the whole Shenzhen scene) is the hardware that they have. The kind of chips they are using are not even available to us but are cheaper and better by an order of magnitude. We are talking about 35$ computers, whereas they are using 12$ phones. All of this comes under the Gongkai method of 'innovation'.

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