Ask HN: How to improve PCB prototyping iteration time?
I'm building wearable tech, and the JLCPCB lead times are my biggest bottleneck for iteration. 3-4 weeks is way too long. Has anyone figured out a way to make this quicker? Strongly considering moving to Shenzen to build the prototype. Has anyone done this, and was it quicker/worth it?
Most of the comments strongly advise against moving to Shenzhen.
Having prototyped in both places I’ll make some arguments for. I’ll preface it’s only worth it if you’re beyond the limits of what American facilities can do and it's a step function in workflow and getting setup. There is an acceptable cultural tunnel vision in our field that developed in the 1980s for "how to do things" and hasn't changed much beyond "4 layer pcb on FR4 with surface mount components" - going against that grain requires an interdisciplinary mindset - as in "make a functioning circuit on a piece of toast" level of creativity[1].
If you’re building wearable tech there’s a strong chance you’ll need to make flex pcbs sooner or later. Those are comically cheap in China and stupid expensive stateside.
Especially when you start pushing the boundaries - there’s so much low hanging fruit for experimenting with your PCBs when you’re in the factory making them. Most US manufacturers will only let you use one color for a solder mask. In Shenzhen we pioneered using full RGB to print any graphic on your pcb back in 2017. Even on top of the chips themselves. It’s now pretty easy to source. This is literally just by being on the factory floor and saying “hey can you do step 5 before you do step 4? - we want to take the boards to this other factory across town first” And they say “sure”. Likewise if you want to mount your parts sideways or upside down to save space. Or say, take a literal sea shell through a copper PVD machine and mill away some traces and mount some chips. They do not care and will gladly take your money and make it happen.
One time we couldn’t find a single vendor in the US or Europe who would embed chips in the middle of pcb layers[2]. This was a weekend project for one of our Chinese vendors - who also had never done this but it sounded like fun so she said “no problem”.
Can get turnaround on prototype boards with assembly for free once you have a cm or just $50 if you don’t. One American vendor comically insisted one couldn’t mix flex and rigid boards for one of our designs for less than $10k. In China it cost me $80. Likewise we mounted chips to non-traditional media like credit cards with no sweat.
Any chip we wanted was available through HQB or TaoBao when Digikey was still backed up on Covid.
Test fixtures (the laser cut jigs that you program and test pcbs) are $100. Stateside they were half as useful and $2000.
You’re one blue Buick minivan ride from Guanzhou where all the garments in the world are made. Being at the intersection of these two cities is a strategic advantage.
Cost of living is cheap.
It will make you a better engineer by exposing you to the dirty business of manufacturing first hand. I'll go so bombastically hyperbolic and say not moving to Shenzhen as an EE is like not moving to Nashville as an aspiring country musician.
In China the saying goes “anything is possible, nothing is easy.” I’d mostly agree with this but also point out that price is completely-orthogonal-to-possible in China, absolutely not in the US, and straight up forbidden in Germany.
No purple, no stiffeners, 12+ day turn, 4mil thickness(!), but yes I understand one can wait and get boards more cheaply from OSH or shipped from China. I’m more trying to address the “hey let’s go to the factory this weekend and try something never before done” kind of use case which they don’t do.
I really want to develop a product in Shenzhen some time. During the height of covid lockdowns in China I got a little concerned about personal safety as a possible visitor. But I also know millions of foreigners visit every year and our news distorts everything coming from China. Do you ever have concerns about personal safety or unexpected government action there?
My threat model is probably not yours and my threat model in China is not my thread model in the US is not my threat model in South Africa. But if I had to pick one point, I'd say most people I've met who haven't worked in China over-index on political risk and under-index on driving risk.
For some data, in 2019 about 3 million Americans went to China and the number detained for political reasons (and not working for the US government or journalism) was probably in the single digits?
In the US I've driven about 600,000 miles and been in one traffic accident. In China I've ridden about 30,000 miles and been in 6 traffic accidents.
Plenty of other things people have gone on at length about things that are just different risks in both places.
Funny you should mention traffic accidents. When was working in Shanghai years ago I was in two accidents in a taxi in a week. One would have written the car off, smashed half the engine out. I was close to work so just walked the rest of the way.
Yeah that makes sense, thanks I appreciate it. Yeah I guess my concerns were that some internal political tensions would boil over and I’d get caught up in the middle, or that something would happen with Taiwan and I’d get stuck. But the internal tensions seem to have subsided since the zero covid policy was relaxed, and the Taiwan stuff seems very long term. As you say, millions visit without a problem, and there are other things to worry about.
I figured I was over indexing but it’s nice to hear it directly from someone who knows. Thanks!
It’s always a potential that this happens. Millions of people come and go peacefully because it’s not actively happening. You can’t measure the risk by observing present data. But you have to make a decision as to what you risk tolerance is and how likely you think something like this is in the future.
It occurs to me that this is the kind of question that /u/SexyCyborg would probably have a good answer for if she hadn't been forced to get off Twitter by her local Chinese police. I think she had an account here, maybe she's still around?
Banger. Confirmed my suspicions about flex PCBs and the viability of European manufacturing (unviable). Being able to shoot to Gaungzhou would also be useful. I've got a couple more questions - I'll dm you on twitter.
Without knowing exactly what you are working on, here are a few ideas:
1. Figure out if you can do fewer slow iterations. What's driving the need for a full PCBA run for each iteration? Might be able to split out to rigid assembly and flex for example.
2. Run more experiments in parallel. If you have multiple ideas or variations to test, design them all and fabricate them all. Flex antenna? Make like 30 parametric variations.
If design then becomes the bottleneck, then automate that next.
I would like to give this response a signal boost, based on the fact that the comment author knows a lot about PCB design, prototyping and manufacturing.
Gotcha - thanks for the advice. The IC performance on the flex circuit is a key part of the product so will figure out how to test that in a lofi manner.
Maybe you only need a small bit on the flex (main CPU and the DDR to prove signal integrity?), and the rest can just go on an ugly quick PCB for software validation and bringup. Stuff it with test points, current shunt points, larger parts for easy probing, add some mounting holes too fasten it to a test rig, whatever.
Then just glomp the flex down to the test PCB with some nice Samtec connectors (you can enough free samples for a small batch of test units even) or an edge connector on the stiffener.
This is exactly what prototype PCB manufacturers are for. If you're in the Bay area, SF Circuits (and a dozen others) will give you 24h/48h turnaround times. This is a highly commoditized service. Even the generic manufacturers like PCBway have options you can purchase for faster turnaround if you meet the constraints.
Don't move to Shenzhen. You don't have the social connections for that and it'd just give you a bunch of new problems.
Some do assembly, some don't. Depends on the house and each one will have slightly different constraints on what they'll assemble. As for costs, it balances out with the costs of slower iteration. When EEs don't have fast turnaround (or too short schedules) they start loading all their little experiments onto the iterations they do have and you can end up with bloated BOMs, overspecified parts, and "good enough".
There are many good common sense answers in this thread: parallelize the runs, use faster (but more expensive) local runs, have a better model (physical or digital) to reduce the runs.
To answer your specific question, Shenzhen is a good place to work on hardware, but it is not like you just fly in, and people start building for you. Your own lead time (establishing yourself there) will likely be in weeks if not months. This is from my personal experience in Shenzhen and other hardware founders'.
If you want to build the prototype faster, identifying the bottleneck is a great start. Which takes most time? For up to medium complexity, PCB fab (the board itself) is the most time-consuming part. Anything more complex, it could be the SMT assembly. Each part of the entire process can be optimized: PCB fab can be done in-house quick (chemical etching, CNC machining, etc). Assembly can be optimized too (solder reflow oven, solder paste stencils, etc) on a small scale. I would estimate a batch of 5 boards of 50 SMT components each can be produced under 8 active engineer-hours. That's your entire prototype in a work day.
Do you have professional/academic training in electrical engineering? EE is no less complex than CS, and perhaps studying up the entire process will help you identify what's possible and what's the bottleneck.
Don't assemble via JLC. Get a good soldering iron, skillet, sand, paste, and order from mouser to do them yourself. If you're iterating errata with a full run each time you are wasting unbelievable amounts of both time and money, and you're probably not tinkering with the board enough, increasing your overall iteration count.
I assembled my own PCBs for years and once I used JLC assembly I never went back. It costs more in shipping from Digikey to pay for assembly at JLC, so you’re literally not saving money. You’re also spending more time ordering parts, and the actual assembly is a pain even if you’re skilled. Hand placing components just sucks. Plus you end up with boxes of capacitors and resistors you will never use again.
I just don’t think this really is a better way of doing things.
Do you generally limit yourself to the parts that JLC stocks? Or do you send them reels with the parts you want to use? Or will they order the parts you want? Last I looked, I don't see that they have any Microchip microcontrollers available (plus plenty of other active components and connectors).
I do my best to use only JLC parts for convenience sake, but it is easy to order parts from global suppliers in to your parts cart at JLC. I’m not sure if you can send them parts but they have a “global parts” function in your “parts cart” that lets you search most global supply companies and they will buy the parts for you.
I’m in same boat. Turnaround is awful for anything besides the most basic boards, and that being fast doesn’t really help when it’s just quickly entering a slow delivery process.
I find pricing really scattered everywhere. Often mouser and digikey, which others swear by, have worst pricing (and availability). But I think these places are intentionally high on some items to discourage production runs and keep it a prototyping service. Not sure why they care though.
As far as I understand, Arrow is where you go when you need larger component batches. And if you're too big for Arrow, you probably already have a Chinese manufacturer in the works.
You’re confounding lead times on assembly services with iteration time.
If you’re bootstrapping, find a good quick turn board house and assemble the boards yourself. Get an lga-12 stencil and hot air tools, maybe a benchtop reflow oven.
> Strongly considering moving to Shenzen to build the prototype.
That seems like a profoundly personal decision that would have more ramifications than you expect.
Breadboarding should be possible, same with soldering together prototype PCBs as long as you're not concerned with wearing the prototype yourself. There's also (albeit expensive) circuit modelling/validation software you could try to use. I don't think many circuit designers have a workflow where they perpetually buy finished prototypes to check if they're working or not, though.
Interesting I see. I'm moving from breadboarding to PCBs because I'm using ICs which are way too small to solder by hand and I've already prototyped with their off-the-shelf dev board versions.
Consider ordering reusable chunks of your circuit as PCBs instead of iterating on entire boards. You can connect the chunks with breadboards or connectors or something.
How small is "too small" here? I'm by no means an expert at soldering but with some patience I can hand solder down to 0603 components, and I know people who can go much smaller than that (right down to the sort of thing where if you sneeze finding the components you just scattered around is like finding a specific grain of sand on the floor). You can get practice boards for next to nothing online if you don't want to risk damaging high value components.
Fiber laser. Even a 20W fiber laser will ablate copper. 30W-50W are now avaiable for under $2k, maybe even dropping still.
You'll be limited to single or double sided, without vias but considering its rapid prototyping, these are the compromises to be had.
You could always try CNCing prototypes but this is fraught with trouble. Fiber lasers offer the simplicity, repeatability and speed that normal laser cuters, but with metal.
> I'm building wearable tech, and the JLCPCB lead times are my biggest bottleneck for iteration. 3-4 weeks is way too long.
Hm... my experience with JLCPCB is that I get 7-10 days iterations from sending my gerbers to getting my boards in SF Bay Area. Still long, but much shorter than your experience.
Is it shipping, PCB manufacturing or PCB assembly that takes so much time?
PCB manufacturing. They said the assembly is just about to start and they'll be shipping day after tomorrow. I'm in London so will have to see how long shipping takes!
In this case, it's not going to be changed by moving to Shenzhen, as you can really only cut on shipping times. But yeah, finding a vendor that can produce flexible boards faster than 2 weeks should be possible, even while you're in Europe.
Often Pcbway and similar have a simple (i.e. 4 layer, no special options that can go in the most regular batches) board-only order on a UK desk in about 6 days from order (order at the weekend, have it in-hand on Friday). So shipping is around 4 days in practice, and around £25 (depends on weight). You're not guaranteed to have it but it's often that fast.
If you have to move, move to a place near the start of your DHL driver's route as that can make the difference between 9am and 4pm delivery (and that goes for RS too).
Where are you located? 3-4 weeks seems very slow for JLCPCB. Are you shipping to South America or something?
If you can afford the time, effort, and expense needed to move to China, maybe you should look into working with a local board shop that could provide more rapid turnaround.
The best way to improve your development time is by doing fewer iterations. Often easier said than done, but you should be designing for test and rework and thoroughly reviewing your designs before submission. You said you're making flex PCBs -- have you considered doing fast-turnaround prototypes on rigid PCB to make sure your electrical design is good? What kind of problems are you having that are forcing you to do extra prototyping runs?
If the difference between $200 and $2000 prototypes is material to you, you probably shouldn't be doing hardware.
Hardware has an enormous set of things that cost money to surmount. Packaging, testing, certifications, etc. If chunks of $2K matter, you're never getting over the next hurdles.
I strongly disagree that people discerning at this price point shouldn’t be doing hardware. If we’re encouraging people to write software apps on the weekend with the hope they gain some traction, we can encourage pre-funding hardware entrepreneurs to prototype and try to get a kickstarter-ready product on the weekends too.
I do a LOT of hardware and the difference between $200 and $2000 matters a lot to me.
In 2013 I raised $150k on kickstarter, went through development hell and extreme burnout, borrowed an extra $80k from friends, family, and banks, went through more development hell and more burnout, and still failed.
This kind of situation is burned in to my psyche. [1]
One thing I learned is how one might bootstrap hardware on the cheap properly. You can’t launch until your product is perfect and you are actually ready to scale and you have to be willing to charge the right amount on your kickstarter.
So you have to know what you are doing, but I believe a cheap bootstrapped hardware product can be built and launched pre-funding and lead to success. Of course it’s difficult but we all know hardware is hard.
There’s a lot of creative people out there who can’t afford $2000 prototype batches and I want to see what they’re building. The point is, don’t panic-launch early. That’s an excellent way to fail in a very painful way. But that’s orthogonal to how much budget you have. Even a well funded project can launch too soon.
Is there no local PCB manufacturer near you? Normally, local manufacturers can do that sort of thing for about $2K or so with quick turnaround (<1 week). Assembly is normally anywhere from 1K to 5K extra depending upon complexity.
You should be able to buy quite a few local turns for the price it would cost for you to spend time in Shenzhen.
Unless you're Chinese is very good or you have a trusted local contact, you're not likely to benefit much from heading to Shenzhen in person.
Can you find a way to reduce the iteration itself? I've never done wearables, but last time I did a product there was almost zero iteration. There were updated versions with easier DFM, but nothing like the iterative process I'm used to with software.
I feel like something might be slightly wrong here. Are you iterating because you haven't finalized the core innovative tech? Can you develop that first, on breadboards or with lab bench equipment?
Are you iterating because of minor aesthetic tweaks? Can you just make one PCB with LEDs in all the places you might want them, turn off the unneeded ones in software, then leave them out of the final BOM?
Are there just straight up mistakes, that could be fixed with slower iteration?
Maybe it's just that I've never quite made it to the level of career success where there's a budget and time for this kind of iteration, but I still think something could improve.
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. The only board I’ve ever worked on that required lots of iteration was a board for a client that could not manage to nail down requirements. We did 16 “iterations” but only fabbed 5 of them because he would often come up with new requirements before the PCBA had even started assembling the previous one. Lots of cancelling orders and resubmitting with assurances each time that “this is it, no more changes”.
Why are the lead times so long? Is it the shipping?
If you're worried about operating in China another option would be to move closer the shenzhen.
Kuala Lumpur has cheap rent, good infrastructure and overnight shipping to shenzhen should be possible. Similarly Korea, Vietnam, Taiwan,Singapore and so on are easier to operate in while being closer to the "source".
Definetly go and visit Shanzhen first though.
What kind of board specs do you typically deal with? This can have a significant effect on leadtime and who you ultimately decide to deal with.
If you just need a lot of unique double-sided boards to play around with in "alpha" and you can wait longer for the "beta" boards from your supplier, you can use several different small scale processes to accomplish that, such as photoresist, milling or printing.
I'm assuming OP is using JLCPCB for assembly instead of doing it in house, because if they just want bare boards they should just be paying for rush processing.
PCBWay can ship bare boards by noon the day after you order them if you pay the $99 to rush the order. Much cheaper than moving to Shenzhen.
Do you have in-house SMD assembly experience? When I was doing fast turnaround prototyping, being able to build up the boards in house was invaluable.
Do you need your prototypes to be on flex PCBs? If you can get the electronics ironed out on FR4 you're going to save a lot of time and money on prototype revisions.
If you're waiting for JLCPCB to assemble all your boards for you you're slowing your process way down. Pay for 2-3 day processing at PCBWay and then assemble in-house. If you can prototype on FR4, PCBWay can literally manufacture the boards overnight and DHL them to you before noon the next day.
Great idea! I've never soldered SMDs but can defo learn. We're getting are boards assembled rn because soldering LGA-12 package ICs by hand is unfeasible, and it seems pointless to pay the setup fee and not get the other components done as well. Does that change your answer at all?
Not trying to be rude, but someone who is complaining about PCB turnaround time, but has also never soldered SMDs sounds odd. You need someone who knows what they're doing on staff. Either hire that person or become that person.
It's been a couple decades since I was involved in the H/W business, but there are usually tricks you can use to assemble even very fine pin-pitch devices in your kitchen. Heat gun, microscope, etc. I'm guessing there are 100 YouTube videos on this. Assemblers will tell you it needs ZYX special machine that only they have, but actually you can do it yourself, albeit slowly and with defects here and there.
Back when, there were decent PCB houses in the UK (up in the midlands typically, not near London). Perhaps they're all out of business now but you might go looking for one of them vs back and forth to Asia for prototypes.
Edit: a quick search suggests that there are many UK manufacturers still alive. E.g. [Forward, Newberry, Leicester, Stevenage]circuits.
Can't plus one this enough. These skills are very achievable, and IMO are required for successfully building prototypes. Especially if you want to be able to salvage an experiment where a couple of mistakes were made, you may need to cut traces solder a few wires and possibly bodge some components on in order to validate the design before ordering the next iteration.
LGA-12 is totally doable yourself, make sure you get solder stencils with the boards and buy yourself a cheap reflow oven. Then you just put solder paste on the board using the stencil so it's in the right places, place the components, and the oven melts everything into place.
Buy yourself some laser-cut paste-mask stencils out of Mylar (https://www.pololu.com/product/446/). Get the room-temperature stable solder paste from Chip Quick (https://www.chipquik.com/store/index.php?cPath=470&osCsid=il...). Buy a cheap temperature controlled hot plate (https://www.amazon.com/Soiiw-Microcomputer-Soldering-Preheat...). Get some cheater glasses with 3x or greater magnification, and some good tweezers. Place parts by hand, and solder them within minutes on the hot plate. Maybe watch a Youtube video or two. Easier than it seems.
I've done LGA-12 with a setup like the above (a ST LIS2D12 3-axis accelerometer). Also, goes without saying that you should get a soldering iron with a fine tip for large part rework, and possibly a hot air pencil for reworking the tinier parts.
For the parts with pins you can't reach with a probe, be sure to leave a way to test connectivity of the pins with a DMM. For the super tiny parts with the hidden pads, I like to have a series resistor that I can remove, and then use a DMM to check that you can find the ESD diodes on each pin of the package.
Lga12 with soldermask stencils and a hotplate doesn't work? Should be doable for prototype quality. Might want a computer controlled pick and place with a suction arm/microscope but it's definitely feasible. Look up some of the gpu repair guys for inspiration, they often do some insane bga parts (nand chips) by hand.
Getting the tools and skills to do PCB assembly and SMD rework seems like a no-brainer (indeed I'd say essential!) if you're aiming to do serious work with building hardware. Not something I've done myself but soldering an LGA-12 doesn't look too hard with appropriate tools.
A lot of folks are missing OP's point about making wearable tech. Flex in the US is just not fast or affordable. There's no reason for it to be (from the fabricator's standpoint).
OTOH, most of the stuff can be and should be prototyped on standard rigid boards.
For standard 2L rigid boards:
If you work in 1-week cycles, you can usually send a PCB out on Thursday or Friday and have it in your hand on Monday or Tuesday to assemble and test. About $40-$100 per round.
If that's not fast enough, a domestic fab shop that can do 1 day turn on bare boards for not terrible pricing - about $150-$200 per round (unless you can will-call at the dock). 2 or 3 day with soldermask/silkscreen will probably be around $300-$500 per round.
Prices are rough estimates off the top of my memory from the shops I've used.
Yeah, definitely don't rely on them for assembly. For prototype runs of a couple to tens of units, just do it yourself. Hire an intern for assembly and just order bare boards. Standard lead time for boards is on the order of a week, if not 24h.
The equipment isn't expensive and you don't need much labor. I bet a 2-3 week wait costs you a lot more than a part time assembly tech.
Not usefully. Language models are terrible at spatial reasoning, and PCB design often involves cross-cutting concerns which interact with physical layout (e.g. requirements that the PCB have a specific size/shape or that connectors or user interface components be in certain places, thermal requirements, EMI, etc).
None of the engineers that I've talked to have been impressed with the current state of automated design or layout tools.
There really isn't these days. There's KiCad and LibrePCB, there are fabs that give you boards for pennies or even assemble the whole thing on a hobbyist's budget, there are cheap off-the-shelf dev boards that you can use as a base for your first designs, there are tools that verify your designs and can autoroute simple things, there are component libraries... I have just went through my first PCBs recently and it's incredible how approachable it became. Merely a decade ago we had to print, etch and drill a PCB ourselves for a group project as anything else would be way too costly (I worked on software and only watched though :P)
I built custom PCBs for a Halloween costume a few years back. Fairly simple board, but that’s ideal for a first PCB. I installed KiCAD on a Monday, finished the design, ordered boards the next day, and they worked on the first spin. (I’d already bread-boarded everything previously, so this was just the “create schematic and make boards“ phase.)
If you want to learn how to design PCBs, I think it’s feasible to jump in and just start doing it (assuming you know how to design the circuit you want to put on it).
I once did a board in Fritzing for a client (strange requirement, but they paid my rate!) -- and I realized that it was actually an accessible route for someone that might make one or two very simple PCBs, ever, on their own.
Interesting. Had no idea that Fritzing could even do PCB gerbers. (I'd only played with it once for a few minutes to see how someone else made some pretty wiring diagrams.)
It's not very good at it, and I wouldn't recommend it over more capable options like Kicad, but if all you need is a simple 2-layer PCB to connect a few basic components together, it'll get the job done. The results won't win any design awards, but they'll work.
do you have any recommendations on learning material or youtube channels to get started? its fascinating that you can "program" circuits with logic gates and "import libraries" by simply looking for parts
(That was a newer playlist than the videos I watched, and I think even that playlist is for an older version of KiCAD, but I found that Chris covered the material in a way that resonated with me, without an excessive amount of time-wasting along the way.)
I had taken a digital electronics course in college (I was Mech E, but we could take EE/CS courses if there was space) which is how I got the basics, but that was back when TTL/CMOS and PALs ruled, which isn't exactly the case anymore. Programming circuits in FPGAs is much newer (and by all accounts, easier/nicer).
BUT:
If you're just starting out/don't yet know which part of a soldering iron gets hot, I'd recommend starting with some Arduinos (clones), then probably do some ESP32 using the Arduino IDE (which is awful but easy to get started with), and that will give you more of a grounding (no pun intended) to set you on a good course for figuring out what you want your first PCB to do.
There are a thousand-plus Arduino makers on YouTube. Most are dreadfully slow-paced once you know the basics, but probably OK paced to start. I'd look at Andreas Spiess, the LED content from Dave's Garage, Adafruit's got a bunch of great content out there, Great Scott is good, Dronebot workshop is the Bob Ross of electronics in some ways, or 50 other channels. For more basic EE topics (including things like understanding decoupling caps, etc), Dave Jones at EEVBlog is great (as is the EEVBlog forum).
Having prototyped in both places I’ll make some arguments for. I’ll preface it’s only worth it if you’re beyond the limits of what American facilities can do and it's a step function in workflow and getting setup. There is an acceptable cultural tunnel vision in our field that developed in the 1980s for "how to do things" and hasn't changed much beyond "4 layer pcb on FR4 with surface mount components" - going against that grain requires an interdisciplinary mindset - as in "make a functioning circuit on a piece of toast" level of creativity[1].
If you’re building wearable tech there’s a strong chance you’ll need to make flex pcbs sooner or later. Those are comically cheap in China and stupid expensive stateside.
Especially when you start pushing the boundaries - there’s so much low hanging fruit for experimenting with your PCBs when you’re in the factory making them. Most US manufacturers will only let you use one color for a solder mask. In Shenzhen we pioneered using full RGB to print any graphic on your pcb back in 2017. Even on top of the chips themselves. It’s now pretty easy to source. This is literally just by being on the factory floor and saying “hey can you do step 5 before you do step 4? - we want to take the boards to this other factory across town first” And they say “sure”. Likewise if you want to mount your parts sideways or upside down to save space. Or say, take a literal sea shell through a copper PVD machine and mill away some traces and mount some chips. They do not care and will gladly take your money and make it happen.
One time we couldn’t find a single vendor in the US or Europe who would embed chips in the middle of pcb layers[2]. This was a weekend project for one of our Chinese vendors - who also had never done this but it sounded like fun so she said “no problem”.
Can get turnaround on prototype boards with assembly for free once you have a cm or just $50 if you don’t. One American vendor comically insisted one couldn’t mix flex and rigid boards for one of our designs for less than $10k. In China it cost me $80. Likewise we mounted chips to non-traditional media like credit cards with no sweat.
Any chip we wanted was available through HQB or TaoBao when Digikey was still backed up on Covid.
Test fixtures (the laser cut jigs that you program and test pcbs) are $100. Stateside they were half as useful and $2000.
You’re one blue Buick minivan ride from Guanzhou where all the garments in the world are made. Being at the intersection of these two cities is a strategic advantage.
Cost of living is cheap.
It will make you a better engineer by exposing you to the dirty business of manufacturing first hand. I'll go so bombastically hyperbolic and say not moving to Shenzhen as an EE is like not moving to Nashville as an aspiring country musician.
In China the saying goes “anything is possible, nothing is easy.” I’d mostly agree with this but also point out that price is completely-orthogonal-to-possible in China, absolutely not in the US, and straight up forbidden in Germany.
[1] https://talk.dallasmakerspace.org/t/breadboard-electronics/1...
[2] https://twitter.com/pmg/status/1248148053795540992/photo/1
p.s. If you enjoyed this comment, you may also enjoy my "So you want to start a factory?" reply on a post from a few days ago [3]
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40001222
OSH Park does flex:
https://docs.oshpark.com/services/flex/
For some data, in 2019 about 3 million Americans went to China and the number detained for political reasons (and not working for the US government or journalism) was probably in the single digits?
In the US I've driven about 600,000 miles and been in one traffic accident. In China I've ridden about 30,000 miles and been in 6 traffic accidents.
Plenty of other things people have gone on at length about things that are just different risks in both places.
I figured I was over indexing but it’s nice to hear it directly from someone who knows. Thanks!
I miss Naomi's tweets!
1. Figure out if you can do fewer slow iterations. What's driving the need for a full PCBA run for each iteration? Might be able to split out to rigid assembly and flex for example.
2. Run more experiments in parallel. If you have multiple ideas or variations to test, design them all and fabricate them all. Flex antenna? Make like 30 parametric variations.
If design then becomes the bottleneck, then automate that next.
Then just glomp the flex down to the test PCB with some nice Samtec connectors (you can enough free samples for a small batch of test units even) or an edge connector on the stiffener.
Don't move to Shenzhen. You don't have the social connections for that and it'd just give you a bunch of new problems.
You don't get many engineer hours for $100.
Of course everything is modulo working capital.
[0] https://www.pcbtrain.co.uk/
To answer your specific question, Shenzhen is a good place to work on hardware, but it is not like you just fly in, and people start building for you. Your own lead time (establishing yourself there) will likely be in weeks if not months. This is from my personal experience in Shenzhen and other hardware founders'.
If you want to build the prototype faster, identifying the bottleneck is a great start. Which takes most time? For up to medium complexity, PCB fab (the board itself) is the most time-consuming part. Anything more complex, it could be the SMT assembly. Each part of the entire process can be optimized: PCB fab can be done in-house quick (chemical etching, CNC machining, etc). Assembly can be optimized too (solder reflow oven, solder paste stencils, etc) on a small scale. I would estimate a batch of 5 boards of 50 SMT components each can be produced under 8 active engineer-hours. That's your entire prototype in a work day.
Do you have professional/academic training in electrical engineering? EE is no less complex than CS, and perhaps studying up the entire process will help you identify what's possible and what's the bottleneck.
Far less! That's about how many boards of similar complexity I could hand-stuff and reflow in an hour!
I just don’t think this really is a better way of doing things.
Also, really take a look at JLC's component prices and compare them. Some of their markup, namely for ICs, is borderline criminal.
I find pricing really scattered everywhere. Often mouser and digikey, which others swear by, have worst pricing (and availability). But I think these places are intentionally high on some items to discourage production runs and keep it a prototyping service. Not sure why they care though.
If you’re bootstrapping, find a good quick turn board house and assemble the boards yourself. Get an lga-12 stencil and hot air tools, maybe a benchtop reflow oven.
That seems like a profoundly personal decision that would have more ramifications than you expect.
Breadboarding should be possible, same with soldering together prototype PCBs as long as you're not concerned with wearing the prototype yourself. There's also (albeit expensive) circuit modelling/validation software you could try to use. I don't think many circuit designers have a workflow where they perpetually buy finished prototypes to check if they're working or not, though.
You'll be limited to single or double sided, without vias but considering its rapid prototyping, these are the compromises to be had.
You could always try CNCing prototypes but this is fraught with trouble. Fiber lasers offer the simplicity, repeatability and speed that normal laser cuters, but with metal.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoYcjyghDx4
I usually get boards right first time now. But it took me 2 years to get there.
Hm... my experience with JLCPCB is that I get 7-10 days iterations from sending my gerbers to getting my boards in SF Bay Area. Still long, but much shorter than your experience.
Is it shipping, PCB manufacturing or PCB assembly that takes so much time?
If you have to move, move to a place near the start of your DHL driver's route as that can make the difference between 9am and 4pm delivery (and that goes for RS too).
If you can afford the time, effort, and expense needed to move to China, maybe you should look into working with a local board shop that could provide more rapid turnaround.
The best way to improve your development time is by doing fewer iterations. Often easier said than done, but you should be designing for test and rework and thoroughly reviewing your designs before submission. You said you're making flex PCBs -- have you considered doing fast-turnaround prototypes on rigid PCB to make sure your electrical design is good? What kind of problems are you having that are forcing you to do extra prototyping runs?
Yep we've been optimising to reduce reruns, but the time spent doing so + the lead time is super frustrating. Standard engineering woes I suppose...
Hardware has an enormous set of things that cost money to surmount. Packaging, testing, certifications, etc. If chunks of $2K matter, you're never getting over the next hurdles.
Hardware isn't software. It isn't cheap.
I do a LOT of hardware and the difference between $200 and $2000 matters a lot to me.
Look at the BeatBuddy. It's one of the most successful projects to come out of the whole crowdfunded hardware thing.
Look at how much money he raised and then how much more money he needed in order to get it finished and how long it took.
If $2K vs $200 prototypes matter to you when building a hardware product, you're in deep, deep trouble.
This kind of situation is burned in to my psyche. [1]
One thing I learned is how one might bootstrap hardware on the cheap properly. You can’t launch until your product is perfect and you are actually ready to scale and you have to be willing to charge the right amount on your kickstarter.
So you have to know what you are doing, but I believe a cheap bootstrapped hardware product can be built and launched pre-funding and lead to success. Of course it’s difficult but we all know hardware is hard.
There’s a lot of creative people out there who can’t afford $2000 prototype batches and I want to see what they’re building. The point is, don’t panic-launch early. That’s an excellent way to fail in a very painful way. But that’s orthogonal to how much budget you have. Even a well funded project can launch too soon.
[1] http://www.tlalexander.com/business/
You should be able to buy quite a few local turns for the price it would cost for you to spend time in Shenzhen.
Unless you're Chinese is very good or you have a trusted local contact, you're not likely to benefit much from heading to Shenzhen in person.
I feel like something might be slightly wrong here. Are you iterating because you haven't finalized the core innovative tech? Can you develop that first, on breadboards or with lab bench equipment?
Are you iterating because of minor aesthetic tweaks? Can you just make one PCB with LEDs in all the places you might want them, turn off the unneeded ones in software, then leave them out of the final BOM?
Are there just straight up mistakes, that could be fixed with slower iteration?
Maybe it's just that I've never quite made it to the level of career success where there's a budget and time for this kind of iteration, but I still think something could improve.
If you just need a lot of unique double-sided boards to play around with in "alpha" and you can wait longer for the "beta" boards from your supplier, you can use several different small scale processes to accomplish that, such as photoresist, milling or printing.
PCBWay can ship bare boards by noon the day after you order them if you pay the $99 to rush the order. Much cheaper than moving to Shenzhen.
Do you need your prototypes to be on flex PCBs? If you can get the electronics ironed out on FR4 you're going to save a lot of time and money on prototype revisions.
If you're waiting for JLCPCB to assemble all your boards for you you're slowing your process way down. Pay for 2-3 day processing at PCBWay and then assemble in-house. If you can prototype on FR4, PCBWay can literally manufacture the boards overnight and DHL them to you before noon the next day.
It's been a couple decades since I was involved in the H/W business, but there are usually tricks you can use to assemble even very fine pin-pitch devices in your kitchen. Heat gun, microscope, etc. I'm guessing there are 100 YouTube videos on this. Assemblers will tell you it needs ZYX special machine that only they have, but actually you can do it yourself, albeit slowly and with defects here and there.
Back when, there were decent PCB houses in the UK (up in the midlands typically, not near London). Perhaps they're all out of business now but you might go looking for one of them vs back and forth to Asia for prototypes.
Edit: a quick search suggests that there are many UK manufacturers still alive. E.g. [Forward, Newberry, Leicester, Stevenage]circuits.
For the parts with pins you can't reach with a probe, be sure to leave a way to test connectivity of the pins with a DMM. For the super tiny parts with the hidden pads, I like to have a series resistor that I can remove, and then use a DMM to check that you can find the ESD diodes on each pin of the package.
OTOH, most of the stuff can be and should be prototyped on standard rigid boards.
For standard 2L rigid boards:
If you work in 1-week cycles, you can usually send a PCB out on Thursday or Friday and have it in your hand on Monday or Tuesday to assemble and test. About $40-$100 per round.
If that's not fast enough, a domestic fab shop that can do 1 day turn on bare boards for not terrible pricing - about $150-$200 per round (unless you can will-call at the dock). 2 or 3 day with soldermask/silkscreen will probably be around $300-$500 per round.
Prices are rough estimates off the top of my memory from the shops I've used.
The equipment isn't expensive and you don't need much labor. I bet a 2-3 week wait costs you a lot more than a part time assembly tech.
None of the engineers that I've talked to have been impressed with the current state of automated design or layout tools.
I just want an easy way to get into PCB design but there is just so much learning curve
There really isn't these days. There's KiCad and LibrePCB, there are fabs that give you boards for pennies or even assemble the whole thing on a hobbyist's budget, there are cheap off-the-shelf dev boards that you can use as a base for your first designs, there are tools that verify your designs and can autoroute simple things, there are component libraries... I have just went through my first PCBs recently and it's incredible how approachable it became. Merely a decade ago we had to print, etch and drill a PCB ourselves for a group project as anything else would be way too costly (I worked on software and only watched though :P)
If you want to learn how to design PCBs, I think it’s feasible to jump in and just start doing it (assuming you know how to design the circuit you want to put on it).
What Fritzing has going for it is that it is very simple.
Think of it like firing up Notepad when you just need to print a few words on to a sheet of paper, while everyone else is using Word.
I wouldn't recommend it for anything beyond maybe one maybe two DIPs and some surrounding passives and a few headers/connectors.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVhWh3AsXQs&list=PLy2022BX6E...
(That was a newer playlist than the videos I watched, and I think even that playlist is for an older version of KiCAD, but I found that Chris covered the material in a way that resonated with me, without an excessive amount of time-wasting along the way.)
I had taken a digital electronics course in college (I was Mech E, but we could take EE/CS courses if there was space) which is how I got the basics, but that was back when TTL/CMOS and PALs ruled, which isn't exactly the case anymore. Programming circuits in FPGAs is much newer (and by all accounts, easier/nicer).
BUT:
If you're just starting out/don't yet know which part of a soldering iron gets hot, I'd recommend starting with some Arduinos (clones), then probably do some ESP32 using the Arduino IDE (which is awful but easy to get started with), and that will give you more of a grounding (no pun intended) to set you on a good course for figuring out what you want your first PCB to do.
There are a thousand-plus Arduino makers on YouTube. Most are dreadfully slow-paced once you know the basics, but probably OK paced to start. I'd look at Andreas Spiess, the LED content from Dave's Garage, Adafruit's got a bunch of great content out there, Great Scott is good, Dronebot workshop is the Bob Ross of electronics in some ways, or 50 other channels. For more basic EE topics (including things like understanding decoupling caps, etc), Dave Jones at EEVBlog is great (as is the EEVBlog forum).