I’ve been making hardware for 20 years. My highest-volume product was Flybrix, a LEGO drone kit manufactured by Seeed and UniPrecision in China and by Sparqtron in Fremont, California. I’d be happy to work with you on a v2 reboot: Flybrix Swarmz, because every American high school needs a drone swarm.
Beyond that, I’ve worked with many domestic suppliers and built ITAR-controlled products as well. Even without owning the production capacity, if you can offer Net 90 on fabrication and extend credit for components--beyond existing DigiKey, Arrow, Mouser, and vendor credit lines--then I can build products and get paid without putting all the capital at risk upfront.
Factoring is expensive, especially against a purchase order rather than an invoice, and I don’t know of anyone offering working-capital credit based solely on an SBIR award.
Credit is what makes the spice flow.
1. Line of credit - we are not billed until we take delivery of tested product. 2. Willingness to handle high mix, low volume products. One product line example: a dozen SKUs with 95-98% parts in common on 2 PCBs, a single set of parts (that we aren't billed for up front) and quoting to build 20 of SKU 1, 50 of SKU 2, 10 of SKU 3, etc. without charging 2-3x the price.
We manufacture in the research / test equipment / defense space and I've heard similar things from other small hardware companies that are like us.
I recently priced out getting a PCB done in China and its insanely cheap. My design isnt complicated, a few ICs, a few connectors, an a dozen or so passives. PCB manufacturing, parts, and soldering/assembly is on the order of $10-20 total per board and that is with zero volume discounts. The parts alone would cost that much in the US, and I suspect the sort of companies that you contract out to also aren't really interested in tiny orders so they would probably quote huge setup fees (looks like your average order so far is ~$7000).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berry_Amendment
More specifically there are a number of new wide-spanning bans on import of mainland china made drone components such as flight controller boards, ESCs, power distribution boards, motors.
The definition of "Blue UAS" pre-dates recent more aggressive changes made by the current US executive branch of the government, but is still relevant:
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=blue+UAS+...
One example I could offer is APD, the ESC manufacturer in Australia. They sell ESCs used both in the commercial cinema/filming industry (big quads and coaxial octos carrying RED Komodo size cameras), but also for defense...
2) What they already are good at they'll continue to improve at, because of domain knowledge & ecosystem
3) The reason they are ahead in the first place is labor cost & the QOL workers will tolerate (and intentional government investment)
4) The only way around this is for the US to invest into robotics (labor) & subsidize american manufacturing (ecosystem)
That hasn't been accurate in a decade. Chinese labor costs have been higher than Mexico since before Covid. They have more efficient firms, business processes and so much more. The parenthesized "(and intentional government investment)" is related to how they developed nimbler systems, but ignores the totality of industrial policy.
We have two options, give up and allow China to control all production, or start the hard battle to improve manufacturing here.
But to (very slightly!) paraphase you, you think it's important to focus on drones/defense and other nationalist areas where the future is canted toward you, and while that is not an area I'd enjoy working in myself (no personal judgement on you, but I'd rather spend my life doing things other than conflict and war), that is clearly what you know to be your first-rank business chance.
Also, I did mention back in 2020 that drones are the only practical type of robotics compared to others, although I meant for good purposes not how they are used right now.
If they had a fast production run in they could extend to 24 hours operation and triple base capacity.
They did a fair bit of TH though which was manually stuffed and wave soldered which could slow stuff down considerably.
It’s not like PCB boards in the defense industry are somehow special, though they probably should be.
I would disagree? Look at Helsing, the german manufacturer of loitering munitions, and its direct competitors who are trying hard to get per-unit costs way down. Without even mentioning the myriad of Ukrainian manufacturers who are building cheap and cheerful things under $10,000 per unit (or even under $2500 per unit). There is a very real push within all NATO militaries now to basically copy many of the capabilities the Ukrainians have built in the last 4-5 years.
Not saying that we won't still have lots of huge dollar items and massive programs like the AGM-158 JASSM, but there's a reason why the US paid a company to basically clone the Shahed-136 as the LUCAS at under $50k per unit.
The bottleneck in assembling a PCB is usually component sourcing. My product was not the most complicated, and even then, to assemble in Shenzhen, China, it often took a few weeks to get all the components.
The core issue here is that latency is determined by the outliers. Assembly can't start until you have all units, and the hardest to source one is the bottleneck!
To me, the core innovation here is to plug into the design software to source these long tail items ahead of time.
It's pretty interesting that usually when the PCB is being designed, the designer has no awareness of supply chain. They'll bake in a chip that has a 4 week lead time without even realizing it, when a similar component might be one cent more expensive with much faster lead time.
Currently there's a wall between the designer and the manufacturer, which hurts lead times massively, we're aiming to bring that down.
Also, for slow old industries (like Automotive), you'd likely need a fast way to coordinate NDAs just to get an engineer to be allowed to share the design files with you.
Quick turn in the US is 2 to 4 days.[1] That's expensive but available.
[1] https://www.surfacemountsolutions.com/services/quick-turn-pc...
> When you look at the full process, you realize that assembly is not the bottleneck.
I’m confused, which one is it?
I assume the growth story isn’t great when you factor in the non-automatable tasks and big capital outlays, so your product leaves that to existing CMs and scales the software stack instead?
Do you see this product as being beneficial to subcontractors (presumably still doing the 90% manual work), or does this legitimately reduce the actual workload/costs at the production level?
This is something that takes real expertise though, kind of a moonshot for an inexperienced team unfortunately. Would be cool if had mission driven backers otherwise will just end up being hobbyist material. Relying on defense (bubble?) gives at least some breathing room as not actually competing against china for better prices.
We believe starting with defense will give us capabilities that we can then bring to other verticals, and will help us make optimizations that bring the cost down. It's impossible to beat china off the bat though.
When my pal’s raw PCB company went out of business, you could buy a finished PCB from China for less than the cost of FR4, which also came from China. How do you intend to address this supply chain risk? Once China raises your cost of raw PCBs your price argument no longer works.
Also, are you sourcing components from US sources or using China? Recently I stopped purchasing from Digikey and Mouser because their services are much slower than they used to be, and I now get components much faster and for lower cost in China.
> How do you intend to address this supply chain risk?
Haven't yet figured it out. Options are opening bare board fabs or partnering with US fabs and panelizing orders.
I noticed your KiCAD plugin there too. I am super curious to see what your workflow and pricing looks like. There are definitely times when the 7-day turnaround will be a game changer for us.
I guess one gate there: do you ship to Canada? We do have a US branch that could do the export-import for us, but way easier if we don’t have to route it through them as far as end-to-end delivery time goes.
Anything available in the EU?
We're trying to make electronic manufacturing (PCB & PCBA) simple, affordable and speedy. A high grade of automation allows prices starting at 12.20 Euros including VAT and shipping. Our software platform is completely built in-house, including state-of-the-art ODB++ integration. Let me know if you've any questions, happy to answer.
Edit: https://aisler.net/en/partners/librepcb
LibrePCB from Aisler seems to be most like jlcpcb.
You do pay a lot more though due to industrial regulations. Only lead free solder is allowed in the EU, and chemical regulations and waste disposal laws will drive up the price a lot compared to similar services in China and the USA.
Your timing could not have been better. Yesterday I was talking to a friend about starting a company to tap into the domestic solar inverter market that is about to have a healthy growth due to FCC banning foreign made inverters with radios.
We are planning to build it around STM32 or ESP32 with US parts sourcing and manufacturing.
We are in the project scoping phase. Hopefully we can get something going soon.
- Sunstone
- Advanced Assembly
- Sierra Circuits
- Osh Park
They all have ~7 day lead time or shorter. It all comes down to choosing simple processes with generic parts.
Do you have your own machines or just outsource these orders and ensure the supply chain stuff moves along quickly?
I like the idea, more heads in the game makes it cheaper for everyone, but this seems like another hat in the ring.
The only domestic drivers for board fab and assembly are autmotive and defense. They already have their supply chains running.
You're right that automotive and defense make up most of the demand. We also see demand from teams who can't use JLC/PCBway due to the difficulty of cosigning parts outside their catalogue.
We however plan to own the full stack, from design to board bring-up and testing. We believe that design is becoming commoditized with AI tools, but these systems need manufacturers that are involved from the start to bring down lead times.
sounds like your goal is to be an embedded systems job shop based on AI instead of engineers? What's your value over existing AI-accelerated job shops that leverage existing quick-turn domestic PCBA suppliers? as a not-so-random example, https://otekengineer.com/
We don't plan to do the design ourselves, we realize that our users will be using AI design tools that need to be integrated with the factory. We will build that link.
it's not clear to me what the interface to the user is, or who the user is
Releasing detailed capability docs on our website today or tomorrow.
> scalable business beyond being yet another Oshkosh
OSH Park is fabulous for what they do, but they don’t do PCBA.
I’m not OP, but I think I can provide some insight anyway:
> Outside of targeting specific sectors e.g. defence, how else do you plan to remain competitive globally
I think that trying to be competitive globally would be a dumb play for these folks, they’re optimizing for something different.
Defence is one sector where this model works, no doubt. But there’s a bigger market that doesn’t have a great domestic story yet (I’m in Canada and work with a variety of CA and US PCB/PCBA houses): fast-turn low-volume PCBA, either for prototype iteration or for industrial one-offs. While I work on a specific “sort of defence adjacent” project right now, my past consulting work would’ve benefitted quite a bit from being able to turn around full PCBA work in 7 days. Macrofab end-to-end was usually 3-4 weeks and cutting that iteration time down would’ve had a solid effect on reducing project timelines if it could’ve happened for a reasonable price. There are domestic manufacturers who have optimized for that… but the price was not something my clients were willing to pay to accelerate their projects. If this hits a sweet spot there… that’ll be really exciting for me.
(I’ve already sent it to my team to start looking at)
> scalable business beyond being yet another Oshkosh
Yes, OSH Park is awesome. They could add PCBA, but we see the long-term value in owning the full stack (from design to testing of finished boards). Stops us from having a knife fight all the way down.
There are a number of small but very specialized US based defense sub-component manufacturers that support 15 to 20 people with very good paying jobs, building stuff exactly like NDAA compliant UAS flight controllers. Not everything needs to become gargantuan to be a success.
There can also be very good money in manufacturing specialized things that require the work to be done by US citizens with a TS or TS/SCI clearance if you can get into that market.