> We have a small pick-and-place machine/etc setup
I've been in at the ground floor of a number of successful hardware startups. One of which had a number of pick and place machines, IR reflow ovens, and all sorts of related manufacturing equipment. So I'm quite familiar with the field.
My very simple, very emphatic advice about a "pick-and-place" machine is: NO NO NO NO NO, a thousand times N0!!!
Maybe it's something you have to do in NZ. But in some other parts of the world, if I blindfolded you and let you stumble around you would probably trip over a pick-and-place machine in about 5 minutes! They're everywhere.
In other words, unless your primary purpose is to bootstrap yourself into being a contract manufacturer, you have absolutely no business owning your own pick-and-place machine.
A design as simple as yours could be manufactured by almost anyone in the world. It's so simple that most of them could do it in their sleep.
Just contract the manufacturing out and be done with it.
Your quixotic effort at stuffing your own boards reminds me of the perhaps apocryphal story of, in the 1970's, WDC designing a chipset that was used in the DEC LSI-11 minicomputer.[1] They had a fab, and in one week they could make enough chips for DEC to sell minicomputers for a year. "Okay, the LSI-11 chips are done. Now WTF do we do with this fab for the other 51 weeks of the year???"
Yeah, in the old days IC fabs were cheap enough that everyone and his brother owned one. And they had large fixed costs. And unless they were utilized around the clock they lost money.
To a large extent stuff like pick-and-place machines are the same. Sure it's orders of magnitude cheaper. But still, maybe it takes you a week or two to build some of your boards. What do you do with your equipment for the other 50 weeks of the year? Is that the business you want to be in?
Of course, if that is the business you want to be in, then OK.
It really depends on the demand, I do plan on doing a small run myself - as I said as a kickstarter premium - that lets me test out the manufacturing support hardware (board test and programming jigs) and provide boards really quickly -if the volumes are high enough then yes, we're off to Shenzhen (I was there in May, I'll be back in December)
We have a CHEAP (~$8k) P&P machine, it's great for doing prototypes (you load it with the 10 most common components and hand place the rest) and VERY small production runs (10-20 panelised boards is probably a limit)
I've been in at the ground floor of a number of successful hardware startups. One of which had a number of pick and place machines, IR reflow ovens, and all sorts of related manufacturing equipment. So I'm quite familiar with the field.
My very simple, very emphatic advice about a "pick-and-place" machine is: NO NO NO NO NO, a thousand times N0!!!
Maybe it's something you have to do in NZ. But in some other parts of the world, if I blindfolded you and let you stumble around you would probably trip over a pick-and-place machine in about 5 minutes! They're everywhere.
In other words, unless your primary purpose is to bootstrap yourself into being a contract manufacturer, you have absolutely no business owning your own pick-and-place machine.
A design as simple as yours could be manufactured by almost anyone in the world. It's so simple that most of them could do it in their sleep.
Just contract the manufacturing out and be done with it.
Your quixotic effort at stuffing your own boards reminds me of the perhaps apocryphal story of, in the 1970's, WDC designing a chipset that was used in the DEC LSI-11 minicomputer.[1] They had a fab, and in one week they could make enough chips for DEC to sell minicomputers for a year. "Okay, the LSI-11 chips are done. Now WTF do we do with this fab for the other 51 weeks of the year???"
Yeah, in the old days IC fabs were cheap enough that everyone and his brother owned one. And they had large fixed costs. And unless they were utilized around the clock they lost money.
To a large extent stuff like pick-and-place machines are the same. Sure it's orders of magnitude cheaper. But still, maybe it takes you a week or two to build some of your boards. What do you do with your equipment for the other 50 weeks of the year? Is that the business you want to be in?
Of course, if that is the business you want to be in, then OK.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Digital#1970s