Cloud-Based Circuit Board Assembly

http://www.worthingtonassembly.com/2014/03/31/circuithub-partnership/

by seddona • 12 years ago

66 52 12 years ago

pjc50• 12 years ago

"Cloud based" is a little misleading, but the service they're offering is a very good idea. Batch PCB services have existed for a while and several have settled out as popular choices. Now the hacker / small product dev community can have suitably downscaled assembly services too.

Hopefully the part standardisation will also include footprints for the PCB tools; setting that up is a common pain.

EChrisDenney10• 12 years ago

"Cloud based" was used because we just couldn't think of a better term.

Footprints for part standardization is absolutely the goal. If we get a known footprint then we can guarantee a better yield because we know it's reliable. How many 0603 footprints do you think exist out there? How many times have people created that? So much redundant effort...

z3phyr• 12 years ago

Though not directly related, ideas like this will inevitibly lead to the mainstream robotics era. Even today, it is very hard to even 'get' the right components for your design. If this works, then the 'first entry' barrier to the field will be removed, and it will be easier for someone to work on the ZX or Apple II of the robots.

vonmoltke• 12 years ago

I think the real first entry barrier is parts for protoyping. Its not as severe, since you can make packaging compromises on brassboard prototypes, but some parts are simply unavailable because manufacturers won't sell them to distributors and insist on NDAs and business plans to even get samples.

This service will help tremendously when it is time to jump from brassboard to final CCA. However, it is not feasible for most brassboard development because it requires redesigning and blue-wiring boards on the fly. The engineer working on the prototype needs parts on hand for this.

cottonseed10• 12 years ago

Based on my own design attempts, I think two things are holding back open source hardware design: (1) assembling and reflowing complex boards with parts in small, modern packages (0402 or 0201, QFN, fine-pitch BGAs) and (2) modern CAD features like length matching, differential-pair and multi routing and impedance matching: all the things you'd need to design a fast, wide DRAM interface, for example. (I know some off these features are available in free packages, but IMHO they're just not there yet.) These would open up the kind of designs that are currently only available to elite designers with Altium, things like the RaspberryPi, BBB or bunnie's Novena.

I built my own oven and had reasonable luck with two-sided boards with small packages (e.g. 0402) and large 1mm pitch BGAs, but I haven't been able to consistently reflow QFNs. However, it is expensive, time consuming, not buying in bulk kills you, and for complex boards with expensive parts, yield becomes a significant cost factor. I'll be interested to see what their costs are like. A service like this could be transformational.

seddona3• 12 years ago

Andrew, co-founder @ https://circuithub.com here.

Thanks for the support. I agree completely, really simple stuff is 'quite' well catered for already. Ultimately if your board is really basic and you only need one or two you can do it at home.

The problem is if you want to do something cutting edge or even mid-range it get's really expensive/complex. We're hoping to help with that.

stox• 12 years ago

Best wishes, and I hope you are a roaring success!

EChrisDenney10• 12 years ago

It's hard to know which is the best option, build a brand new EDA tool and provide this service, or stand on the shoulders of giants in the past. CircuitHub has decided to go the route of allowing you to use your EDA of choice. Right now they support Altium, Eagle, and KiCAD.

Reflow is tough. Getting the profile right so as not to damage components is a real pain without very expensive equipment.

wyager2• 12 years ago

I think it's incredibly important that we get a new FOSS EDA tool with a focus on modularity and usability. I have a really hard time using KiCad because it's so clunky compared to Eagle. The UI for Eagle is better, and the design flow is much easier (for me).

My dream EDA tool is a highly extensible, scriptable, and modular core performing stuff like routing, impedance matching, DRC, etc. and then have that wrapped by a nice Eagle-like UI.

sokoloff3• 12 years ago

FCC certification are also a roadblock of sorts for product development.

In theory, I should do testing for verification and or "declaration of conformity" for any run over 5 devices where I have a clock over 1.705 MHz for a battery-only device or over 9 kHz (yes, KILO-Hertz) for a digital device that plugs in, even to recharge batteries.

UL (or equivalent) testing/listing isn't required by law, but represents additional possible expenses if you want to sell to consumers.

It's already pretty daunting, tech-wise, to make the leap from "I have an idea" to "works on my bench on protoboard" to "works on my custom-designed PCB", but at least the out-of-pocket costs and risks are low there.

It's a much greater leap, cost-wise, to get the FCC paperwork in order, even for "unintentional radiators", to say nothing of trying to get a BTLE or wifi device certified.

tcas4• 12 years ago

BTLE and WiFi are getting a bit easier thankfully. I know the TI CC3000 doesn't require intentional emitter testing if the recommended design is followed which saves a _lot_ of money and time. [0]

Agreed that FCC unintentional emitter testing can be a pain, however, unless you're doing something very fancy it's not that hard to achieve, and it's not super expensive if you just need a low frequency unintentional testing.

I'm not a lawyer, but I think you can self declare as well for unintentional emitters, just if you get caught the penalties are much stricter than if you can prove you went through a lab.

[0] http://processors.wiki.ti.com/index.php/CC3000_Product_Certi...

cottonseed10• 12 years ago

You're totally right. Obviously, I've never gotten that far along.

cottonseed10• 12 years ago

So there's a question. How do you reimagine certification testing to cut the cost 10x.

tcas4• 12 years ago

QFNs and most reflows are tricky as well, since it requires you to also design the board properly to reflow correctly. For example, if the QFN has a large ground pad in the middle, putting unmasked vias in the middle can cause solder to get sucked down to the other side. To the best of my knowledge, there isn't a great handbook that explains all this, since it crosses a bunch of fields (the electrical design says you will want a few vias in the pad to lower impedance, while the manufacturing might say otherwise [0] or will be able to do it no problem).

In regards to memory and more advanced stuff, the beaglebone/raspberry pi/other system on modules are great for the hobbyist and low volume production, since making what is essentially a computer can be very difficult. It might work on the first spin, but hard to spot issues might occur if the power / grounding isn't good enough, or if there are noise or other signal integrity issues.

[0] http://i.screamingcircuits.com/docs/Via_In_Pad_Guidelines.pd...

EChrisDenney10• 12 years ago

Hi tcas, Chris from Worthington Assembly here.

We found that when we switched to our super fancy high end reflow oven (that's literally 15 feet long) all those sorts of issues kind of went away. Stencil design has a lot to do with it, believe it or not. Too much paste on the center pad and the QFN just floats up and the joints never get connected. So yeah, if CircuitHub just has a footprint for QFN's that's known to work, you can eliminate a lot of that type of research.

lgeek2• 12 years ago

QFNs and most reflows are tricky as well

I've now manually soldered two dozen or so 0.5mm pitch QFN chips without a single failure. To be honest, I'm somewhat surprised myself. I'm using the footprint recommended by the manufacturer, NXP, which has small vias on the edges of the center pad. Since the center pad is VSS, at least one via would be required anyway.

My process is quite simple:

1) I use a soldering iron to tin all the pads except the large one in the center.

2) I apply no clean flux to the freshly tinned pads. If I wouldn't be too lazy to make a stencil I could probably skip these two steps.

3) I apply a blob of solder paste to the center pad.

4) I place the chip.

5) I reflow the whole board with a hot air soldering station. After the solder has melted, I tap the center of the chip to make sure all the pads on the chip have made contact with the pads on the board.

I actually prefer QFNs over QFPs because on QFPs it's really easy to get solder bridges - easy to fix, but more finicky than preparing QFNs in the first place.

I realise this doesn't really apply to manufacturing, but automated manufacturing already has the processes to deal with QFNs.

iandanforth• 12 years ago

I feel this kind of service is extraordinarily important. As a software person who's gotten into hardware and robotics I am continually frustrated by the tyranny of choice in electronics. There are so many ways to accomplish a goal and it's so expensive to do things wrong that a huge amount of my time is spent researching parts rather than building things out of those parts.

The more companies like this develop a clean pallet of available parts (even if the excuse is price control) the better! While I'm sure many people will be quick to point out that solid EE is hard for good reasons, I think we're light-years from the point where we can say "we can't make useful prototyping any easier."

Perhaps this exists and I haven't found it, but I'd love not to have to even think about parts and assembly. I want to write a clean high-level spec for the functions of a board and have part choice, fab, and assembly taken care of for me. I see services like this and ciruits.io as great stepping stones on the way to that goal.

seddona3• 12 years ago

Thanks, we started this due to the enormous amount of 'grunt' work involved in getting hardware into production. The essence is this;

You as a designer probably have a pretty loose spec for a 3.3V regulator, why not just have the factory tell you the one everybody else is using and better yet here's the symbol and footprint.

We were careful not to restrict people though, you can use any parts but we try and gently nudge you onto the more popular stuff!

hershel4• 12 years ago

The part rank is a very good idea. Is there a place we see part rank before starting a design ?

HeyLaughingBoy• 12 years ago

How much of this is simply because of hobby-level or inexperienced builders, though?

When I was a full time EE, answers to questions like this were just a phone call away. The part manufacturer's FAE (Field Applications Engineer) were happy to answer questions like that ("what's a cheap, low-dropout 3.3V regulator that can handle 100mA and won't be on allocation anytime soon?") and would be around the next day with samples.

Even for our tiny company, we got excellent service. Hell, I had FAE's visiting me when I was working out of my apartment! Has that changed these days?

cottonseed10• 12 years ago

I like browsing through other people's designs just to see what parts they use. When I see something useful, or something that comes up again and again, I add it to the list of things to consider in the future. Yeah, it's a huge pain.

EChrisDenney10• 12 years ago

Hi iandanforth, I'm Chris, CTO for Worthington Assembly

Let's hope they are. It's a ton of work to even make this one little stepping stone but we hope it's headed in that direction as well.

ErikRogneby• 12 years ago

This is great. I look forward to trying it out.

Does anyone know of a repository of open designs? Kind of like an http://www.thingiverse.com/ for PCBs?

seddona3• 12 years ago

checkout https://circuithub.com/explore

cottonseed10• 12 years ago

Hey seddona, how do you parse Altium files? Did you reverse engineer it? Do they have documentation or a dev kit/API? Thanks!

nnnnni• 12 years ago

Has anyone used this to make the board for a reprap?

LandoCalrissian• 12 years ago

This is one of the better ideas I have seen on here in a while. Definitely makes the hardware space far more approachable than in the past. I can't wait to try it out!

EChrisDenney10• 12 years ago

LandoCalrissian, this is Chris from Worthington Assembly. So many Star Wars quotes to reference. So little time.

We hope so. Have you signed up yet? All you need is a Dropbox account. No CC or anything like that.

sciguy77• 12 years ago

Using CircuitHub’s “Part Rank” the community decides which parts should be used. When all of the designers are using the same 10K resistor or Atmel chip, we can buy 10,000 of them instead of just 6 for your project alone.

YES! As someone who has bootstrap designed many PCB boards I am still skeptical about how cheap this will actually be, but I'm interested. I've generally kept costs around $100 per prototype board by using OSH Park to make the boards, Pololu for the stencil, and assembly by myself and a toaster oven. The downside of course is that this way takes more time and effort on my part. It would take a HUGE price drop to be cheaper than one night of my time + $100 + 2 week wait for PCBs though.

EChrisDenney10• 12 years ago

sciguy77, Chris from Worthington Assembly here.

We're interested too. Using this technique though, we've already saved customers thousands (literally thousands, just on one job) vs. quoting it independently. Try uploading your project to see how it compares. No CC or any like that required.

chm• 12 years ago

Hey, if someone working for CircuitHub is here:

Your homepage [1] has a typo. Scaleable should read Scalable.

[1] https://circuithub.com/

theunis• 12 years ago

Thanks! (Theunis from CircuitHub)

Cloud-Based Circuit Board Assembly

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