This is painful. They got a used solder mask holder, a Lumen pick and place machine, a bunch of old Siemens feeders, and a small automatic reflow oven. All these tools needed major work. Everything with firmware needed firmware mods. Everything else needed assembly or major cleaning. Everything needed adjustment. They had to 3D print their own solder paste squeegee. They're six months in and still trying to produce one simple board.
I've been down this road of populating a surface mount board. There is a minimum size for a practical board-stuffing operation, and they are below it. They are using prototype techniques for 100 units or so, not techniques that scale.
Surface mount soldering requires applying hot air in a very controlled way, with the temperature ramping up, holding at the high temp for a few seconds, and then ramping down. On a small scale, you have a programmable oven which tries to do that. Those always have heat distribution problems. For production, you have a tunnel oven, with about six sections at different temperatures and a chain conveyor to take the boards through the tunnel. With the tunnel oven, you let the whole thing warm up and stabilize, and when all zones are at the right temperature, you can repeatably solder boards successfully.
They're using a hobbyist-grade pick and place machine. Slow, but cheap. Plus the software isn't ready for prime time. They looked at a used production machine. Runs Windows XP and wouldn't fit through the door. Rejected that.
They're about EUR 30,000 into this, not counting their own labor.
This approach is not going to revive electronics in Europe.
Learning by mistake isn't painful; it is how you learn best. I keep iterating on that point to my children. But that isn't merely what these guys were doing. They were doing more, since they were documenting their (expensive!) learning process. Documenting your learning process and sharing it freely is allowing others to not make the very same mistakes, but to do better instead. It lowers the barrier of entry for competition, taunting competition who hopefully also share back. Like many talks on 39c3 (esp. the lightning talks), it is an invitation to collaboration.
Sharing the documentation is also an act of compassion, and very much in the spirit of FOSS & OSHW.
This talk was hands down my favourite talk (and not even in a subject I am familiar with!). These two guys shared a lot of info in little time, and were very humble. It was also a presentation which contains a political component (Europe's lack of independence, specifically hardware-wise), but it managed to avoid that discussion. Why, because it is assumed the attending public shares the same value. Instead, it maintains focus on the taking action part. I am not sure everyone here shares said value, but I do, and for whatever it is worth: USA is in a similar boat.
Hey! Talk speaker here, thank you so much for these words.
This is exactly what we wanted to convey: Let's act, our way isnt the best way, but it is the path we're on, and there is little we can do on our own to get to another path.
We don't want to build the european JLCPCB, we don't even know what our company will be in 20 years if it still exists.
What we want is to give knowledge and see more people get into the business of electronics. We also want to give meaningfull jobs to engineers and factory workers which will eventually join us.
We are not going to change the world, I would settle for selling 1 unit of 1 well made product to 1 customer. I would settle for giving one person a job that they love working with cool guys to make electronics. I would settle for the ability to pay my rent from this, from bringing value in the world.
Just curious, is it possible to get some basic production "kit" from China and go from there? I'd assume it's going to be new and cheaper and more "modular", and you only rely them on these basic items. I have never been into electronics manufacturing so not sure if it makes sense.
You are saying the same thing they said -- it doesn't scale. It's not how you build a large factory. They acknowledge this and pretty quickly move on to say that they are aiming for smaller and sustainable.
They even specifically call out why they chose not to use a conveyor based oven in the video.
Basically they believe they can be price reasonable at small scales, small batches. Build process knowledge and expertise over time, and then incrementally scale up after assessing bottlenecks.
I think the route of local sustainable, grow as needed or collaborate to expand capacity is pretty reasonable.
It's not possible to make a competitively priced product that way.
What are you going to do, sell artisanal circuit boards on Etsy?
Here's a small US-based PCB board and assembly facility in the US, in Hesperia, California.[1]
Looks like it might have 20 to 30 employees from the building picture.
This is probably about as small as a viable business of this type gets. It doesn't have to be done in a huge plant like JLCPCB in Shenzhen.
Here's a company in India, Invariance, which makes low-cost semi-automatic machines to do exactly the same operations 39c3 is doing.[2] They have three machines - a solder paste spreader, a pick and place machine, and a mini tunnel reflow oven. They make all three machines.
These machines intended for small companies who want to assemble their own boards in house. The solder paste spreader is just automated enough to do a consistent job, with pressure and timing controlled. The pick and place machine uses their own feeder design which runs off strips of component tape. The tunnel oven is small, only about a meter long.
That's close to a viable minimum production solution.
39c3 is the conference it is being presented at, not the presenter. 39th Chaos Communication Congress, the annual conference of the Chaos Computer Club.
This is a hacker messing around who is presenting to inspire others and get feedback. Many things presented at Xc3 are wildly impractical, potentially illegal, or not even technical at all and more on the side of activism and policy. Most are interesting and fun, which is the main goal.
That depends on your definition of "competitive", doesn't it?
Being 3x as expensive as China but 0.1x as expensive as current small-scale EU manufacturing can be extremely competitive. Plenty of people looking for <1000 unit runs would be willing to pay extra for a "made in EU" label.
COVID and the supply chain crisis made apparent just how over-reliant we are on Shenzhen and Taiwan for the most basic components. There are several hundred ICs on dozens of circuitboards in every car now that are dumber, slower, and less efficient than a 1990s calculator, that we have lost the ability to produce domestically. These are now bottlenecks to manufacturing in any disruption to world trade.
It doesn't need to be cutting edge, if you have a few board assembly shops and some fabs pumping out small chips in 20-30 year old process nodes it helps the resilience of the economy and geopolitical situation a great deal.
Technically the differentiation isn't cost reduction its in shored manufacturer. That can become an important requirement as firms become more wary of IP theft and other issues.
Besides other than that what can you really differentiate in this field that isn't cost? Its a service that is standardized regardless of country. Maybe you can provide different "styles" of boards (ie. different specs) or improve the entire submit to production pipeline but thats about it.
The pipeline is a massive one - especially for PCBA. Being able to get an instant quote and order in 5 minutes is worth a lot. Nobody wants a 2-week-long back-and-forth with sales and engineering for a basic prototype run.
I don't know how much real innovation can happen there that the Chinese haven't done. In fact the Chinese haven't really innovated, that have optimized existing processes. Think about it: If you break it down: a "2-week-long back-and-forth with sales and engineering for a basic prototype run" is the same stuff happening in the background as the "get an instant quote and order in 5 minutes"...just much faster.
Thats not the innovation I was talking about: Let me give an example. When the Xbox was being developed, there was a push within Microsoft to create a standard CD‑based game console that was a more refined version of the existing competitors. The Xbox team pushed back and said: No, you don't enter a market and just copy the incumbents. You need to do something different and differentiated. So they innovated by adding a hard drive and standard networking to every console. The addition of these components as standard in each console opened up a new paradigm of gaming with Xbox Live and was a different vision compared to what the others were offering at the time. They eventually ended up moving the market in a fundamental way.
Now, going back to manufacturing, how do we translate that to PCB manufacturing? Again, I don’t know how you could possibly truly innovate the pipeline process more than it has already been done. Even just adding an AI‑handled pipeline process, it's just further optimizing what has already been done. There may or may not be an opportunity to truly move the market but if there is, then thats something the West can do to really compete.
>I don’t know how you could possibly truly innovate the pipeline process more than it has already been done
There are things China does well, things the US does well, and a lot of people building stuff for fun. Yet doing business in North America can be just as challenging for different "reasons". =3
>Consumer hardware like the iPhone would not do well when the next model is 20% slower with a 35% retail price reduction.
Yes, American companies know this already: Apple managed to ship $1000 phone even the Chinese coveted for a long while and their innovation at the time was Face ID and the applications it enabled like Memoji.
Just improving spec sheets is a race to 0 profits.
>Don't worry about it... =3
There has got to be something that can move the market as relying on China is just a mirage anyway. Those demographic issues will catch up to everyone eventually. Im not knowledgeable enough to know what this magical innovation will be. (or else I'd pull my savings and get into the business :P )
>Just improving spec sheets is a race to 0 profits.
If and only if people chase the low-margin markets. Some people want the best value they can afford, and the ones that don't usually are not worth the sales effort.
Note, most current Apple products are just information-appliances tied to their media service businesses.
>Im not knowledgeable enough to know what this magical innovation will be
Whatever a unique imagination comes up with will probably be just as good or better. Don't worry about it... =3
I think you're doing Apple products a big disservice. This is a company that produces a lot of very polished products that don't directly tie into the services, for example the AirPods and the Apple Watch and even their computers continue to drag the industry kicking and screaming into some sort of minimum expectation of performance and efficiency. If you look at just their phone or their Apple TV products, fine that makes sense.
But even if you do just look at their phone,tablet and TV sales, it's not entirely a great argument because Apple is not actually prioritizing services as much as their hardware and although those services constitute a decent percentage of their sales, they are still way below the hardware sales. So you could argue that their service business is a complement to their excellent hardware.
>Whatever a unique imagination comes up with will probably be just as good or better. Don't worry about it... =3
You seem to have a similar very consistent style of speaking in all your comments. I don't know if I am conversing with an AI or not. If not I apologize for the accusation. Take care for now... =3
>I don't know if I am conversing with an AI or not
I take time to chat with people in good faith, and while I have authored several ML Patents it would be disrespectful to poison discourse with slop.
My point was Apple shifted into an integrated media service business years ago, and few other firms were able to give consumers the same value due to Jobs early work securing a content portfolio. It is not just the gadgets that drive their revenue model.
Ok again, I apologize for the accusation. It is getting more difficult to discern between AI and non-AI and normally I just let it be but the strange pattern I see with your comments made me pause.
I am in agreement with your thesis, im just not convinced that it is their main priority at this time. A company like Sony would also match your description and more so than Apple.
Sony had tried to leverage their Film/TV portfolio in the past with limited success, as they were fixated on selling physical media. Yet in Game publishing, the PS5 has taken a great deal of market share from the Microsoft Xbox new "rental" model from the 1990s.
The schtick for Capitalism is that it is supposed to push all companies to the top of optimal resource production, the place you call the bottom.
Was it always the case that Western Capitalism was about optimising profits for an over-class, the optimising of resources was always just propaganda, or did it once have ethics?
Brands shifted away from garnering customer goodwill, and prioritized shareholder value by siphoning intangible assets accrued over decades of prior works.
There was little utility in judging if it was ethical, but merely to profit by the shortsighted stewards. =3
> Was it always the case that Western Capitalism was about optimising profits for an over-class, the optimising of resources was always just propaganda, or did it once have ethics?
Adam Smith wrote a whole book about ethics.
I actually think the ethical corruption has been very recent and driven by multiple factors, but the most important is the myth that people are rich because they deserve to be, and if they are poor it is because they are stupid or lazy. The rich therefore tend to feel far less noblesse oblige.
I double checked because these were not the prices I had in mind.
After looking through the options, I think that's because the designs I did quotations for had 0.2mm holes. This is standard for Eurocircuits, but high precision for JLCPCB.
Note that to get the price you quoted, you'll get lead in your PCB, and vias that are not plated, but plugged with conductive epoxy. Changing that gets you to $14 for 5 boards, which is still way cheaper than Eurocircuits.
I'll keep that in mind for the next PCB I design: keep holes bigger than 0.3mm if possible.
> It's not possible to make a competitively priced product that way. What are you going to do, sell artisanal circuit boards on Etsy?
10 years ago in the US I met someone who owned a company of about 5 people that he largely built off of the acquisition of a single broken pick-and-place machine which he repaired himself. They applied the solder paste manually and finished the boards in what looked like a toaster-oven. Each production run consisted of around 100 units which were sold at $50 apiece. The company is still in business today, as far as I'm aware.
The commenter above you phrased it well: "Price-reasonable", to us, it's first about breaking even.
I will look into the companies you linked, looks interesting!
Though to give you food for though, I will tell you about a french drone manufacturing company, they manufacture in house, they turn over probably around 10 million € a year.
I know first hand they stencil print around 10k boards a year using a "machine" that is 2x4's from the hardware store, and a credit card :)
Design for manufacturability means you leave tolerance within Factory limits, and your own prototyping process limits.
While an inexpensive PnP machine will do 50k to 80k components/hour. If you have someone doing _any_ task, than add $3 USD * number of operations per unit.
Tech is a low-margin business with a lot of regulations, and should be contracted to a proper facility if making over a few thousand units a month. Tooling up for a production line is almost always a bad idea, as it usually adds additional barriers to a product launch as people get sidetracked. =3
Electronics in Europe is so dead. It is past the point where where it can be revived. One thing is sick overregulation to spin hardware product. Last nail in the coffin today is Cyber Resilience Act. It dwarfs all the regulations before it.
Second thing is talent. People can’t hardware anymore. I mean putting a 0402 capacitor on the printed circuit board is not hard. But doing that in meaningful way gets hard. As a contractor I designed few boards and optimized for production in China. In my dayjob colleagues are stuck in the last century. No recent knowledge about parts, design rules, testing principles… No willingness to learn and talk to Chinese manufacturers about optimization. Just copy paste bad decisions from old boards to new designs.
Honestly I wouldn’t even try to revive anything in Europe. Chinese electronics factories are way too far in the future. The suppliers for my workplace are all stuck in the past. Even the ones with new equipment struggle to use full potential due to worker’s shortage. Which is probably a problem in whole western world. Who wants to be manufacturing technician when you can be lifestyle influencer!?
As other commenters pointed out, the electronics industry is quite big in Europe, on paper it generates a lot of money and sustains a lot of jobs. The issue is a bit more complex, and you point it out when you say people around you are old and old-fashioned.
Like I said in the talk: We used to laugh at the chinese products for how low quality they were 20 years ago, who's laughing now?
I don't believe europeans are unable to turn around this situation in as many years as a matter of fact, it's my core beliefs: That together with other young motivated people we'll build our own little electronics industry for ourselves, among ourselves and people who believe we can one day have theye crazy future factories in Europe.
Yes it's crazy hard, but like you I believe things will get sufficiently bad that more will see that the effort is worth it.
You should check out the 39c3 talk from Kliment, he understands this issue so well, and I'll paraphrase him here: Electronics is dominated by old dudes, the industry is hostile to newcomers, self-taught people, women, and more. But by making an effort to give people who are starting a good experience, we can turn this around.
Honestly there is no worker shortage, in my immediate contacts, I already know 2 or 3 people who are ready to work my production line: They have the smarts, skills, and time. They are unemployed because no one would respect them, and give them a meaningful mission like we would, and it's quite clear this is quite a widespread feeling among people.
> Electronics is dominated by old dudes, the industry is hostile to newcomers, self-taught people, women, and more. But by making an effort to give people who are starting a good experience, we can turn this around.
Completely agree.
Then the Semi industry wonders why they're running out of people
>Then the Semi industry wonders why they're running out of people
Yes but they make up with via immigration of candidates on visa. Last time I worked in semi, about 30% of colleagues were on visa from abroad. Today from former collogues still there, I hear it's close to 50%.
>I don't believe europeans are unable to turn around this situation in as many years as a matter of fact, it's my core beliefs
Actually, I DO believe we are unable to turn it around. I've done EE work both in Europe and in China for over a span of 10 years, and what sets China apart from Europe that enabled them to overtake us is the mindset, both at government support level AND at individual level.
Chinese operated a lot closer in mentality of the US compared to Europeans, as in very cutthroat move fast and break things, wanting to ship a new product every 6 months(!). This mentality is lacking in Europe who mostly stick to slow paced industries where there's a national security, regulatory or bureaucratic moat like aerospace, defense, telco, industrial automation or automotive, but nothing cutting edge in consumer space that's dominated by China, Korea, Japan and US.
Then there's the massive investments and support from the Chinese state that's missing in European electronics industry. To get an idea compare to the massive sums Europe invests in pharma(or life sciences) versus pitiful investments in electronics for example, and you'll get what I mean.
Until those change, we have no chance, we're just dreaming and huffing copium that somehow things will magically improve out of the blue.
>the industry is hostile to newcomers, self-taught people, women, and more.
Pretty much this, minus the hostility towards women part. I've had few women colleagues everywhere I worked in EE, there's no gender hostility or discrimination, just that young girls looking for a career, aren't really into sitting hunched down over a table and soldering and probing PCB's in a lab somewhere in a techo-park in the outskirts of town as a career, when stuff like HR, marketing, brand design in the city center, is way more hip and appealing to young urbanites. You can't force people to be attracted to a specific industry or line of work. Similarly how there's not much women in construction, welding, oil industry, fire fighters, LEO, etc and it's also not due to hostility, or how there's not too many men in nursing, HR or childcare.
> They are unemployed because no one would respect them, and give them a meaningful mission like we would
I hope you realize, you're not really selling the European electronics industry optimism here with this example of skilled people being passed on for employment.
I disagree. There is a great deal of variation between countries and companies. My daughter is in automotive electronics (in R & D rather than manufacturing) and her employer and country are at the better end of the spectrum, but there are definitely places where it is very difficult for women.
> You can't force people to be attracted to a specific industry or line of work.
That depends on culture and upbringing. If you bring girls up to think that electronics or software or whatever is a male pursuit they will avoid it. A lot of this is set in early childhood and subtly so. Have you seen the difference in the toys little girls and boys get? Or who helps dad (and its almost always dad!) with the DIY or setting up a new gadget or similar tasks? I was my kids primary parent, so they picked up I liked and I just assumed my kids were likely to be interested in things I found interesting.
>There is a great deal of variation between countries and companies.
Well yes, that was also part of my point. I travelled and worked all over the world in my youth and what I noticed is that women typically choose engineering careers only for the money, stability and benefits of working at engineering corporation if the alternatives like humanities, soft sciences or social/government work pay like shit and the welfare state is lackluster like it's the case is North-/Latin- America, Asia or South/Eastern Europe, not because they're really passionate about engineering.
But if you're in a wealthy welfare state, with high taxes, low income disparity and and well funded government services where a women working as a school teacher for example can take home nearly the same as an engineer while having great government benefits, like Nordic or German speaking countries for instance, then women are more likely to choose those types of humanities careers or other such careers that revolve more around interacting with people over working in engineering.
It is literally that simple. There's no 4D chess psychology to dissect. If you have easy access to easy money, most people will choose the path of least resistance. It's all transactional following Maslow's pyramid of needs. SW dev would also have far fewer people in it if it weren't so well paid.
>but there are definitely places where it is very difficult for women.
Can you explain in detail how exactly those places make it difficult for women and it's not just the correlation I explained above?
Like I'm sure there's some toxic workplaces out there, but that's the case for everyone in a lot of jobs, including(or maybe even especially) those where women are majority, like HR.
In fact, from what I saw in engineering they tend to prioritize attracting female candidates in order to try to break up the massive sausage fest of this profession even if that part is never said out loud.
I am afraid, that when it gets too bad and too obvious it will be too late.
For me first steps would be turning bureaucratic ship around and making regulatory framework simpler and cheaper. With some exceptions for startups/small companies during very first months or years. The industry would be more attractive and with more demand for European electronics manufacturing. With more demand it would slowly start growing domestically. It’s insane that the rules for my 1 person company are the same as for Bosch or Siemens. I can praise good lobbyists work. There are two engineers at my dayjob that are writing mandatory documents about cadmium amount in screws or calculating sustainability parameters…
Of course quasi monopolies of European industry are hoping to lobby these measures to suit them more than small players, but I am hopeful, as we have some very good legislators and politicians who are on our side.
Also Eurostack (of which Eilbek Research is a member) is a lobbyist group pushing for Draghi-adjacent policies, most of all: Relocating the entire cloud stack to Europe. And while for the bigger members of this organization it means having our own Google or Facebook (including their harms), it cannot help but inadvertently push the EU to pass laws that will further the agenda of eroding the USA-Tech monopolies.
Things are moving in the right direction, not many are talking about it, but when things hit mainstream news, they're already old by the reality's standard.
The regulations argument is a red herring: those mostly apply to electronics products sold in the EU, not manufactured in the EU. You have exactly the same burden trying to sell CN-manufactured hardware in the EU.
Worker's shortage is a real problem in China as well. Their approach? Automate everything. Focus on manufacturing 1000s of designs using a handful of standard formulas, instead of treating every design as bespoke. There's no reason this couldn't be done in the EU.
It's going to require a serious cultural shift, but given the right incentive I see no reason why it would be impossible.
> You have exactly the same burden trying to sell CN-manufactured hardware in the EU.
Not if you're a Chinese OEM: you just mail it in, and thanks to the arcane operation of international postage it's cheaper to post to Germany from China than from Germany. CE is such a European type of regulation, there's almost no enforcement, while at the same time it's so vague that simply working out what directives you might need to comply with is time-consuming.
Mind you as others have pointed out, there is still EU electronics. It's just not massive production runs for consumer electronics, much more of it is for defence, aerospace, and medical. And a bit of automotive, although that is definitely going to fall to Chinese car OEMs.
Europe is starting crack down on individual CN import - for exactly this reason. But that's still not going to solve the real problems EU-based hardware companies run into.
The whole problem is that the EU electronics industy is laser-focused on those defence and aerospace runs. They expect everything to be bespoke and complicated, so their entire business model is built around it.
But the vast majority of hardware isn't that complicated. I don't want a two-month ordering process with a "call for pricing" and a €1500 "engineering fee" - I want a JLCPCB-like instant quote and click-to-order for my dime-a-dozen 4-layer 10x10cm prototype!
The fact that a handful of industy giant are still doing production in Europe while moving at a glacial pace is not that relevant when China is rapidly out-innovating the West. If it continues like this, they will eventually die too.
Hey, original talk speaker here. I agree with this sentiment, we are very geared for high-quality, high-spec industrial designs in Europe.
CE for simple consumer products is actually not so pricy, and things are moving very quickly there in the right direction. We work with Smander.com for compliance, but there are others who offer it for cheap. The more expensive measurements are EMI, but in Germany universities will let you use their chamber at low cost or even for free if you are a small business or single person.
Honestly the problem with CE is misinformation most of all. It does not need to be complicated: Cheap standards can be bought from evs.ee for 30€, a couple of hours of a CE consultant cost is only a couple hundred, getting close to a university costs only time...
The goals of the EU is also to simplify these regulations, and things are also moving very fast there.
Funfact: If you are working in the industry, you know that there are many companies who produce electronics in Europe in general and some even in Germany.
The problem is the gap between hobbyist project and hundred-thousand-unit production run.
You can't easily and cheaply get 10, 100, or 1000 units manufactured in the EU the way you can in China. This pretty much kills hardware startups and scaleups wanting to do local manufacturing.
If you're not a multinational or have an essentially-unlimited budget for your small-scale run, you have to outsource it to China.
Disagree. The main reason we use chinese fabs is because we can actually get the goods in less than three weeks, so if we have a surge in sales we are covered pretty quickly.
The other reason is that we do some low complexity boards all specified with chinese parts, JLCPCB for the win, and our contractor agrees with us. They are not interested in those jobs because they can't possibly compete.
However, for our batch size/complexity our local contractor beats the chinese, by a good margin, and they keep growing the business. In Italy. The only problem we have with them is lead time, because there is always some hiccup, some missing part, some email that gets answered a day too late. I've been asking them for years to just provide their catalog with their partnumbers so i can just specify them in the BOM, and we won't waste all that time back and forth, but it's never been a true priority, but they do need to streamline the process. All european manufacturers need to streamline their process.
Another comment here lamented that the issue is that the fabs may try to treat every board as unique, whereas is should be us designers that adapt to them. I agree. That's a general issue in our attitude to designing a product, in many areas.
Manufacturers in china just do it fast, and avoid all the pains, they actually care about customer experience above all, something we have to learn from ourselves obviously!
As I said in another comment, I fully expect things to change for the better: Some manufacturers will go out of business, but yet others will turn around in time.
All these people that were laid off will find jobs again, revitalizing moribund companies. Some will create their own companies, I view myself as part of this group.
I work with companies, which have a more like small scale production. They are about 100 or so workers. Yes, this is also possible. They grew their business in the last 25 years, when it was even harder to produce something than these days. At least one of these business have PCB suppliers in the EU, which helped them in the post COVID crises where everybody struggled with supply.
I just named some big name brands. I also know mid-size and smaller brands.
Building your business and getting your stuff together is hard for any startup in any business field.
Could you perhaps share those PCBA businesses with us?
I tried quite hard to find them when I was still in the hardware world, and I never managed to find anything even remotely close to what China offers at less than 10x the price.
I'd love to give it another shot for some hobby projects if the industry has indeed changed in the last few years!
I think the original commenter means companies that manufacture their own products but do not offer manufacturing services.
You can't beat JLC because the model from JLC is that they lose money on all order less than 100 boards, so that they win order of 10 to 100k+
If you work in germany in engineering, you know a lot of mittelstand (SMEs) actually have some production machinery, as said, usually they have between 50 and 200 employees, and they manufacture pretty niche products up to 10k units a year or so.
They do not advertise this, as their business model is not manufacturing, it's selling their own products.
I am actually the speaker of the talk, and for us, manufacturing is not a business model either, it's just the capability we want to develop. Our business model would be to sell products. We shared our knowledge and results because we were curious about people's thoughts, and because if we fail and disapear we want this stuff to be online where other can find it.
>We shared our knowledge and results because we were curious about people's thoughts, and because if we fail and disapear we want this stuff to be online where other can find it.
probably the likes of Enics and GPV - nowadays this is likely a field overrun by military demand and private equity squeezing the supply side... Also I doubt that they can/want to compete with jlcpcb et al.
I can third this observation. I've even had my flat above one of these for 10 years. Small company, privately-owned, five employees or so. They have a few pick-and-place machines (SIMATICs as far as I have seen) located in a small factory building and manufacture small production runs with them.
They don't have a real website advertising their services, but they seem to do well, probably their customers know them. They've run their business continuously for at least those 10 years I've lived at that spot. I could smell the soldering oven running constantly.
For an example with a website, see Waterott, it's run by one person who has a single Siplace SMT machine and stencils manually, and he has no issues earning money.
As far as I am aware the European plants survive mostly on decent QA and regulated industries. When the cost of a defect slipping QA is high, it can be cheaper to operate European plant with intra-step quality controls than manufacture in China and slap thorough QA on top.
I feel like HN posters simply know the names of these companies because they're big, but don't actually work at those companies, otherwise they would know about the massive waves of layoffs and offshoring happening there lately.
I feel like some HN posters simply read news and don't work in the industry and have actual insights on what's happening.
Like Hydac moved some of there assembly from China to Germany.
A company in the district nearby, just moved their whole production from Thailand back to here. Yes, production costs are higher. But there is not transportation costs. They don't have long lead times anymore and can react more better to demand. So the overall costs assessment lead to the decision it is better to have production here locally.
I recommend to go to SPS, Agritechnica, and so and talk to actual people.
BTW: Even as Continental has layoff. There are other companies around that happily absorb those people. Because 2 years back, that had problems employing people.
If possible I would like to know what positions and how much they were offering.
I had offerings for a manager position, 15 people, responsibility for the 15, including in house training of them, and part responsibility in the 5 different projects these people were working on. They wanted somebody with background in HW development, 10 years experience in FPGA, experience of at least 5 years Linux driver development, cryptography, at least 5 years managing people.
Wait for it… they offered 80k/year. I don’t know… seems little bit low somebody with like 20 years experience.
That's the dirty secret of "the employment shortage".
Under pay, no one takes the job, so justify off-shoring.
The truth, having talked to employees at big firms, is that in the past, entire factories were off shored to save 10 cents from one single part in a product.
Today, most jobs are not just under-paid, they are undignified. Because any job can be gratifying in the right circumstances, even a job on a factory line, it just has to:
1. Pay a fair wage
2. Be designed to be gratifying
Companies dont even care about their customers anymore, we all know it's been more than 15 years since they've cared about their employees. That's how entshittification goes.
>Under pay, no one takes the job, so justify off-shoring.
You mean to justify easy rubber stamping work visas on candidates from abroad.
Offshoring is usually last resort when costs other than labor are also much cheaper abroad like energy, or there's other incentives like government handouts or tax exemptions that high-CoL EU countries like France or Germany can't compete with.
>Companies dont even care about their customers anymore, we all know it's been more than 15 years since they've cared about their employees. That's how entshittification goes.
Exactly. And sometimes even very strange things happen. Currently I know of a company taking lots of positions from Germany to China, people in China are having more money in the pocket per year. The cost to the company are basically the same, but people is more motivated. Mind you, that people are not working crazy hs! Mostly 8 to 9 hs per day 5 days a week.
>Wait for it… they offered 80k/year. I don’t know… seems little bit low somebody with like 20 years experience.
In which country?
The sad thing is the state of supply and demand in the economy, doesn't really care how many years of experience you have, or how hard you worked, or how difficult the job is. It'll pay as little as they can get away with.
Sucks, but welcome to being a tax cattle in Europe, where someone on the dole with welfare and credits takes home nearly as much as you do. Thank our politicians for outsourcing everything that wasn't nailed to the ground for 20+ years in the name of shareholder growth.
South Germany. In a capital city. And that was “tops”
And as you say, 40% is out of the bat off. Then you have expensive energy also plagued with taxes… plus of course 19% VAT, etc, etc, etc… if somebody in USA could tell me what would you earn for that there would be nice.
If you're open to being mobile right now you might consider relocating to work in the EE industry of Linz, Villach or Graz in Austria or the aerospace/defence industry Toulouse in France.
Someone with your experience wouldn't earn much less there and you'd have much lower housing CoL than the big capital cities in southern Germany, and better food and weather.
I’m sure there is one or another company generating employment. I didn’t stated something different. Did I?
I just named a fact. I know people in at least 3 different companies in the list that lost their job last year, and many others which are in the list until 2030. The people that lost their jobs are/were more than 1 year searching. I’m talking with many “actual people” in different industries, and it is not looking very bright…
Most of the open positions is management of projects in other parts of the world. I see almost no development in SW or electronics going on here, much less production.
Who is "that" in this context? Can you be more specific.
>Even as Continental has layoff
Not just Conti, but all major automotive suppliers, semiconductor, embedded companies spread across Europe had mass layoffs.
And not everyone was quickly absorbed. I have EE friends almost a year unemployed after the layoffs. They apply but only get rejections, not sure why. It's a bloodbath right now in industries in high-CoL regions.
And is not only automotive. Other sectors are also suffering a lot. As you said, finding a new job is not very easy, even if you are ok with 1hs commute. As far as I know, all big companies are moving work outside the EU in a hurry.
>Who wants to be manufacturing technician when you can be lifestyle influencer!?
Before influencers people wanted to be actors. It predates the time before Electronics was 'lost' in Europe so thats not a convincing argument.
What you are saying really is that the world enjoys what we have on the backs of inadequately paid production engineers in China. As their demographic crisis does not produce a similar sized replacement generation, that benefit will go away as experts retire and no one replaces them. So one way or another wages will go up meaning inflation will go up and some of those 'lifestyle influencers' will now consider the field because it is a viable career path in terms of pay.
What is really interesting is that worker pay in tier 1 cities in China (e.g. Shenzen) actually is higher than in EU countries such as Slovenia, Bulgaria or Czech republic. Incidentally these countries have a large number of EMS, and we know of quite a few startups that quickly grew production capability to be able to provide electronics assembly.
Yeah I didn't say that Chinese people didn't want to go down the same route, infact lifestyle influencers have a better shot there (probably 0.1% better).
There is so much overproduction of engineers that you are possibly working a customer support role with that degree.
Another reason SASS supposedly never took off there, why pay some company when you can just hire from the batch of overproduced STEM graduates and make any software you need.
When I can have an experienced engineer correct my garbage designs for free as part of a manufacturing service you know I am benefiting off of a lucky circumstance that will go away one day: https://youtu.be/ljOoGyCso8s?t=98
Not sure why your post was buried. As the EU does have a lot of rules, but if a product is reasonably made its almost the same cost as the US market entry. Robert Feranec covers a lot of the more obscure EU rules:
Designs that contain China parts are often immediately disqualified from most trade exemptions. The landed cost can bump gadget retail prices too high in some countries. YMMV =3
Where do you live/work that you don't see any of this?
I heard Poland is doing amazing right now, but where I live half my friend group including me has been through layoffs in the past 2-3 years and every day when I open the news, large companies in my country are announcing layoffs or hiring freezes, and small to medium sized ones are announcing insolvencies.
i was looking it up and the 12th biggest pcb manufacture is in austria. which is europa afaik. Its not that dead
"In Leoben befindet sich das weltweite Headquarter von AT&S. Derzeit gibt es drei Produktionslinien, die eine Reihe von verschiedenen ML/HDI Highend-Leiterplatten, Embedded Lösungen für Power Applikationen vor allem im Server Bereich und Cores für die IC-Substratwerke herstellen. Weiteres werden spezielle Technologien für Aviation & Satellites, Industrie, Automotive und den IC-Markt entwickelt und gefertigt.
Mitarbeiter: 1.759
Eröffnung: 1982
Fokus:
Automotive, Aviation, Industrial, Medical, Communication, Consumer, Computer, Semicon
Ein neues Werk, das derzeit gebaut wird, wird auch die Produktion von IC-Substraten nach Leoben bringen, einschließlich bedeutsamer Kapazitäten für Forschung und Entwicklung. Mit dem neuen Werk werden rund 700 neue Arbeitsplätze geschaffen, wodurch sich die Zahl der Mitarbeiter:innen nahezu verdoppeln wird.
To be more specific: PCB manufacture anywhere other than China is, given the current economics, so dead. This includes the USA. The only viable alternative is SE asian countries (e.g. Malaysia) but that's not at a comparable scale. The reason is simply economics (e.g. labour costs, equipment, etc).
Hi! Augustin here, one of the presenters of the talk: Alex actually built a vapour phase soldering oven from scratch a few years ago! Indeed they are not exactly practical for series production, though they are amazing for small runs of very challenging to solder board though.
Main issues is solvent recovery: as another commenter pointed out, Galden is very expensive, and it is also extremely greenhouse inducing and we were not confident in our ability to recover it completely, especially at "scale" (100 boards per month or so).
In our case, we picked a hot-air convection oven, which, while not as good as VPS, is still a lot better than IR at not burning components. Our main challenge is always space, so we went for a production batch oven which already has more throughput than we need for us to get to profitability.
The plan is to upgrade to a long and big conveyor oven once we move to a bigger facility, these are quite cheap and they are compatible with a fully automated production line.
Ngl, everything on crowd supply is overpriced. I bought an sdr through them several months ago, and the antenna I bought with it could be found on mouser for at least $10 cheaper.
Well the "source" is arguable. If you want stock parts it's definitely Mouser (or their suppliers) but if you want a project, namely something new made out of parts provided by Mouser then it's still CrowdSupply. I didn't take the time to compare but I imagine prices are roughly comparable and maybe you get projects slightly faster on CS, I'd hope so at least. You definitely get to follow the evolution of the project though, which is positive (your learn how it goes) and negative (you can get frustrated by delays).
Yes this makes CCC look bad. You can tell they were not serious because they used OpenPNP. From the video - "most importantly, it is open, hackable, and extensible." not mentioned: able to assemble electronics!
Hi, talk speaker here, we are hoping to assemble our first products this year.
OpenPnP is currently more than able to assemble electronics, Opulo and LumenPnP are used by many profitable companies (many I know first hand).
Our opinion (shared in the talk) is that there is a little bit of work to bring it from "able to assemble electronics" to "entreprise-ready" in the sense of adding features like access rights (operators and admins shoudl have different rights) and integration to Inventree, our inventory and parts management software.
Investing in even new production devices is a dead end, and our vision is that owning 100% of the software is owning 100% of the capability. China essentially developed their solutions themselves, and I believe that is the reason why they are so advanced.
Entire business needs are locked behind aging software, licensing hell, an junk fees, both in europe and the US.
Given the context (CCC) I would find it far less interesting if they did NOT use OpenPNP. It is also, coincidentally, able to assemble PCBs, even if it's perhaps not the best software out there.
Given it's CCC, a hobbyist hacker con, OpenPNP and especially those three things you mentioned seem perfect, I'm not sure why you'd think it makes the con look bad. I've heard this talk mentioned repeatedly as one of the coolest ones there, and I certainly enjoyed it myself.
It's not an industry seminar on how to start a board house, it's two guys explaining how they automated the basics of production on a low budget and with space constraints, etc.
"This approach is not going to revive electronics in Europe."
Revive what exactly? There's ASML, IMEC and many others. Then a host of PCB fabs that are expensive but are present and perfectly useful such as Eurocircuits and many others. This project is typical of these conferences where people find it interesting and fun to do things from scratch.
Given the economics, it is not possible for anywhere other than a couple of south east asian countries to be competitive at scale with Chinese manufacturers. This presentation hasn't a hope of replacing that using the methods outlined but it doesn't mean its a waste of time!
The comments here seem to show a typical US-EU divide in perspectives, people talk past each other. Yes, mass-market low-margin consumer products (the US view) probably won't be produced much in the EU in the next few years.
But much of the electronics industry in the EU is B2B and centers around producing high-margin products where 10.000 units of a product would be huge.
The company I work for, for example, usually produces a few hundred units of a product before the next revision replaces it. Whether or not the PCB costs 20€ more or not really isn't that important if you only plan to sell 100 devices of it per year for 10k€ each. Aspects like quality and regulatory conformity are way more important here.
That is an excellent point. The development costs of such low-volume projects are often way higher than the production costs. Having production in house or close often allows tighter, thus faster, prototyping and feedback during development, which in turn saves money.
The whole "But how can this be scaled and monetized" crowd here also does not seem to understand the point of such projects and Germany's Hacker community. It is about learning and just doing it, much less about building a high–revenue business.
I think so too, because the bar to economic sustainability is not incredibly high. I know a lot of one-man businesses operating with one Siplace pick and place machine and making a good living out of it.
Many people don't have the desire to expand forever. In my case I hope the company grows o 20 or 30 employees, and then I would work stabilizing it so it can last 50+ years. e.g. setting up a trust to oversee the well being of employees, the quality of the products, etc.
This is completely alien to most american founders and businessmen, in the words of Larry Elison: "it's not enough for me to win, it's about everybody else losing"
A discussion that got cut from the talk at the early draft process was defining what "small-series" and "large-series" mean.
To me, at a human scale and without dystopian monopolies, a small series is anything under 1k, a medium series around 50k and a large series 100-500k.
I wanted to define a special class of series, because to an american a small series is probably more like 100k, and a large one 1 million or more, last year something like 230 million iphones were sold globally and that's an absurd number imo.
Because my vision of a healthy electronics industry is 200 companies each selling competing runs of 1 million units, rather than apple selling all 230 million.
In my ideal world then, the only way for apps to be distributed is a marketplace that is regulated and prevents apple from imposing their 30% tax on every dollar spent on the app store.
How would this marketplace be regulated? Is the idea that there would be an open app format (so that devices from different vendors could run these apps) or a regulated OS?
Reminds me that comma.ai has its own line. While their setup is quite expensive they do run production for a smartphone-level of difficulty in-house. They detail it incredibly well at commacon [0].
If you're interested in assembling PCBs at home, but you're looking at all this expensive hardware and thinking it's impossible, I've had great success with:
1. Stencil jig: two bare boards taped to stiff cardboard (the kind stencils are shipped in)
2. Squeegee: an old debit card
3. Pick and place: ESD tweezers, a magnifying glass, and some tunes
4. Reflow: a toaster oven modified with a kit (the expensive part: https://whizoo.com/products/controleo3-reflow-oven-build-kit)
I've made tons of boards with this setup and they work great. Are there limitations? Sure. Doing pick-and-place by hand will set a lower bound on the size of components you can design with. It also forces you to keep your part count down (but you should probably be doing that anyway). For my projects, these are never even close to the biggest problems.
I've been an early employee at two separate small-scale US manufacturing facilities, each making only a few hundred products annually ($x,xxx, each). Their PCBs contain several hundred components, mostly surface-mounted.
Making PCBs outside of SE Asia is not economical. You cannot afford to train labor on such a small scale, and would be foolish to manufacture more than a few of your own prototype boards.
>2. Squeegee: an old debit card
This works really well
>3. Pick and place
Even with a cheaper optical pick-&-place, you still need to examine every board thoroughly (the placements aren't optimal).
>4. Reflow: a toaster oven w/ mods
The problem with this approach is that the low thermal mass of a toaster oven results in inconsistent temperature profiles (e.g. sporadically burnt / un-soldered). I have used this setup and much prefer a larger reflow oven (with conveyer).
----
A repeated problem with this in-house PCB manufacturing dream is that the EE designer the circuit board cannot work more profitably when he has to make all the PCBs himself — which he'll have to, because he also cannot afford most American training/labor to make reliable boards.
Oh, I would never recommend my setup for assembly of actual products. I've spent enough time in avionics to know where that line is. :) My "lab" is strictly for side projects.
What I really would love is a JLCPCB equivalent in Europe. Slightly higher prices are OK, but I want to have the the Same amount of process automation and flexibility.
Should be good for a scale of a few thousend per year.
Hi! Have you every checked out aisler.net? In my opinion they do an amazing job, it's not quite JLCPCB prices, but maybe only 20% higher depending on what service you take, and they deliver faster since they are based in europe.
Their business model is pooling small orders and sending them to board fabs in europe, mainly germany and some in the east.
The job fee seems to include shipping, which makes it more reasonable. But Aisler's "estimated dispatch" for the budget service is Jan 26. That's 10 business days + shipping, making it not very competitive with JLCPCB's 10-15 business days including the slowest/cheapest shipping.
Express service adds ~20 EUR, roughly the same cost as picking DHL express delivery on JLCPCB.
Aisler is decent for bare boards, but their PCBA is several orders of magnitude more expensive due to the setup & handling fees. JLCPCB has this down to a science, with their preloaded (and therefore dirt-cheap) "basic parts" and pre-approved "extended parts" pulled directly from LCSC for a small fee.
On top of that they also offer 3D printing, CNC machining, sheet metal bending, and even a McMaster-Carr-like parts store. It is literally a one-stop-shop for all your hardware prototype needs.
For a lot of parts the exact details aren't crucial. If I'm using 4k7 0603 I2C pullup resistors I'm more than happy to swap them for 5k6 0402 if they just so happen to have a reel of those lying around and it means not having to wait two days for a restock.
Same with plenty of other parts. Maybe 10% is crucial, the rest can relatively easily be swapped out with whatever happens to be available. Transistor from a different manufacturer, generic level converter with two extra channels, LDO in a different package? If I know what is available, for a proto run I'm more than happy to make a few small changes!
I have been using them in the past, when I needed a board overnight. Problem is that they are prohibitively expensive. For the price of a couple of bare unpopulated boards I could get dozen boards populated (with parts priced in) from China and they would arrive at the same time. Once Brexit was fully implemented their shipping was slower than from China, so they lost all edges to me.
It's impressive how JLCPCB somehow made this process seem so seamless and easy for PCBs but also for other random components one might want.
Recently needed an 4 adapters in sheet metal for a project, two fabrication shops near me quoted >100$. Got JLCPCB to do them all for 12$ with 20$ of shipping. Got them in less than 2 weeks.
What I really loved about the talk is that you got a good insight into the actual complexities of manufacturing and drew all the right conclusions from it, rather than to throw your hands up and ordering stuff from China after all.
Friends of mine - with a bit more practical experience - are doing something similar, they realize that if there ever is a real demand for their product it might be at a time when the cheap alternatives simply are no longer available and have set up from day #1 to do everything in Europe. They are - like you - quite talented but the difference is that they have access to a lot more funding and if they need a particular machine they will simply go get it rather than to make their own.
You are resource constrained and that brings out a lot of creativity, which in the longer term will turn into a competitive advantage.
Everything John Nagle said is true. But to have a meaningful discussion about it on HN is futile because we need to come together and first admit and agree that exporting everything to China has ruined the economy and culture in the West. That isn’t happening. The best we can do is remind ourselves to follow the guidelines while we get downvoted by brigades.
I watched the video and sent it to family members who are deeply involved and ve$ted in manufacturing in the West. These two boys are unlikely to see anything like this at scale in Europe. That ship has sailed while no one was looking, and it’s not coming back.
This is painful. They got a used solder mask holder, a Lumen pick and place machine, a bunch of old Siemens feeders, and a small automatic reflow oven. All these tools needed major work. Everything with firmware needed firmware mods. Everything else needed assembly or major cleaning. Everything needed adjustment. They had to 3D print their own solder paste squeegee. They're six months in and still trying to produce one simple board.
I've been down this road of populating a surface mount board. There is a minimum size for a practical board-stuffing operation, and they are below it. They are using prototype techniques for 100 units or so, not techniques that scale.
Surface mount soldering requires applying hot air in a very controlled way, with the temperature ramping up, holding at the high temp for a few seconds, and then ramping down. On a small scale, you have a programmable oven which tries to do that. Those always have heat distribution problems. For production, you have a tunnel oven, with about six sections at different temperatures and a chain conveyor to take the boards through the tunnel. With the tunnel oven, you let the whole thing warm up and stabilize, and when all zones are at the right temperature, you can repeatably solder boards successfully.
They're using a hobbyist-grade pick and place machine. Slow, but cheap. Plus the software isn't ready for prime time. They looked at a used production machine. Runs Windows XP and wouldn't fit through the door. Rejected that.
They're about EUR 30,000 into this, not counting their own labor. This approach is not going to revive electronics in Europe.
Learning by mistake isn't painful; it is how you learn best. I keep iterating on that point to my children. But that isn't merely what these guys were doing. They were doing more, since they were documenting their (expensive!) learning process. Documenting your learning process and sharing it freely is allowing others to not make the very same mistakes, but to do better instead. It lowers the barrier of entry for competition, taunting competition who hopefully also share back. Like many talks on 39c3 (esp. the lightning talks), it is an invitation to collaboration.
Sharing the documentation is also an act of compassion, and very much in the spirit of FOSS & OSHW.
This talk was hands down my favourite talk (and not even in a subject I am familiar with!). These two guys shared a lot of info in little time, and were very humble. It was also a presentation which contains a political component (Europe's lack of independence, specifically hardware-wise), but it managed to avoid that discussion. Why, because it is assumed the attending public shares the same value. Instead, it maintains focus on the taking action part. I am not sure everyone here shares said value, but I do, and for whatever it is worth: USA is in a similar boat.
Hey! Talk speaker here, thank you so much for these words.
This is exactly what we wanted to convey: Let's act, our way isnt the best way, but it is the path we're on, and there is little we can do on our own to get to another path.
We don't want to build the european JLCPCB, we don't even know what our company will be in 20 years if it still exists.
What we want is to give knowledge and see more people get into the business of electronics. We also want to give meaningfull jobs to engineers and factory workers which will eventually join us.
We are not going to change the world, I would settle for selling 1 unit of 1 well made product to 1 customer. I would settle for giving one person a job that they love working with cool guys to make electronics. I would settle for the ability to pay my rent from this, from bringing value in the world.
Just curious, is it possible to get some basic production "kit" from China and go from there? I'd assume it's going to be new and cheaper and more "modular", and you only rely them on these basic items. I have never been into electronics manufacturing so not sure if it makes sense.
You are saying the same thing they said -- it doesn't scale. It's not how you build a large factory. They acknowledge this and pretty quickly move on to say that they are aiming for smaller and sustainable.
They even specifically call out why they chose not to use a conveyor based oven in the video.
Basically they believe they can be price reasonable at small scales, small batches. Build process knowledge and expertise over time, and then incrementally scale up after assessing bottlenecks.
I think the route of local sustainable, grow as needed or collaborate to expand capacity is pretty reasonable.
It's not possible to make a competitively priced product that way. What are you going to do, sell artisanal circuit boards on Etsy?
Here's a small US-based PCB board and assembly facility in the US, in Hesperia, California.[1] Looks like it might have 20 to 30 employees from the building picture. This is probably about as small as a viable business of this type gets. It doesn't have to be done in a huge plant like JLCPCB in Shenzhen.
Here's a company in India, Invariance, which makes low-cost semi-automatic machines to do exactly the same operations 39c3 is doing.[2] They have three machines - a solder paste spreader, a pick and place machine, and a mini tunnel reflow oven. They make all three machines. These machines intended for small companies who want to assemble their own boards in house. The solder paste spreader is just automated enough to do a consistent job, with pressure and timing controlled. The pick and place machine uses their own feeder design which runs off strips of component tape. The tunnel oven is small, only about a meter long.
That's close to a viable minimum production solution.
[1] https://mermarinc.com/
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_VCJyeqa-A
39c3 is the conference it is being presented at, not the presenter. 39th Chaos Communication Congress, the annual conference of the Chaos Computer Club.
This is a hacker messing around who is presenting to inspire others and get feedback. Many things presented at Xc3 are wildly impractical, potentially illegal, or not even technical at all and more on the side of activism and policy. Most are interesting and fun, which is the main goal.
That depends on your definition of "competitive", doesn't it?
Being 3x as expensive as China but 0.1x as expensive as current small-scale EU manufacturing can be extremely competitive. Plenty of people looking for <1000 unit runs would be willing to pay extra for a "made in EU" label.
COVID and the supply chain crisis made apparent just how over-reliant we are on Shenzhen and Taiwan for the most basic components. There are several hundred ICs on dozens of circuitboards in every car now that are dumber, slower, and less efficient than a 1990s calculator, that we have lost the ability to produce domestically. These are now bottlenecks to manufacturing in any disruption to world trade.
It doesn't need to be cutting edge, if you have a few board assembly shops and some fabs pumping out small chips in 20-30 year old process nodes it helps the resilience of the economy and geopolitical situation a great deal.
If the only service a CM brings to the table is cost reduction, than its a doomed business model.
Rule #23: Don't compete to be at the bottom, as you just might actually win.
Have a great day =3
Technically the differentiation isn't cost reduction its in shored manufacturer. That can become an important requirement as firms become more wary of IP theft and other issues.
Besides other than that what can you really differentiate in this field that isn't cost? Its a service that is standardized regardless of country. Maybe you can provide different "styles" of boards (ie. different specs) or improve the entire submit to production pipeline but thats about it.
The pipeline is a massive one - especially for PCBA. Being able to get an instant quote and order in 5 minutes is worth a lot. Nobody wants a 2-week-long back-and-forth with sales and engineering for a basic prototype run.
I don't know how much real innovation can happen there that the Chinese haven't done. In fact the Chinese haven't really innovated, that have optimized existing processes. Think about it: If you break it down: a "2-week-long back-and-forth with sales and engineering for a basic prototype run" is the same stuff happening in the background as the "get an instant quote and order in 5 minutes"...just much faster.
Thats not the innovation I was talking about: Let me give an example. When the Xbox was being developed, there was a push within Microsoft to create a standard CD‑based game console that was a more refined version of the existing competitors. The Xbox team pushed back and said: No, you don't enter a market and just copy the incumbents. You need to do something different and differentiated. So they innovated by adding a hard drive and standard networking to every console. The addition of these components as standard in each console opened up a new paradigm of gaming with Xbox Live and was a different vision compared to what the others were offering at the time. They eventually ended up moving the market in a fundamental way.
Now, going back to manufacturing, how do we translate that to PCB manufacturing? Again, I don’t know how you could possibly truly innovate the pipeline process more than it has already been done. Even just adding an AI‑handled pipeline process, it's just further optimizing what has already been done. There may or may not be an opportunity to truly move the market but if there is, then thats something the West can do to really compete.
China is a tough place to do business even for domestic small firms.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQrEDq8KPiU
>I don’t know how you could possibly truly innovate the pipeline process more than it has already been done
There are things China does well, things the US does well, and a lot of people building stuff for fun. Yet doing business in North America can be just as challenging for different "reasons". =3
Consumer hardware like the iPhone would not do well when the next model is 20% slower with a 35% retail price reduction.
>what can you really differentiate in this field that isn't cost?
Don't worry about it... =3
>Consumer hardware like the iPhone would not do well when the next model is 20% slower with a 35% retail price reduction.
Yes, American companies know this already: Apple managed to ship $1000 phone even the Chinese coveted for a long while and their innovation at the time was Face ID and the applications it enabled like Memoji.
Just improving spec sheets is a race to 0 profits.
>Don't worry about it... =3
There has got to be something that can move the market as relying on China is just a mirage anyway. Those demographic issues will catch up to everyone eventually. Im not knowledgeable enough to know what this magical innovation will be. (or else I'd pull my savings and get into the business :P )
>Just improving spec sheets is a race to 0 profits.
If and only if people chase the low-margin markets. Some people want the best value they can afford, and the ones that don't usually are not worth the sales effort.
Note, most current Apple products are just information-appliances tied to their media service businesses.
>Im not knowledgeable enough to know what this magical innovation will be
Whatever a unique imagination comes up with will probably be just as good or better. Don't worry about it... =3
I think you're doing Apple products a big disservice. This is a company that produces a lot of very polished products that don't directly tie into the services, for example the AirPods and the Apple Watch and even their computers continue to drag the industry kicking and screaming into some sort of minimum expectation of performance and efficiency. If you look at just their phone or their Apple TV products, fine that makes sense.
But even if you do just look at their phone,tablet and TV sales, it's not entirely a great argument because Apple is not actually prioritizing services as much as their hardware and although those services constitute a decent percentage of their sales, they are still way below the hardware sales. So you could argue that their service business is a complement to their excellent hardware.
>Whatever a unique imagination comes up with will probably be just as good or better. Don't worry about it... =3
You seem to have a similar very consistent style of speaking in all your comments. I don't know if I am conversing with an AI or not. If not I apologize for the accusation. Take care for now... =3
>I don't know if I am conversing with an AI or not
I take time to chat with people in good faith, and while I have authored several ML Patents it would be disrespectful to poison discourse with slop.
My point was Apple shifted into an integrated media service business years ago, and few other firms were able to give consumers the same value due to Jobs early work securing a content portfolio. It is not just the gadgets that drive their revenue model.
Have a great day, =3
Ok again, I apologize for the accusation. It is getting more difficult to discern between AI and non-AI and normally I just let it be but the strange pattern I see with your comments made me pause.
I am in agreement with your thesis, im just not convinced that it is their main priority at this time. A company like Sony would also match your description and more so than Apple.
Sony had tried to leverage their Film/TV portfolio in the past with limited success, as they were fixated on selling physical media. Yet in Game publishing, the PS5 has taken a great deal of market share from the Microsoft Xbox new "rental" model from the 1990s.
"Steve Jobs - The Lost Interview"
https://youtu.be/TRZAJY23xio?si=u9Dm3u8HDPOfHZpx&t=1751
Controversial guy at times, but understood business content well. =3
The schtick for Capitalism is that it is supposed to push all companies to the top of optimal resource production, the place you call the bottom.
Was it always the case that Western Capitalism was about optimising profits for an over-class, the optimising of resources was always just propaganda, or did it once have ethics?
Brands shifted away from garnering customer goodwill, and prioritized shareholder value by siphoning intangible assets accrued over decades of prior works.
There was little utility in judging if it was ethical, but merely to profit by the shortsighted stewards. =3
> Was it always the case that Western Capitalism was about optimising profits for an over-class, the optimising of resources was always just propaganda, or did it once have ethics?
Adam Smith wrote a whole book about ethics.
I actually think the ethical corruption has been very recent and driven by multiple factors, but the most important is the myth that people are rich because they deserve to be, and if they are poor it is because they are stupid or lazy. The rich therefore tend to feel far less noblesse oblige.
For that, there's a company named eurocircuits. Slightly more expensive than JLCPCB, but not 30x.
5pcs 2 layer default settings 80x100mm boards ($4 vs EUR 124) is pretty much 30x.
I double checked because these were not the prices I had in mind.
After looking through the options, I think that's because the designs I did quotations for had 0.2mm holes. This is standard for Eurocircuits, but high precision for JLCPCB.
Note that to get the price you quoted, you'll get lead in your PCB, and vias that are not plated, but plugged with conductive epoxy. Changing that gets you to $14 for 5 boards, which is still way cheaper than Eurocircuits.
I'll keep that in mind for the next PCB I design: keep holes bigger than 0.3mm if possible.
> It's not possible to make a competitively priced product that way. What are you going to do, sell artisanal circuit boards on Etsy?
10 years ago in the US I met someone who owned a company of about 5 people that he largely built off of the acquisition of a single broken pick-and-place machine which he repaired himself. They applied the solder paste manually and finished the boards in what looked like a toaster-oven. Each production run consisted of around 100 units which were sold at $50 apiece. The company is still in business today, as far as I'm aware.
Hey, I'm one of the two speakers :)
The commenter above you phrased it well: "Price-reasonable", to us, it's first about breaking even.
I will look into the companies you linked, looks interesting!
Though to give you food for though, I will tell you about a french drone manufacturing company, they manufacture in house, they turn over probably around 10 million € a year.
I know first hand they stencil print around 10k boards a year using a "machine" that is 2x4's from the hardware store, and a credit card :)
>I will tell you about a french drone manufacturing company [...]
Can you also tell us the name?
Sadly I cannot disclose it
Parrot
[dead]
Design for manufacturability means you leave tolerance within Factory limits, and your own prototyping process limits.
While an inexpensive PnP machine will do 50k to 80k components/hour. If you have someone doing _any_ task, than add $3 USD * number of operations per unit.
Tech is a low-margin business with a lot of regulations, and should be contracted to a proper facility if making over a few thousand units a month. Tooling up for a production line is almost always a bad idea, as it usually adds additional barriers to a product launch as people get sidetracked. =3
Electronics in Europe is so dead. It is past the point where where it can be revived. One thing is sick overregulation to spin hardware product. Last nail in the coffin today is Cyber Resilience Act. It dwarfs all the regulations before it.
Second thing is talent. People can’t hardware anymore. I mean putting a 0402 capacitor on the printed circuit board is not hard. But doing that in meaningful way gets hard. As a contractor I designed few boards and optimized for production in China. In my dayjob colleagues are stuck in the last century. No recent knowledge about parts, design rules, testing principles… No willingness to learn and talk to Chinese manufacturers about optimization. Just copy paste bad decisions from old boards to new designs.
Honestly I wouldn’t even try to revive anything in Europe. Chinese electronics factories are way too far in the future. The suppliers for my workplace are all stuck in the past. Even the ones with new equipment struggle to use full potential due to worker’s shortage. Which is probably a problem in whole western world. Who wants to be manufacturing technician when you can be lifestyle influencer!?
Hi, Augustin here, one of the presenters.
As other commenters pointed out, the electronics industry is quite big in Europe, on paper it generates a lot of money and sustains a lot of jobs. The issue is a bit more complex, and you point it out when you say people around you are old and old-fashioned.
Like I said in the talk: We used to laugh at the chinese products for how low quality they were 20 years ago, who's laughing now?
I don't believe europeans are unable to turn around this situation in as many years as a matter of fact, it's my core beliefs: That together with other young motivated people we'll build our own little electronics industry for ourselves, among ourselves and people who believe we can one day have theye crazy future factories in Europe.
Yes it's crazy hard, but like you I believe things will get sufficiently bad that more will see that the effort is worth it.
You should check out the 39c3 talk from Kliment, he understands this issue so well, and I'll paraphrase him here: Electronics is dominated by old dudes, the industry is hostile to newcomers, self-taught people, women, and more. But by making an effort to give people who are starting a good experience, we can turn this around.
Honestly there is no worker shortage, in my immediate contacts, I already know 2 or 3 people who are ready to work my production line: They have the smarts, skills, and time. They are unemployed because no one would respect them, and give them a meaningful mission like we would, and it's quite clear this is quite a widespread feeling among people.
> Electronics is dominated by old dudes, the industry is hostile to newcomers, self-taught people, women, and more. But by making an effort to give people who are starting a good experience, we can turn this around.
Completely agree.
Then the Semi industry wonders why they're running out of people
>Then the Semi industry wonders why they're running out of people
Yes but they make up with via immigration of candidates on visa. Last time I worked in semi, about 30% of colleagues were on visa from abroad. Today from former collogues still there, I hear it's close to 50%.
>I don't believe europeans are unable to turn around this situation in as many years as a matter of fact, it's my core beliefs
Actually, I DO believe we are unable to turn it around. I've done EE work both in Europe and in China for over a span of 10 years, and what sets China apart from Europe that enabled them to overtake us is the mindset, both at government support level AND at individual level.
Chinese operated a lot closer in mentality of the US compared to Europeans, as in very cutthroat move fast and break things, wanting to ship a new product every 6 months(!). This mentality is lacking in Europe who mostly stick to slow paced industries where there's a national security, regulatory or bureaucratic moat like aerospace, defense, telco, industrial automation or automotive, but nothing cutting edge in consumer space that's dominated by China, Korea, Japan and US.
Then there's the massive investments and support from the Chinese state that's missing in European electronics industry. To get an idea compare to the massive sums Europe invests in pharma(or life sciences) versus pitiful investments in electronics for example, and you'll get what I mean.
Until those change, we have no chance, we're just dreaming and huffing copium that somehow things will magically improve out of the blue.
>the industry is hostile to newcomers, self-taught people, women, and more.
Pretty much this, minus the hostility towards women part. I've had few women colleagues everywhere I worked in EE, there's no gender hostility or discrimination, just that young girls looking for a career, aren't really into sitting hunched down over a table and soldering and probing PCB's in a lab somewhere in a techo-park in the outskirts of town as a career, when stuff like HR, marketing, brand design in the city center, is way more hip and appealing to young urbanites. You can't force people to be attracted to a specific industry or line of work. Similarly how there's not much women in construction, welding, oil industry, fire fighters, LEO, etc and it's also not due to hostility, or how there's not too many men in nursing, HR or childcare.
> They are unemployed because no one would respect them, and give them a meaningful mission like we would
I hope you realize, you're not really selling the European electronics industry optimism here with this example of skilled people being passed on for employment.
> There's no gender hostility or discrimination
I disagree. There is a great deal of variation between countries and companies. My daughter is in automotive electronics (in R & D rather than manufacturing) and her employer and country are at the better end of the spectrum, but there are definitely places where it is very difficult for women.
> You can't force people to be attracted to a specific industry or line of work.
That depends on culture and upbringing. If you bring girls up to think that electronics or software or whatever is a male pursuit they will avoid it. A lot of this is set in early childhood and subtly so. Have you seen the difference in the toys little girls and boys get? Or who helps dad (and its almost always dad!) with the DIY or setting up a new gadget or similar tasks? I was my kids primary parent, so they picked up I liked and I just assumed my kids were likely to be interested in things I found interesting.
>There is a great deal of variation between countries and companies.
Well yes, that was also part of my point. I travelled and worked all over the world in my youth and what I noticed is that women typically choose engineering careers only for the money, stability and benefits of working at engineering corporation if the alternatives like humanities, soft sciences or social/government work pay like shit and the welfare state is lackluster like it's the case is North-/Latin- America, Asia or South/Eastern Europe, not because they're really passionate about engineering.
But if you're in a wealthy welfare state, with high taxes, low income disparity and and well funded government services where a women working as a school teacher for example can take home nearly the same as an engineer while having great government benefits, like Nordic or German speaking countries for instance, then women are more likely to choose those types of humanities careers or other such careers that revolve more around interacting with people over working in engineering.
It is literally that simple. There's no 4D chess psychology to dissect. If you have easy access to easy money, most people will choose the path of least resistance. It's all transactional following Maslow's pyramid of needs. SW dev would also have far fewer people in it if it weren't so well paid.
>but there are definitely places where it is very difficult for women.
Can you explain in detail how exactly those places make it difficult for women and it's not just the correlation I explained above?
Like I'm sure there's some toxic workplaces out there, but that's the case for everyone in a lot of jobs, including(or maybe even especially) those where women are majority, like HR.
In fact, from what I saw in engineering they tend to prioritize attracting female candidates in order to try to break up the massive sausage fest of this profession even if that part is never said out loud.
I am afraid, that when it gets too bad and too obvious it will be too late.
For me first steps would be turning bureaucratic ship around and making regulatory framework simpler and cheaper. With some exceptions for startups/small companies during very first months or years. The industry would be more attractive and with more demand for European electronics manufacturing. With more demand it would slowly start growing domestically. It’s insane that the rules for my 1 person company are the same as for Bosch or Siemens. I can praise good lobbyists work. There are two engineers at my dayjob that are writing mandatory documents about cadmium amount in screws or calculating sustainability parameters…
This is happening already! The 28th regime (https://www.europarl.europa.eu/committees/en/the-28th-regime...) will simplify the framework to register and operate companies in the EU, also the push by the EU commission to implement the Draghi report (https://commission.europa.eu/topics/competitiveness/draghi-r...) is one of deregularization of the industry.
Of course quasi monopolies of European industry are hoping to lobby these measures to suit them more than small players, but I am hopeful, as we have some very good legislators and politicians who are on our side.
Also Eurostack (of which Eilbek Research is a member) is a lobbyist group pushing for Draghi-adjacent policies, most of all: Relocating the entire cloud stack to Europe. And while for the bigger members of this organization it means having our own Google or Facebook (including their harms), it cannot help but inadvertently push the EU to pass laws that will further the agenda of eroding the USA-Tech monopolies.
Cory Doctorow pushes this narrative (https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/15/freedom-of-movement/) that this can only be a benefit in the medium term.
Things are moving in the right direction, not many are talking about it, but when things hit mainstream news, they're already old by the reality's standard.
The regulations argument is a red herring: those mostly apply to electronics products sold in the EU, not manufactured in the EU. You have exactly the same burden trying to sell CN-manufactured hardware in the EU.
Worker's shortage is a real problem in China as well. Their approach? Automate everything. Focus on manufacturing 1000s of designs using a handful of standard formulas, instead of treating every design as bespoke. There's no reason this couldn't be done in the EU.
It's going to require a serious cultural shift, but given the right incentive I see no reason why it would be impossible.
> You have exactly the same burden trying to sell CN-manufactured hardware in the EU.
Not if you're a Chinese OEM: you just mail it in, and thanks to the arcane operation of international postage it's cheaper to post to Germany from China than from Germany. CE is such a European type of regulation, there's almost no enforcement, while at the same time it's so vague that simply working out what directives you might need to comply with is time-consuming.
Mind you as others have pointed out, there is still EU electronics. It's just not massive production runs for consumer electronics, much more of it is for defence, aerospace, and medical. And a bit of automotive, although that is definitely going to fall to Chinese car OEMs.
Europe is starting crack down on individual CN import - for exactly this reason. But that's still not going to solve the real problems EU-based hardware companies run into.
The whole problem is that the EU electronics industy is laser-focused on those defence and aerospace runs. They expect everything to be bespoke and complicated, so their entire business model is built around it.
But the vast majority of hardware isn't that complicated. I don't want a two-month ordering process with a "call for pricing" and a €1500 "engineering fee" - I want a JLCPCB-like instant quote and click-to-order for my dime-a-dozen 4-layer 10x10cm prototype!
The fact that a handful of industy giant are still doing production in Europe while moving at a glacial pace is not that relevant when China is rapidly out-innovating the West. If it continues like this, they will eventually die too.
Hey, original talk speaker here. I agree with this sentiment, we are very geared for high-quality, high-spec industrial designs in Europe.
CE for simple consumer products is actually not so pricy, and things are moving very quickly there in the right direction. We work with Smander.com for compliance, but there are others who offer it for cheap. The more expensive measurements are EMI, but in Germany universities will let you use their chamber at low cost or even for free if you are a small business or single person.
Honestly the problem with CE is misinformation most of all. It does not need to be complicated: Cheap standards can be bought from evs.ee for 30€, a couple of hours of a CE consultant cost is only a couple hundred, getting close to a university costs only time...
The goals of the EU is also to simplify these regulations, and things are also moving very fast there.
Funfact: If you are working in the industry, you know that there are many companies who produce electronics in Europe in general and some even in Germany.
Bosch, Continental, Siemens, Palfinger, FAUN, Webasto, Phoenix Contact, Beckhoff, …
The problem is the gap between hobbyist project and hundred-thousand-unit production run.
You can't easily and cheaply get 10, 100, or 1000 units manufactured in the EU the way you can in China. This pretty much kills hardware startups and scaleups wanting to do local manufacturing.
If you're not a multinational or have an essentially-unlimited budget for your small-scale run, you have to outsource it to China.
Disagree. The main reason we use chinese fabs is because we can actually get the goods in less than three weeks, so if we have a surge in sales we are covered pretty quickly.
The other reason is that we do some low complexity boards all specified with chinese parts, JLCPCB for the win, and our contractor agrees with us. They are not interested in those jobs because they can't possibly compete.
However, for our batch size/complexity our local contractor beats the chinese, by a good margin, and they keep growing the business. In Italy. The only problem we have with them is lead time, because there is always some hiccup, some missing part, some email that gets answered a day too late. I've been asking them for years to just provide their catalog with their partnumbers so i can just specify them in the BOM, and we won't waste all that time back and forth, but it's never been a true priority, but they do need to streamline the process. All european manufacturers need to streamline their process.
Another comment here lamented that the issue is that the fabs may try to treat every board as unique, whereas is should be us designers that adapt to them. I agree. That's a general issue in our attitude to designing a product, in many areas.
Yes, it's all about fast turnaround without pain.
Manufacturers in china just do it fast, and avoid all the pains, they actually care about customer experience above all, something we have to learn from ourselves obviously!
As I said in another comment, I fully expect things to change for the better: Some manufacturers will go out of business, but yet others will turn around in time.
All these people that were laid off will find jobs again, revitalizing moribund companies. Some will create their own companies, I view myself as part of this group.
I work with companies, which have a more like small scale production. They are about 100 or so workers. Yes, this is also possible. They grew their business in the last 25 years, when it was even harder to produce something than these days. At least one of these business have PCB suppliers in the EU, which helped them in the post COVID crises where everybody struggled with supply.
I just named some big name brands. I also know mid-size and smaller brands.
Building your business and getting your stuff together is hard for any startup in any business field.
Could you perhaps share those PCBA businesses with us?
I tried quite hard to find them when I was still in the hardware world, and I never managed to find anything even remotely close to what China offers at less than 10x the price.
I'd love to give it another shot for some hobby projects if the industry has indeed changed in the last few years!
I think the original commenter means companies that manufacture their own products but do not offer manufacturing services.
You can't beat JLC because the model from JLC is that they lose money on all order less than 100 boards, so that they win order of 10 to 100k+
If you work in germany in engineering, you know a lot of mittelstand (SMEs) actually have some production machinery, as said, usually they have between 50 and 200 employees, and they manufacture pretty niche products up to 10k units a year or so.
They do not advertise this, as their business model is not manufacturing, it's selling their own products.
I am actually the speaker of the talk, and for us, manufacturing is not a business model either, it's just the capability we want to develop. Our business model would be to sell products. We shared our knowledge and results because we were curious about people's thoughts, and because if we fail and disapear we want this stuff to be online where other can find it.
>We shared our knowledge and results because we were curious about people's thoughts, and because if we fail and disapear we want this stuff to be online where other can find it.
For those who come after. ;-)
I can't share the name. I don't know their prices. I know that they are in Eastern Europe.
From my knowledge, the last time (2022ish) we talked about that was, that they don't take new customers for now. They are working at capacity.
probably the likes of Enics and GPV - nowadays this is likely a field overrun by military demand and private equity squeezing the supply side... Also I doubt that they can/want to compete with jlcpcb et al.
I can second that there are relatively small electronics manufacturers in Germany. I know a few myself, although I'm not working in that field.
I can third this observation. I've even had my flat above one of these for 10 years. Small company, privately-owned, five employees or so. They have a few pick-and-place machines (SIMATICs as far as I have seen) located in a small factory building and manufacture small production runs with them.
They don't have a real website advertising their services, but they seem to do well, probably their customers know them. They've run their business continuously for at least those 10 years I've lived at that spot. I could smell the soldering oven running constantly.
For an example with a website, see Waterott, it's run by one person who has a single Siplace SMT machine and stencils manually, and he has no issues earning money.
As far as I am aware the European plants survive mostly on decent QA and regulated industries. When the cost of a defect slipping QA is high, it can be cheaper to operate European plant with intra-step quality controls than manufacture in China and slap thorough QA on top.
Fun fact: some of those companies are shutting down productions sites as we read this forum...
I feel like HN posters simply know the names of these companies because they're big, but don't actually work at those companies, otherwise they would know about the massive waves of layoffs and offshoring happening there lately.
I feel like some HN posters simply read news and don't work in the industry and have actual insights on what's happening.
Like Hydac moved some of there assembly from China to Germany.
A company in the district nearby, just moved their whole production from Thailand back to here. Yes, production costs are higher. But there is not transportation costs. They don't have long lead times anymore and can react more better to demand. So the overall costs assessment lead to the decision it is better to have production here locally.
I recommend to go to SPS, Agritechnica, and so and talk to actual people.
BTW: Even as Continental has layoff. There are other companies around that happily absorb those people. Because 2 years back, that had problems employing people.
> that had problems employing people.
If possible I would like to know what positions and how much they were offering.
I had offerings for a manager position, 15 people, responsibility for the 15, including in house training of them, and part responsibility in the 5 different projects these people were working on. They wanted somebody with background in HW development, 10 years experience in FPGA, experience of at least 5 years Linux driver development, cryptography, at least 5 years managing people.
Wait for it… they offered 80k/year. I don’t know… seems little bit low somebody with like 20 years experience.
That's the dirty secret of "the employment shortage".
Under pay, no one takes the job, so justify off-shoring.
The truth, having talked to employees at big firms, is that in the past, entire factories were off shored to save 10 cents from one single part in a product.
Today, most jobs are not just under-paid, they are undignified. Because any job can be gratifying in the right circumstances, even a job on a factory line, it just has to:
1. Pay a fair wage 2. Be designed to be gratifying
Companies dont even care about their customers anymore, we all know it's been more than 15 years since they've cared about their employees. That's how entshittification goes.
>Under pay, no one takes the job, so justify off-shoring.
You mean to justify easy rubber stamping work visas on candidates from abroad.
Offshoring is usually last resort when costs other than labor are also much cheaper abroad like energy, or there's other incentives like government handouts or tax exemptions that high-CoL EU countries like France or Germany can't compete with.
>Companies dont even care about their customers anymore, we all know it's been more than 15 years since they've cared about their employees. That's how entshittification goes.
What solution would you suggest?
Exactly. And sometimes even very strange things happen. Currently I know of a company taking lots of positions from Germany to China, people in China are having more money in the pocket per year. The cost to the company are basically the same, but people is more motivated. Mind you, that people are not working crazy hs! Mostly 8 to 9 hs per day 5 days a week.
>Wait for it… they offered 80k/year. I don’t know… seems little bit low somebody with like 20 years experience.
In which country?
The sad thing is the state of supply and demand in the economy, doesn't really care how many years of experience you have, or how hard you worked, or how difficult the job is. It'll pay as little as they can get away with.
Sucks, but welcome to being a tax cattle in Europe, where someone on the dole with welfare and credits takes home nearly as much as you do. Thank our politicians for outsourcing everything that wasn't nailed to the ground for 20+ years in the name of shareholder growth.
> In which country?
South Germany. In a capital city. And that was “tops”
And as you say, 40% is out of the bat off. Then you have expensive energy also plagued with taxes… plus of course 19% VAT, etc, etc, etc… if somebody in USA could tell me what would you earn for that there would be nice.
If you're open to being mobile right now you might consider relocating to work in the EE industry of Linz, Villach or Graz in Austria or the aerospace/defence industry Toulouse in France.
Someone with your experience wouldn't earn much less there and you'd have much lower housing CoL than the big capital cities in southern Germany, and better food and weather.
I’m sure there is one or another company generating employment. I didn’t stated something different. Did I?
I just named a fact. I know people in at least 3 different companies in the list that lost their job last year, and many others which are in the list until 2030. The people that lost their jobs are/were more than 1 year searching. I’m talking with many “actual people” in different industries, and it is not looking very bright…
Most of the open positions is management of projects in other parts of the world. I see almost no development in SW or electronics going on here, much less production.
>that had problems employing people
Who is "that" in this context? Can you be more specific.
>Even as Continental has layoff
Not just Conti, but all major automotive suppliers, semiconductor, embedded companies spread across Europe had mass layoffs.
And not everyone was quickly absorbed. I have EE friends almost a year unemployed after the layoffs. They apply but only get rejections, not sure why. It's a bloodbath right now in industries in high-CoL regions.
And is not only automotive. Other sectors are also suffering a lot. As you said, finding a new job is not very easy, even if you are ok with 1hs commute. As far as I know, all big companies are moving work outside the EU in a hurry.
Hitachi Energy as well, afaik anyway.
I'd add Infineon to that list, formerly Siemens.
>Who wants to be manufacturing technician when you can be lifestyle influencer!?
Before influencers people wanted to be actors. It predates the time before Electronics was 'lost' in Europe so thats not a convincing argument.
What you are saying really is that the world enjoys what we have on the backs of inadequately paid production engineers in China. As their demographic crisis does not produce a similar sized replacement generation, that benefit will go away as experts retire and no one replaces them. So one way or another wages will go up meaning inflation will go up and some of those 'lifestyle influencers' will now consider the field because it is a viable career path in terms of pay.
What is really interesting is that worker pay in tier 1 cities in China (e.g. Shenzen) actually is higher than in EU countries such as Slovenia, Bulgaria or Czech republic. Incidentally these countries have a large number of EMS, and we know of quite a few startups that quickly grew production capability to be able to provide electronics assembly.
Kids in china also want to be lifestyle influencers instead of manufacturing technicians
Yeah I didn't say that Chinese people didn't want to go down the same route, infact lifestyle influencers have a better shot there (probably 0.1% better).
There is so much overproduction of engineers that you are possibly working a customer support role with that degree.
Another reason SASS supposedly never took off there, why pay some company when you can just hire from the batch of overproduced STEM graduates and make any software you need.
When I can have an experienced engineer correct my garbage designs for free as part of a manufacturing service you know I am benefiting off of a lucky circumstance that will go away one day: https://youtu.be/ljOoGyCso8s?t=98
Not sure why your post was buried. As the EU does have a lot of rules, but if a product is reasonably made its almost the same cost as the US market entry. Robert Feranec covers a lot of the more obscure EU rules:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTPb7etzOmA
Designs that contain China parts are often immediately disqualified from most trade exemptions. The landed cost can bump gadget retail prices too high in some countries. YMMV =3
You sound like you're stuck in a rut. I don't see any of this.
Where do you live/work that you don't see any of this?
I heard Poland is doing amazing right now, but where I live half my friend group including me has been through layoffs in the past 2-3 years and every day when I open the news, large companies in my country are announcing layoffs or hiring freezes, and small to medium sized ones are announcing insolvencies.
i was looking it up and the 12th biggest pcb manufacture is in austria. which is europa afaik. Its not that dead
"In Leoben befindet sich das weltweite Headquarter von AT&S. Derzeit gibt es drei Produktionslinien, die eine Reihe von verschiedenen ML/HDI Highend-Leiterplatten, Embedded Lösungen für Power Applikationen vor allem im Server Bereich und Cores für die IC-Substratwerke herstellen. Weiteres werden spezielle Technologien für Aviation & Satellites, Industrie, Automotive und den IC-Markt entwickelt und gefertigt.
Mitarbeiter: 1.759 Eröffnung: 1982 Fokus: Automotive, Aviation, Industrial, Medical, Communication, Consumer, Computer, Semicon Ein neues Werk, das derzeit gebaut wird, wird auch die Produktion von IC-Substraten nach Leoben bringen, einschließlich bedeutsamer Kapazitäten für Forschung und Entwicklung. Mit dem neuen Werk werden rund 700 neue Arbeitsplätze geschaffen, wodurch sich die Zahl der Mitarbeiter:innen nahezu verdoppeln wird.
Fabriksgasse 13, 8700 Leoben, Österreich"
https://ats.net/
To be more specific: PCB manufacture anywhere other than China is, given the current economics, so dead. This includes the USA. The only viable alternative is SE asian countries (e.g. Malaysia) but that's not at a comparable scale. The reason is simply economics (e.g. labour costs, equipment, etc).
Really? Most of the electronics I work on get made in the EU. There are a few decent options, even. It's not dead, even if China is much bigger.
Hobbyist vapour phase reflow ovens exist although not cheap: https://eleshop.eu/vaporflow-275-vapour-phase-reflow-oven.ht...
Hi! Augustin here, one of the presenters of the talk: Alex actually built a vapour phase soldering oven from scratch a few years ago! Indeed they are not exactly practical for series production, though they are amazing for small runs of very challenging to solder board though.
Main issues is solvent recovery: as another commenter pointed out, Galden is very expensive, and it is also extremely greenhouse inducing and we were not confident in our ability to recover it completely, especially at "scale" (100 boards per month or so).
In our case, we picked a hot-air convection oven, which, while not as good as VPS, is still a lot better than IR at not burning components. Our main challenge is always space, so we went for a production batch oven which already has more throughput than we need for us to get to profitability.
The plan is to upgrade to a long and big conveyor oven once we move to a bigger facility, these are quite cheap and they are compatible with a fully automated production line.
Bit pricier https://www.crowdsupply.com/pcb-arts/vapor-phase-one
Ngl, everything on crowd supply is overpriced. I bought an sdr through them several months ago, and the antenna I bought with it could be found on mouser for at least $10 cheaper.
Eh... well yes CS is not cheap but also... CS is Mouser. They got acquired 7 years ago https://www.crowdsupply.com/announcements/crowd-supply-has-b... .
You can buy the exact same products if they have enough in stock on either platform so price should be about the same e.g. https://www.crowdsupply.com/mouser-electronics and the opposite https://eu.mouser.com/manufacturer/crowd-supply/
They might have big margins on generic products but nothing obvious to me. FWIW bought uSDR with antennas just last month.
Ah... good to know... I don't have anything to shop for right now, but if they're the same, I'll just go to the source.
Well the "source" is arguable. If you want stock parts it's definitely Mouser (or their suppliers) but if you want a project, namely something new made out of parts provided by Mouser then it's still CrowdSupply. I didn't take the time to compare but I imagine prices are roughly comparable and maybe you get projects slightly faster on CS, I'd hope so at least. You definitely get to follow the evolution of the project though, which is positive (your learn how it goes) and negative (you can get frustrated by delays).
The working fluid for that thing costs EUR205/liter. Ouch.
Yes this makes CCC look bad. You can tell they were not serious because they used OpenPNP. From the video - "most importantly, it is open, hackable, and extensible." not mentioned: able to assemble electronics!
Hi, talk speaker here, we are hoping to assemble our first products this year.
OpenPnP is currently more than able to assemble electronics, Opulo and LumenPnP are used by many profitable companies (many I know first hand).
Our opinion (shared in the talk) is that there is a little bit of work to bring it from "able to assemble electronics" to "entreprise-ready" in the sense of adding features like access rights (operators and admins shoudl have different rights) and integration to Inventree, our inventory and parts management software.
Investing in even new production devices is a dead end, and our vision is that owning 100% of the software is owning 100% of the capability. China essentially developed their solutions themselves, and I believe that is the reason why they are so advanced.
Entire business needs are locked behind aging software, licensing hell, an junk fees, both in europe and the US.
Given the context (CCC) I would find it far less interesting if they did NOT use OpenPNP. It is also, coincidentally, able to assemble PCBs, even if it's perhaps not the best software out there.
Given it's CCC, a hobbyist hacker con, OpenPNP and especially those three things you mentioned seem perfect, I'm not sure why you'd think it makes the con look bad. I've heard this talk mentioned repeatedly as one of the coolest ones there, and I certainly enjoyed it myself.
It's not an industry seminar on how to start a board house, it's two guys explaining how they automated the basics of production on a low budget and with space constraints, etc.
"This approach is not going to revive electronics in Europe."
Revive what exactly? There's ASML, IMEC and many others. Then a host of PCB fabs that are expensive but are present and perfectly useful such as Eurocircuits and many others. This project is typical of these conferences where people find it interesting and fun to do things from scratch.
Given the economics, it is not possible for anywhere other than a couple of south east asian countries to be competitive at scale with Chinese manufacturers. This presentation hasn't a hope of replacing that using the methods outlined but it doesn't mean its a waste of time!
The comments here seem to show a typical US-EU divide in perspectives, people talk past each other. Yes, mass-market low-margin consumer products (the US view) probably won't be produced much in the EU in the next few years.
But much of the electronics industry in the EU is B2B and centers around producing high-margin products where 10.000 units of a product would be huge.
The company I work for, for example, usually produces a few hundred units of a product before the next revision replaces it. Whether or not the PCB costs 20€ more or not really isn't that important if you only plan to sell 100 devices of it per year for 10k€ each. Aspects like quality and regulatory conformity are way more important here.
That is an excellent point. The development costs of such low-volume projects are often way higher than the production costs. Having production in house or close often allows tighter, thus faster, prototyping and feedback during development, which in turn saves money.
The whole "But how can this be scaled and monetized" crowd here also does not seem to understand the point of such projects and Germany's Hacker community. It is about learning and just doing it, much less about building a high–revenue business.
I think so too, because the bar to economic sustainability is not incredibly high. I know a lot of one-man businesses operating with one Siplace pick and place machine and making a good living out of it.
Many people don't have the desire to expand forever. In my case I hope the company grows o 20 or 30 employees, and then I would work stabilizing it so it can last 50+ years. e.g. setting up a trust to oversee the well being of employees, the quality of the products, etc.
This is completely alien to most american founders and businessmen, in the words of Larry Elison: "it's not enough for me to win, it's about everybody else losing"
Hey, talk speaker here, that's a great point!
A discussion that got cut from the talk at the early draft process was defining what "small-series" and "large-series" mean.
To me, at a human scale and without dystopian monopolies, a small series is anything under 1k, a medium series around 50k and a large series 100-500k.
I wanted to define a special class of series, because to an american a small series is probably more like 100k, and a large one 1 million or more, last year something like 230 million iphones were sold globally and that's an absurd number imo.
Because my vision of a healthy electronics industry is 200 companies each selling competing runs of 1 million units, rather than apple selling all 230 million.
In my ideal world then, the only way for apps to be distributed is a marketplace that is regulated and prevents apple from imposing their 30% tax on every dollar spent on the app store.
How would this marketplace be regulated? Is the idea that there would be an open app format (so that devices from different vendors could run these apps) or a regulated OS?
Reminds me that comma.ai has its own line. While their setup is quite expensive they do run production for a smartphone-level of difficulty in-house. They detail it incredibly well at commacon [0].
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iiBSN224w4
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LE-QlIWMHxM
If you're interested in assembling PCBs at home, but you're looking at all this expensive hardware and thinking it's impossible, I've had great success with:
I've made tons of boards with this setup and they work great. Are there limitations? Sure. Doing pick-and-place by hand will set a lower bound on the size of components you can design with. It also forces you to keep your part count down (but you should probably be doing that anyway). For my projects, these are never even close to the biggest problems.I've been an early employee at two separate small-scale US manufacturing facilities, each making only a few hundred products annually ($x,xxx, each). Their PCBs contain several hundred components, mostly surface-mounted.
Making PCBs outside of SE Asia is not economical. You cannot afford to train labor on such a small scale, and would be foolish to manufacture more than a few of your own prototype boards.
>2. Squeegee: an old debit card
This works really well
>3. Pick and place
Even with a cheaper optical pick-&-place, you still need to examine every board thoroughly (the placements aren't optimal).
>4. Reflow: a toaster oven w/ mods
The problem with this approach is that the low thermal mass of a toaster oven results in inconsistent temperature profiles (e.g. sporadically burnt / un-soldered). I have used this setup and much prefer a larger reflow oven (with conveyer).
----
A repeated problem with this in-house PCB manufacturing dream is that the EE designer the circuit board cannot work more profitably when he has to make all the PCBs himself — which he'll have to, because he also cannot afford most American training/labor to make reliable boards.
¢¢
Oh, I would never recommend my setup for assembly of actual products. I've spent enough time in avionics to know where that line is. :) My "lab" is strictly for side projects.
What I really would love is a JLCPCB equivalent in Europe. Slightly higher prices are OK, but I want to have the the Same amount of process automation and flexibility. Should be good for a scale of a few thousend per year.
Hi! Have you every checked out aisler.net? In my opinion they do an amazing job, it's not quite JLCPCB prices, but maybe only 20% higher depending on what service you take, and they deliver faster since they are based in europe.
Their business model is pooling small orders and sending them to board fabs in europe, mainly germany and some in the east.
> maybe only 20% higher depending on what service you take
For higher-end board that seems likely. For cheap hobby-grade boards just the job fee[1] is more than 10 boards delivered is from JLCPCB.
That said, thanks for reminding me. Will definitely compare next time I need boards.
[1]: https://community.aisler.net/t/our-simple-pricing/102#p-124-...
The job fee seems to include shipping, which makes it more reasonable. But Aisler's "estimated dispatch" for the budget service is Jan 26. That's 10 business days + shipping, making it not very competitive with JLCPCB's 10-15 business days including the slowest/cheapest shipping.
Express service adds ~20 EUR, roughly the same cost as picking DHL express delivery on JLCPCB.
> For higher-end board that seems likely. For cheap hobby-grade boards just the job fee[1] is more than 10 boards delivered is from JLCPCB.
Just checked myself using a board I already had manufactured, and can confirm it's a lot higher than JLCPCB or PCBWay.
Maybe for rapid prototyping it is okay, but at scale, to make one board is more than the entire selling point of the whole device.
Aisler is decent for bare boards, but their PCBA is several orders of magnitude more expensive due to the setup & handling fees. JLCPCB has this down to a science, with their preloaded (and therefore dirt-cheap) "basic parts" and pre-approved "extended parts" pulled directly from LCSC for a small fee.
On top of that they also offer 3D printing, CNC machining, sheet metal bending, and even a McMaster-Carr-like parts store. It is literally a one-stop-shop for all your hardware prototype needs.
Have you looked at Eurocircuits? Not quite as big, but similar kind of thing.
Similar in how you order, not similar in price at all. Order of magnitude more expensive for hobby-grade boards.
Eurocircuits does the same kind of service (bar the parts library) but has the DRC - but you aren't going to get slightly higher from anyone in Europe
The parts library has a massive value.
For a lot of parts the exact details aren't crucial. If I'm using 4k7 0603 I2C pullup resistors I'm more than happy to swap them for 5k6 0402 if they just so happen to have a reel of those lying around and it means not having to wait two days for a restock.
Same with plenty of other parts. Maybe 10% is crucial, the rest can relatively easily be swapped out with whatever happens to be available. Transistor from a different manufacturer, generic level converter with two extra channels, LDO in a different package? If I know what is available, for a proto run I'm more than happy to make a few small changes!
I have been using them in the past, when I needed a board overnight. Problem is that they are prohibitively expensive. For the price of a couple of bare unpopulated boards I could get dozen boards populated (with parts priced in) from China and they would arrive at the same time. Once Brexit was fully implemented their shipping was slower than from China, so they lost all edges to me.
It's impressive how JLCPCB somehow made this process seem so seamless and easy for PCBs but also for other random components one might want.
Recently needed an 4 adapters in sheet metal for a project, two fabrication shops near me quoted >100$. Got JLCPCB to do them all for 12$ with 20$ of shipping. Got them in less than 2 weeks.
I used a Voltera V-One for a few small projects that otherwise would have been breadboarded, and it wasn't bad.
This is the approach we're taking at Pikkolo! (pikkoloassembly.com).
Heavy focus on low-capex and machines we can easily scale and hack up specifically for high-mix/low-volume work.
Hey! Don't hesitate to get in touch with us, I read your website but there isnt so much information yet, but Alex and I would love to hear more :)
What I really loved about the talk is that you got a good insight into the actual complexities of manufacturing and drew all the right conclusions from it, rather than to throw your hands up and ordering stuff from China after all.
Friends of mine - with a bit more practical experience - are doing something similar, they realize that if there ever is a real demand for their product it might be at a time when the cheap alternatives simply are no longer available and have set up from day #1 to do everything in Europe. They are - like you - quite talented but the difference is that they have access to a lot more funding and if they need a particular machine they will simply go get it rather than to make their own.
You are resource constrained and that brings out a lot of creativity, which in the longer term will turn into a competitive advantage.
This was a wonderful talk. Thank you for sharing.
Everything John Nagle said is true. But to have a meaningful discussion about it on HN is futile because we need to come together and first admit and agree that exporting everything to China has ruined the economy and culture in the West. That isn’t happening. The best we can do is remind ourselves to follow the guidelines while we get downvoted by brigades.
I watched the video and sent it to family members who are deeply involved and ve$ted in manufacturing in the West. These two boys are unlikely to see anything like this at scale in Europe. That ship has sailed while no one was looking, and it’s not coming back.
Major multi-decade fuckup.
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