I have a delima. I have 2 pcb designs with 50+ components each. Based on the pcb assembly quote I could buy a rework station on the cost of just 1 spin of 1 design. If there is something wrong with the design then I’m out the cost if the assembly + components; and I don’t want to do that.
The question is: should I get the rework station and stuff the first few spins of boards myself ( no I can’t find someone locally to do it)?
how many boards do you need to make in prototyping, and for real? How developed is your board - how confident are you that this should work?
Paging @Justin who has a picknplace that may not get much use??
Personally, I’d always do prototype boards myself, but I’m a tightar$e. 50 is not that much - I’ve modded a toaster oven for reflow, and I have an SMT hot-air gun (not a rework station) which is good enough for most things needed, except fine pitch, small amounts of solder etc… then I’m screwed.
The cost in doing small run boards is the setup time on a machine - the NRE, non-recurring engineering time - making the pnp know how to grab the component, and put it in the right spot/orientation. Doing that takes X minutes/hours, and they then have to recoup that cost spread out over your job - which in a small run prototype could be as little as say 10 boards, making the per-board cost very high. Since it’s a prototype, that NRE is wasted unless your board was perfect, then they need to have minimal setup time for doing a production run. So your challenge is making the NRE actually NR, and you can do that through spending money (with them to do tests) or through labour doing the assembly yourself the first time
@Brett, Since there are 4 types of boards and I need to build at least 3 machines to prove that I can manufacture them, that means a total of 12 boards that must be stuffed. I’ll be getting the pcbs in batches of 10.
For real, I’m looking at making 104 machines; 416 boards + extras in the event of breakage, and to offer them as a product outright).
Edit: On board has $40 dollars worth of components on it, another has $100 dollars. The third and forth, I don’t yet know.
for a run of 10, your NRE will kill you unless you can pimp out the work to someone cheap. @justin is cheap, but I am not sure me pimping him out like this is cool with him So really your only first-run option is to do a hand-stuff run on one or two to prove the design works, then scale out to the remainder of your 10 boards (assuming it runs) to get your three working prototypes.
NRE. At some point, you have to pay it. You’d want to be sure the 104 (call it 120 for manufacturing losses?) are not going to need changes before committing the NRE lock-in.
he forgot one point. Order stainless steel solder stencil, even for your first board / IR oven builds. Especially if you have small pin pitches and/or close component spacing. Doing toothpick placement on small stuff sucks the proverbial - just don’t ask how I know
Send your BOM and Gerber’s to MyroPCB and ask for a quote.
I’ve used them loads of times and very good service. Very fast time to quote too and they do due diligence on your parts list to PCB layout to make sure no issues with parts.
Nothing to lose asking for a quote. They are well happy to do small runs. I’ve done as little as 4 PCB’s before.
Yes, order a stencil. Have a look at ALLPCB if you havent.
I can run a single board thru the PnP as 90% of my BOM’s are common which use reels that dont change on the PnP. Generating the PnP files from Altium or the like is a single click so for me PnP setup generally takes 5 mins.
@Mr_John_Smith, give AllPCB a try out next time. You can get your PCB’s as a panel or you can get them as single.
I just ordered 5 off 100 x 65mm 2 layer boards from AllPCB. $20 including shipping and 24 hour (working day) service. I used to use Seeed Studio but they did not do the board cutouts. Prior to AllPCB, I used DFRobot and they were good for board cutouts etc but took far longer and more expensive.
Those look good. I’d love to use them for population but I get stung badly on import costs. I do use them for all of my PCB’s these days. Great quality and super fast on 2 layer for the simple boards.