Hi Andrew founder of CircuitHub here. Happy to answer any questions. Hardware design has been in the news a lot lately as it's going through the same AI revolution as coding. We're happy to make it easy to turn those designs into physical products.
I'd highly recommend you revisit your protection of customer's IP. Considering that you require source files (not just the industry standard gerbers), your legal terms are very unfavorable to customers. This makes me uncomfortable because it makes my IP much easier to leak. As written, I cannot justify the risks given your agreement.
Nothing in the legal terms explicitly prevents your employees from using my designs for other purposes. If you leak my IP and I find out 13 months later, your terms prevent me from seeking damages because you only cover 12 months from manufacturing.
I like that you have an NDA that I can opt in to, but you should be offering the NDA by default when I upload the files. I should not have to go looking for it in your documentation.
Edit: I realize that there is also limited protection and a lot of risk using a Chinese manufacturer. But requiring source files makes it much, much, easier to look at my design, recognize what it's for, and reproduce it, or at least copy the innovative parts of my design.
You can upload Gerbers/ODB++ if you like. We also sign custom NDA's. We count many of the worlds largest corporations as customers so this is pretty standard.
It’s several steps up from Chinese manufacturers already however where they will almost certainly use your design for something else if it suits them and you have no protections.
I wish you well, domestic electronic production is something we need very badly.
I won't complain about the price, I understand it's going to be more expensive than China. But it's a tough one for me. I have a budget that I have to work with, and while I have some flexibility 3X prices (your site priced $9k compared to JLC's $2k, even after tariffs and shipping) make the project nonviable for me. I hope you can continue to improve pricing over time as you scale.
Also your parts selection interface needs a lot of work. I have a very simple board and I had to go through clunky search and select for parts, even when the digikey part number was in the description.
Thanks for the feedback on part selection interface, we are just wrapping up some big improvements here. On the pricing side, if you fit within the Proto Board spec we are very comparable with JLC on much shorter lead time. If you go outside that then for now we are quite a bit higher price. But bear with us, more capacity and thus lower prices all round coming soon.
Looks interesting. As a US manufacturer/designer I will be keeping an eye on this closely.
Currently, all assembly is done in house (in the US) but bare PCBs typically are still made in CN.
We used to produce everything overseas and just do the QA/test in the US but during the chip shortage I ended up setting up the production line to attempt to eliminate any possible shortages/tariffs.
It is a difficult struggle manufacturing commercial products in the US (doubly so with an openhardware project) since the final cost is the major blocker but I decided it was worth it for many reasons. Big issue though is knowing that even if I pay someone 2x the going rate for an employee it still will not be a living wage. Not sure the fix there. I see you are planning to lean heavily on automation/AI for this, will be watching to see how it all progresses.
There are still some major blockers in the US. Commercial/Industrial real estate being a big one. Costs are not going down...even if employee count is minimized.
> Big issue though is knowing that even if I pay someone 2x the going rate for an employee it still will not be a living wage.
Being mindful of wages is great, but eventually you have to accept that creating a job at a less than ideal wage is better than not creating any job at all. If the pay is not enough then you’ll get the signal through being unable to hire because workers are taking better paying jobs.
An unintuitive feature of the job market is that creating more low paying jobs actually puts upward pressure on wages. Ideally the low end of the job market should be saturated with job opportunities, which creates a situation where employers have to compete with each other to raise wages to find and retain employees, which means pay goes up for everyone.
So don’t let worries about not being able to pay as much as you’d like get in the way of paying anyone at all. The alternative (less jobs, more outsourcing) is worse in every way.
It’s incredible that you set up an in-house PCBA pipeline. I’m curious about what that looks like, and what you are building/manufacturing, if you don’t mind sharing!
> Big issue though is knowing that even if I pay someone 2x the going rate for an employee it still will not be a living wage. Not sure the fix there.
The fix is you will just have to buy American and pay higher prices for higher "living wages". There's no way around it besides taxes or tariffs on foreign goods to equalize the wage/price difference (which does have some down sides).
I buy American and western-made products as much as possible, and I pay higher prices (assuming high quality) for those higher wages. If you want low cost, you can't by definition support "living wages".
There's no "oh if only the CEO makes less" way around it either. Labor is simply more expensive in the west and will remain so and you can vote with your wallet, as I do, or you can pay people less than living wages.
The site quotes prices for ≥4 layer board production are on the order of 10x JLCPCB. I can pay for DHL overnight from JLC and still come in from uploading my design to holding it in my hand ~7 business days or less.
A domestic PCB manufacturing pipeline, has been a pipe dream for me an many other Hardware startup EEs for a long time. Until costs are more competitive, CN still gets the business. Hope you can bring costs for small batch prototype PCB manufacturing down further in the future, then you will have our business!
Thanks for the feedback. For 5 units of 2 or 4 layer turnkey assembled boards, so long as you fit in the Grid Proto spec it's a little bit more expensive (not 10x, more like 1.3x) and much faster - we have benchmarked this quite a bit. 7 days to the US with any consistency is not possible, we have a lot of data points on that, median is about 10 days. To other countries it might be faster?
I recently went through the exercise of asking one of the Chinese manufacturers how much it would cost to build me a board (a bit pirate adapter board for ESP3 that does all the voltage conversions to the GPIO pins so you don't burn something out). Board layout & BOM already exist on github. They do 5 boards minimum. Ok, so I figure I can sell the other 4 boards, probably not a big deal. Total's about $400. Then we get to the point where I'm about the pull the trigger and it goes to a page on tariffs and it looks like at least 45% + they want my SSN to give to CBP to collect the tariff. That's a hard "Nope" on sending my SSN to China. So I'm going to give this a look.
I've ordered hundreds of things from JLC over the last decade. Both bare boards and assembled boards based on my own designs that I uploaded, BOMs i provided, and sometimes even special parts I had shipped to them. All ordered boards arrived to me just fine over their cheap shipping (name varied often, last i recall was "direct standard line") and over DHL, and precisely zero times was I asked for my SSN.
We've had a few batches of mostly assembled (minus through hole parts) prototype boards made with y'all recently, pretty stoked how quick it is. Plus no tarrifs vs the last PCBway order.
Curious, why are surface mount USB-C connectors not able to be done as part of the surface mount components (treated as a through hole I think)? Too fiddly?
Glad you had a good experience! Right now hybrid parts with SMT and through hole kick you out of the Grid Proto offer (can still order but more expensive) but we are working on fully automating them and they should be included soon.
Adding to the litany of feedback: your BOM parser and manager is a source of pain. For a few BOM items it's fine, but for 50+ with 500+ placements there it's a heavy human lift with a lot of human error that is ripe for automation. Also, DNP interpretation are large hazard for silent failures. The spreadsheet is gospel.
Andrew, congrats on the launch! Great to see another scaled manufacturer and assembly line here in Massachusetts. I helped scale another startup with personalized for 3D prints for orthodontic braces (https://lf.co/blog/deloitte-fast500-2024), so feel to reach out to exchange tips since the generic mass manufacturing world is not well suited for this new world of “one size fits one” at a global scale.
Also, one question to pick your team’s brain: What’s your team’s AI PCB workflow and design tips to work with your production line? Any specific tips for ESP32-related integrations?
Thanks, that sounds like an interesting project! We are starting to see a few AI designed boards flow in and we're working on some guidelines, should be coming soon!
"Never put any friction between your customer and giving you money"
Dude, absolutely get rid of the requirement to make an account to get a quote. Understandable(ish) to need one to check-out, but hell "Check-out as guest" was probably one of the most profitable innovations in e-commerce ever.
A longer list of accounts is not worth more than a longer list of orders.
I was interested and hit the friction twice, after making an account, It wouldn't accept eagle files or just the raw gerbers. I know it's older but even sparkfun and adafruit designs are in this format.
Hi. I'm a little confused about how many companies are under your umbrella. Is CircuitLabs the parent company for The Grid and all these other companies on this page? https://www.circuithub.com/case-studies
Are you interested in partnerships? I'm running pcbjam.com (web port of KiCad with collab, sharing, git, AI etc.) and I'm looking for a partner to do what EasyEDA is to JLC. Where can I find you?
How automated is your process. If it is the vast majority of it then why can’t you price match China. Are there other factors besides labor that causes the higher prices?
I just wanted a quote. But signup was painful it needs a major review. Then I uploaded a zip of my gerbers and it came up with some error that I could not figure out and halted any further movement. I'd love to do my PCBs domestic but the site makes it way too hard.
Earlier this month I ordered some PCBs. Due to the tariffs OSH park was actually a viable competitor for small batch runs. I've also found them to be higher quality than PCB way
I've done a lot of PCBA sourcing from Shenzhen so I have domain knowledge here.
The main latency for this is typically sourcing. The partners I've worked with will get PCBA done within a day or two once they have parts.
The claims here about a breakthrough in setup time also don't really fit with my experience. What is this, putting a new stencil in, adding different components to a hopper? I've toured PCBA factories and it's not like their lines are typically down for set-up. I think this takes like 30min?
Also, it doesn't look like they substantiate their 2x speed claims? They "benchmarked" this, but with what suppliers? Their claims would make sense if they found random suppliers, not exactly specialized in rapid prototype style PCBA, so they're not comparing like to like.
Don't get me wrong, I really want this to happen too, but the desire for this to happen seems to be making the community gullible. I'd love the founders or someone with circuithub to link to real benchmark evidence and explain why their changeover procedure can produce several days of difference.
Understandable concerns. We don't call out competitors specifically but you can probably guess who we are benchmarking against. I did the one we describe in the blog post myself with our toughest competitor in Shenzhen, it's real I assure you.
I've run hundreds of low volume orders on conventional lines, it's death by a thousand cuts, tough to describe exactly why until you do it.
In Guangdong standard turnarounds 2020-2022 were 1-2 days (unpopulated) and 3-4 days (fully populated) outside of holiday periods or special cases (>4 layers; exotic substrates; oddball components; custom through-hole soldering). Faster was available for extra money. I'm sure it's accelerated since then. About 9 calendar days international delivery from China is often achieved these days as noted by others and myself.
I do a fair bit of electronics manufacturing and excited to see this pop up.
However I have my reservations because China is incredibly cheap, incredibly fast, and incredibly skilled. Our domestic made boards tend to be lower quality with more mistakes than Chinese made ones (while also costing up to 50x more).
I'll run some designs through this later, and I really hope it is broadly viable (not just unique niches that fit their tooling)
Is all this stuff entirely machines nowadays, or do people do it by hand still?
I remember documentaries from the 90s/00s showing Chinese factories with people hand soldering stuff onto PCBs, but most components used in electronics seems way too small for that.
Depends what you're doing. Most smaller surface-mount components and these days even a lot of standardized through-hole components can be assembled via pick and place machines and reflow ovens, which are largely automated. Larger components may require some extra steps like a small blob of glue to fix them in place - this comes up a lot for edge connectors, switches, or other larger mechanical components where the weight distribution doesn't allow them to rest flat on the board during reflow. Larger through-hole devices might need assistance with initial insertion or may be paired to other mechanical interfaces like a heatsink which requires some manual interaction. In some cases (particularly for boards with through-hole components all on one side) the soldering step can be automated by wave soldering. There's still some constraints on what can be automated, but it's all a lot less manual than the 90s/00s.
Some components, particularly transformers, might also be constructed by hand for custom/complex structures. That's component assembly rather than board assembly, but it's a consistent source of manual labor involvement in the supply chain.
Design for manufacturability is one of the important goals being considered in any PCB design. High-volume or low-cost boards will optimize for automated assembly and find ways to substitute or eliminate components with higher assembly costs. Extremely high-volume boards like in smartphones can justify custom tooling if it helps automate assembly.
The assembly is almost all automated with pick and places machines and the board fabrication is mostly chemistry. The problem is changing tooling between each run: PNPs need their feeders changed to the right parts for each board and there’s limited space for them so they all have to be changed for every design that runs through. Same with the tooling for the board etching. This stuff is precision equipment and has to be properly aligned so it’s not just a simple matter of plugging and unplugging some parts.
A lot of PCBs will have one or two manual steps but they really try to minimise it. I think anything through-hole is still manual? They can be wave-soldered, but aligning them to the holes is a problem. Surface-mount components (no holes) can be placed and soldered by a fully automated process that self-aligns them to the solder pads.
There is actually still quite a bit of hand work done. For standard surface mount designs it's mostly all automated, but there is still a good amount of through hole out there.
Through hole can be automated, but it doesn't really make sense until you have pretty good volume. So that leaves it still mostly to hand.
Then there are also all the unique customizations, like non-standard mounting specs or running jumper wires.
It's not (just) about cheap labor. The sheer density of resources and knowledge in Shenzhen is just insane.
Manufacturing at small to medium scales is so heavily determined by small blockers/latencies. Missing some component, or need a modified PCB? In the US or Europe you'd be happy to find a replacement within a week, or more likely have to wait a month for it to come from China. In Shenzhen you can probably walk 2km and pick it up yourself in under an hour.
Aseembly is mostly done by machines now, even for low volume its generally done by a pick and place machine setup. But depending on your product, things like thick power terminals may still be hand soldered as not every manufacturer/equipment can handle these.
Pretty strict board requirements. They give an example motor controller, but then require your board to be 1oz copper. Motor controllers in particular often use 2oz for high current. No buried vias is an interesting requirement too. I'm not sure how often our guys use them but dense designs probably need them.
Still, looks super cool and I don't think the price difference is very high for a company doing prototypes.
I didn't like the way the example 4 layer motor controller table displayed the data. The bottom row, which says "No customs" under the image then has "5 days sooner" under their box for "The Grid", but then under Shenzen it says "$165 more", then in a tiny font "than the Shenzen shop".
I don't think it was meant to be misleading because the small font style was used throughout, and the bottom row wasn't really designed as part of the table, but it sure looks like it at first glance.
How do I select parts? That has been a historic limitation; Shenzen (What this article compares to) has vertically integrated systems. What library do I select from?
I'm not expecting it to be cheaper than China, but in the same general range, and being able to at small quantity/fast turnaround is important. Overall: I'm skeptical of the cost and time claims in the article. I am thinking "What assumptions" are here. Do they mean some part of the process is faster than that same part from China, etc. So I'm curious about what the real-world order-to-arrival time is; what the final CC charge is, and then compare that with China. They advertise faster turnaround: Is that really true than 10 days order to arrival we are used to?
OK, Its a cool video, and wish there was more joined up thinking about keeping sovereign control of designs/manufacture - but the concept isn't new. I know the UK better, but 24 hour pcbs are a thing, we have https://www.pcbtrain.co.uk (which might outsource to china anyway) but I usually prefer https://www.eurocircuits.com/ which builds in Poland. There are plenty more CEMs
Sadly neither really compete on price with jlcpcb and despite a hemisphere of delivery advantage jlcpcb can be quicker! I once got in a discussion with a Project Manager about whether the design was worth keeping some level of traceability for ~$50... he just wanted it cheaper.
I don't see why non-US companies should "vote with their wallet" by over-spending so that they can have a US supply chain instead of a Chinese supply chain. They're both foreign, outside their control and vulnerable to political stunts.
I ordered 2 power supplies from China for work, and they power supplies were $60/each, and the tariffs were $45/ea. I am all for manufacturing in the US, but holy hell, give industry time to develop the skills and infrastructure
I'd imagine that just because they've decided it's good enough to go public with it, doesn't mean it's done getting better. Or that someone else can't do it better, now that it's been shown to work.
I'm surprised they don't offer next day turn around (whenever fedex's last pickup plus however long to build). Even same day if you live close to their factory.
Meanwhile as a hobbyist I'd be glad for the discount "we will get around to it sometime in the next two weeks discount"
It’s kinda funny - half the parts on my boards are TI, but the Sherman fab only does rad-hardened components. It’s cheaper to ship me components from halfway around the world than it is to run a 120mm process node in north america.
Yeah, because the demand for parts in the US is a rounding error! Build that fab in the US and 95% of its output will need to be shipped to China, because that's where all the mass manufacturing happens.
I hope you move your fab to somewhere in the middle of the country. Part of the appeal of your concept to me is speed, but now I'm looking at cross-country FedEx, which is so expensive that it makes your service unpalatable. A plant in, say, Kansas, is a couple of days of UPS Ground from a huge portion of the country.
While logistics and delivery (both inbound parts and outbound product) are a key factor, time and cost don't map linearly to distance. Rather than being exactly central, the optimal solve is often somewhat geographically central but leverages proximity to transport corridors, ports and other factors such as weather variability.
KCI isn't a central air hub and winter weather can disrupt flow. Being further south near an East-West hub like DFW can be better (or Houston if an Atlantic port is valuable). Or if bidirectional delivery is everything, base near a Super-Hub like Memphis (Fedex) or UPS WorldPort (Louisville, KY) and go all-in on reaching lower rate tiers with one preferred domestic delivery partner.
For high-automation physical plants, scale can tend to chunk into increments beyond which 'one double-size plant' isn't meaningfully cheaper than two 'single-size' plants. Then an optimal build-out end game can be East and West plants that are each one air-hop from all major metros on that coast and a one-day truck/rail hop from 50% of customers on that coast. If it's a rapid-turn tech product, Reno can work well - half-day road trip from bay area for outbound and a Pacific port for inbound (Stockton). I don't know the quick-turn PCB assembly biz but maybe basing across the street from Digi-Key's biggest distribution center is a 'checkmate' move that beats all other advantages?
>A plant in, say, Kansas, is a couple of days of UPS Ground from a huge portion of the country.
80% of the US population lives east of the 100th meridian, which bisects Kansas.
It's probably not best to optimize for the lowest maximum ship time in the lower 48, but something more weighted for population. Lowest average transit time. I would have guessed something like Nashville, TN. Claude is telling me Nashville is up there but Dayton, OH is the best. 14% <= 1 day, 46% reached in <= 2 days and 74% reached in <= 3 days. 2.83 average.
Compared to Kansas City, KS at 5%, 25%, 61%. 3.11 average.
This fab is in South Deerfield, MA which is 15%, 26%, 52%, 3.32 avg.
I guess population is also technically not the best measure. It would be better to measure the potential customers. Which is interesting because those are going to be skewed towards the coasts to some degree.
Maybe your Kansas suggestion is more correct than I thought. I'd still wager its more like the midwest than the plains though.
Broadly speaking, there's a western supply chain and a china supply chain, lots of like for like MCU's and such in each. The western parts supply chains are actually pretty robust and built over many years so you don't hear much about them.
Awesome. Wish I could work on a project like this. I wonder how it scales compared to a long linear assembly line with lots of preloaded pick and place machines. I've been expecting the next stage of electronics automation to look more like an amazon warehouse. Parts distribution and assembly happening under the one roof, fully automated.
That's never been true (at least since the first chips or components). A lot of my Shenzhen orders have to wait on international airfreight on US-made chips because the ones I spec'd (basically the only ones that would do the job) are US-manufactured and warehoused.
Recommend you look at a world map of Intel fabs. Or Micron Fabs.
Lets be realistic.. components meaning 0805 capacitors and resistors, small digital ICs. I can almost guarantee those aren't made in the US... and are WAY cheaper on a site like LCSC.
Lots of use cases are more speed than cost sensitive. I.e. yes if you are paying a bunch of engineers in Boston who graduated from MIT to work on robotics $165 is a rounding error if you aren’t producing at scale.
Basically anything aerospace and defense related will care more about speed and compliance than cost.
You don't accept industry standard formats and require source... that rules you right out of the aerospace company I work for. That's billions of dollars gone from your potential pool.
You spent 5 years developing this fab and somehow ignored regular industry standards the entire time? That does not instill confidence in your services, at least from my standpoint.
Needing to sign up for a quote? Who are you selling this data to?
We work with many of the worlds largest companies, speak to our account management team for custom contracts and such. We also support Gerbers, ODB++ and IPC-2581 if you like, the flow is just a little less slick.
Sorry about that, we went viral in various places this week and demand has been through the roof. We are working round the clock to get more capacity online.
This is great, especially as easypcbusa is being absorbed into a much more expensive conglomerate. Looking forward to seeing if they do just-pcb pricing as well
kudos! for solving a hardwares, hardware problem, but especialy for the open, matter of fact demenour devoid of rhetoric.
aaaand the web site renders perfectly on my less than standard browser, fast too.
Hi Andrew founder of CircuitHub here. Happy to answer any questions. Hardware design has been in the news a lot lately as it's going through the same AI revolution as coding. We're happy to make it easy to turn those designs into physical products.
I'd highly recommend you revisit your protection of customer's IP. Considering that you require source files (not just the industry standard gerbers), your legal terms are very unfavorable to customers. This makes me uncomfortable because it makes my IP much easier to leak. As written, I cannot justify the risks given your agreement.
Nothing in the legal terms explicitly prevents your employees from using my designs for other purposes. If you leak my IP and I find out 13 months later, your terms prevent me from seeking damages because you only cover 12 months from manufacturing.
I like that you have an NDA that I can opt in to, but you should be offering the NDA by default when I upload the files. I should not have to go looking for it in your documentation.
Edit: I realize that there is also limited protection and a lot of risk using a Chinese manufacturer. But requiring source files makes it much, much, easier to look at my design, recognize what it's for, and reproduce it, or at least copy the innovative parts of my design.
You can upload Gerbers/ODB++ if you like. We also sign custom NDA's. We count many of the worlds largest corporations as customers so this is pretty standard.
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It’s several steps up from Chinese manufacturers already however where they will almost certainly use your design for something else if it suits them and you have no protections.
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I wish you well, domestic electronic production is something we need very badly.
I won't complain about the price, I understand it's going to be more expensive than China. But it's a tough one for me. I have a budget that I have to work with, and while I have some flexibility 3X prices (your site priced $9k compared to JLC's $2k, even after tariffs and shipping) make the project nonviable for me. I hope you can continue to improve pricing over time as you scale.
Also your parts selection interface needs a lot of work. I have a very simple board and I had to go through clunky search and select for parts, even when the digikey part number was in the description.
Thanks for the feedback on part selection interface, we are just wrapping up some big improvements here. On the pricing side, if you fit within the Proto Board spec we are very comparable with JLC on much shorter lead time. If you go outside that then for now we are quite a bit higher price. But bear with us, more capacity and thus lower prices all round coming soon.
Looks interesting. As a US manufacturer/designer I will be keeping an eye on this closely.
Currently, all assembly is done in house (in the US) but bare PCBs typically are still made in CN. We used to produce everything overseas and just do the QA/test in the US but during the chip shortage I ended up setting up the production line to attempt to eliminate any possible shortages/tariffs.
It is a difficult struggle manufacturing commercial products in the US (doubly so with an openhardware project) since the final cost is the major blocker but I decided it was worth it for many reasons. Big issue though is knowing that even if I pay someone 2x the going rate for an employee it still will not be a living wage. Not sure the fix there. I see you are planning to lean heavily on automation/AI for this, will be watching to see how it all progresses.
There are still some major blockers in the US. Commercial/Industrial real estate being a big one. Costs are not going down...even if employee count is minimized.
I wish nothing but the best for the project.
> Big issue though is knowing that even if I pay someone 2x the going rate for an employee it still will not be a living wage.
Being mindful of wages is great, but eventually you have to accept that creating a job at a less than ideal wage is better than not creating any job at all. If the pay is not enough then you’ll get the signal through being unable to hire because workers are taking better paying jobs.
An unintuitive feature of the job market is that creating more low paying jobs actually puts upward pressure on wages. Ideally the low end of the job market should be saturated with job opportunities, which creates a situation where employers have to compete with each other to raise wages to find and retain employees, which means pay goes up for everyone.
So don’t let worries about not being able to pay as much as you’d like get in the way of paying anyone at all. The alternative (less jobs, more outsourcing) is worse in every way.
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It’s incredible that you set up an in-house PCBA pipeline. I’m curious about what that looks like, and what you are building/manufacturing, if you don’t mind sharing!
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Thanks! Best of luck with your project also!
> Big issue though is knowing that even if I pay someone 2x the going rate for an employee it still will not be a living wage. Not sure the fix there.
The fix is you will just have to buy American and pay higher prices for higher "living wages". There's no way around it besides taxes or tariffs on foreign goods to equalize the wage/price difference (which does have some down sides).
I buy American and western-made products as much as possible, and I pay higher prices (assuming high quality) for those higher wages. If you want low cost, you can't by definition support "living wages".
There's no "oh if only the CEO makes less" way around it either. Labor is simply more expensive in the west and will remain so and you can vote with your wallet, as I do, or you can pay people less than living wages.
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The site quotes prices for ≥4 layer board production are on the order of 10x JLCPCB. I can pay for DHL overnight from JLC and still come in from uploading my design to holding it in my hand ~7 business days or less.
A domestic PCB manufacturing pipeline, has been a pipe dream for me an many other Hardware startup EEs for a long time. Until costs are more competitive, CN still gets the business. Hope you can bring costs for small batch prototype PCB manufacturing down further in the future, then you will have our business!
Thanks for the feedback. For 5 units of 2 or 4 layer turnkey assembled boards, so long as you fit in the Grid Proto spec it's a little bit more expensive (not 10x, more like 1.3x) and much faster - we have benchmarked this quite a bit. 7 days to the US with any consistency is not possible, we have a lot of data points on that, median is about 10 days. To other countries it might be faster?
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I recently went through the exercise of asking one of the Chinese manufacturers how much it would cost to build me a board (a bit pirate adapter board for ESP3 that does all the voltage conversions to the GPIO pins so you don't burn something out). Board layout & BOM already exist on github. They do 5 boards minimum. Ok, so I figure I can sell the other 4 boards, probably not a big deal. Total's about $400. Then we get to the point where I'm about the pull the trigger and it goes to a page on tariffs and it looks like at least 45% + they want my SSN to give to CBP to collect the tariff. That's a hard "Nope" on sending my SSN to China. So I'm going to give this a look.
What company is asking for your SSN?
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I've ordered hundreds of things from JLC over the last decade. Both bare boards and assembled boards based on my own designs that I uploaded, BOMs i provided, and sometimes even special parts I had shipped to them. All ordered boards arrived to me just fine over their cheap shipping (name varied often, last i recall was "direct standard line") and over DHL, and precisely zero times was I asked for my SSN.
We've had a few batches of mostly assembled (minus through hole parts) prototype boards made with y'all recently, pretty stoked how quick it is. Plus no tarrifs vs the last PCBway order.
Curious, why are surface mount USB-C connectors not able to be done as part of the surface mount components (treated as a through hole I think)? Too fiddly?
Glad you had a good experience! Right now hybrid parts with SMT and through hole kick you out of the Grid Proto offer (can still order but more expensive) but we are working on fully automating them and they should be included soon.
Adding to the litany of feedback: your BOM parser and manager is a source of pain. For a few BOM items it's fine, but for 50+ with 500+ placements there it's a heavy human lift with a lot of human error that is ripe for automation. Also, DNP interpretation are large hazard for silent failures. The spreadsheet is gospel.
Yeah it’s not great right now, big improvements coming, thanks for the feedback!
Andrew, congrats on the launch! Great to see another scaled manufacturer and assembly line here in Massachusetts. I helped scale another startup with personalized for 3D prints for orthodontic braces (https://lf.co/blog/deloitte-fast500-2024), so feel to reach out to exchange tips since the generic mass manufacturing world is not well suited for this new world of “one size fits one” at a global scale.
Also, one question to pick your team’s brain: What’s your team’s AI PCB workflow and design tips to work with your production line? Any specific tips for ESP32-related integrations?
Thanks, that sounds like an interesting project! We are starting to see a few AI designed boards flow in and we're working on some guidelines, should be coming soon!
Business 101, page 1, line 1:
"Never put any friction between your customer and giving you money"
Dude, absolutely get rid of the requirement to make an account to get a quote. Understandable(ish) to need one to check-out, but hell "Check-out as guest" was probably one of the most profitable innovations in e-commerce ever.
A longer list of accounts is not worth more than a longer list of orders.
I was interested and hit the friction twice, after making an account, It wouldn't accept eagle files or just the raw gerbers. I know it's older but even sparkfun and adafruit designs are in this format.
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100%. Let people play and —most importantly— invest time and effort in the platform without friction.
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Since you have been building for years you must be aware of how tariffs affect the viability. how would a reduction to zero affect the project?
Not viability but tariffs do swing in our favour, it’s a tailwind for sure.
Hi. I'm a little confused about how many companies are under your umbrella. Is CircuitLabs the parent company for The Grid and all these other companies on this page? https://www.circuithub.com/case-studies
Hey,
Are you interested in partnerships? I'm running pcbjam.com (web port of KiCad with collab, sharing, git, AI etc.) and I'm looking for a partner to do what EasyEDA is to JLC. Where can I find you?
Are you considering any in-house fab capabilities? Are you considering accepting consigned fabbed boards?
GERBER is the standard. Why won't you accept it?
What's the refinement process been like over the last five years? Many small problems or a few larger ones?
Are you manufacturing in the UK as well? Saw on your site you are hiring mechanical engineers here.
How automated is your process. If it is the vast majority of it then why can’t you price match China. Are there other factors besides labor that causes the higher prices?
I'd love to see you successful, so wanted to comment:
The app feels very vibe-coded, and gives impression it's not well tested and polished for a new user/project.
I appreciate PCBs aren't the usual the consumer-level type of user, but I felt confused by a lot compared to JLCPCB. Hope that helps.
How much of a concern are environmental regulations?
I just wanted a quote. But signup was painful it needs a major review. Then I uploaded a zip of my gerbers and it came up with some error that I could not figure out and halted any further movement. I'd love to do my PCBs domestic but the site makes it way too hard.
I've been using Macrofab for a couple years now and their experience is MUCH smoother. Prices are a bit higher, but for me, that is not an issue.
How high?
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Earlier this month I ordered some PCBs. Due to the tariffs OSH park was actually a viable competitor for small batch runs. I've also found them to be higher quality than PCB way
OSHPark is a nonstarter for many workflows because they don't do assembly. I can't do anything with a plain PCB!
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eish sorry about the bad experience here. If you could drop a note to support@circuithub.com we'll get you fixed up.
Also uploaded an old gerber export straight from KiCAD and no dice. The project files themselves seemed to work.
I've done a lot of PCBA sourcing from Shenzhen so I have domain knowledge here.
The main latency for this is typically sourcing. The partners I've worked with will get PCBA done within a day or two once they have parts.
The claims here about a breakthrough in setup time also don't really fit with my experience. What is this, putting a new stencil in, adding different components to a hopper? I've toured PCBA factories and it's not like their lines are typically down for set-up. I think this takes like 30min?
Also, it doesn't look like they substantiate their 2x speed claims? They "benchmarked" this, but with what suppliers? Their claims would make sense if they found random suppliers, not exactly specialized in rapid prototype style PCBA, so they're not comparing like to like.
Don't get me wrong, I really want this to happen too, but the desire for this to happen seems to be making the community gullible. I'd love the founders or someone with circuithub to link to real benchmark evidence and explain why their changeover procedure can produce several days of difference.
Understandable concerns. We don't call out competitors specifically but you can probably guess who we are benchmarking against. I did the one we describe in the blog post myself with our toughest competitor in Shenzhen, it's real I assure you.
I've run hundreds of low volume orders on conventional lines, it's death by a thousand cuts, tough to describe exactly why until you do it.
In Guangdong standard turnarounds 2020-2022 were 1-2 days (unpopulated) and 3-4 days (fully populated) outside of holiday periods or special cases (>4 layers; exotic substrates; oddball components; custom through-hole soldering). Faster was available for extra money. I'm sure it's accelerated since then. About 9 calendar days international delivery from China is often achieved these days as noted by others and myself.
The biggest latency I feel is in getting through PMO and DFM. Shenzhen doesn't have this issue and neither does circuithub.
I do a fair bit of electronics manufacturing and excited to see this pop up.
However I have my reservations because China is incredibly cheap, incredibly fast, and incredibly skilled. Our domestic made boards tend to be lower quality with more mistakes than Chinese made ones (while also costing up to 50x more).
I'll run some designs through this later, and I really hope it is broadly viable (not just unique niches that fit their tooling)
Is all this stuff entirely machines nowadays, or do people do it by hand still?
I remember documentaries from the 90s/00s showing Chinese factories with people hand soldering stuff onto PCBs, but most components used in electronics seems way too small for that.
Depends what you're doing. Most smaller surface-mount components and these days even a lot of standardized through-hole components can be assembled via pick and place machines and reflow ovens, which are largely automated. Larger components may require some extra steps like a small blob of glue to fix them in place - this comes up a lot for edge connectors, switches, or other larger mechanical components where the weight distribution doesn't allow them to rest flat on the board during reflow. Larger through-hole devices might need assistance with initial insertion or may be paired to other mechanical interfaces like a heatsink which requires some manual interaction. In some cases (particularly for boards with through-hole components all on one side) the soldering step can be automated by wave soldering. There's still some constraints on what can be automated, but it's all a lot less manual than the 90s/00s.
Some components, particularly transformers, might also be constructed by hand for custom/complex structures. That's component assembly rather than board assembly, but it's a consistent source of manual labor involvement in the supply chain.
Design for manufacturability is one of the important goals being considered in any PCB design. High-volume or low-cost boards will optimize for automated assembly and find ways to substitute or eliminate components with higher assembly costs. Extremely high-volume boards like in smartphones can justify custom tooling if it helps automate assembly.
The assembly is almost all automated with pick and places machines and the board fabrication is mostly chemistry. The problem is changing tooling between each run: PNPs need their feeders changed to the right parts for each board and there’s limited space for them so they all have to be changed for every design that runs through. Same with the tooling for the board etching. This stuff is precision equipment and has to be properly aligned so it’s not just a simple matter of plugging and unplugging some parts.
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A lot of PCBs will have one or two manual steps but they really try to minimise it. I think anything through-hole is still manual? They can be wave-soldered, but aligning them to the holes is a problem. Surface-mount components (no holes) can be placed and soldered by a fully automated process that self-aligns them to the solder pads.
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There is actually still quite a bit of hand work done. For standard surface mount designs it's mostly all automated, but there is still a good amount of through hole out there.
Through hole can be automated, but it doesn't really make sense until you have pretty good volume. So that leaves it still mostly to hand.
Then there are also all the unique customizations, like non-standard mounting specs or running jumper wires.
It's not (just) about cheap labor. The sheer density of resources and knowledge in Shenzhen is just insane.
Manufacturing at small to medium scales is so heavily determined by small blockers/latencies. Missing some component, or need a modified PCB? In the US or Europe you'd be happy to find a replacement within a week, or more likely have to wait a month for it to come from China. In Shenzhen you can probably walk 2km and pick it up yourself in under an hour.
Aseembly is mostly done by machines now, even for low volume its generally done by a pick and place machine setup. But depending on your product, things like thick power terminals may still be hand soldered as not every manufacturer/equipment can handle these.
The review (design for assembly) is done by hand.
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China is super impressive for sure. I agree the existing domestic options are not great and we founded CircuitHub to fix that :-)
Pretty strict board requirements. They give an example motor controller, but then require your board to be 1oz copper. Motor controllers in particular often use 2oz for high current. No buried vias is an interesting requirement too. I'm not sure how often our guys use them but dense designs probably need them.
Still, looks super cool and I don't think the price difference is very high for a company doing prototypes.
like 99% of all prototype fit 1oz copper and within 4 layers. no via-in-pad.
Yeah working on expanding the options here :-)
I didn't like the way the example 4 layer motor controller table displayed the data. The bottom row, which says "No customs" under the image then has "5 days sooner" under their box for "The Grid", but then under Shenzen it says "$165 more", then in a tiny font "than the Shenzen shop".
I don't think it was meant to be misleading because the small font style was used throughout, and the bottom row wasn't really designed as part of the table, but it sure looks like it at first glance.
Well, yeah. That table has the classic randomly-selected and randomly-placed text of an AI output.
How do I select parts? That has been a historic limitation; Shenzen (What this article compares to) has vertically integrated systems. What library do I select from?
I'm not expecting it to be cheaper than China, but in the same general range, and being able to at small quantity/fast turnaround is important. Overall: I'm skeptical of the cost and time claims in the article. I am thinking "What assumptions" are here. Do they mean some part of the process is faster than that same part from China, etc. So I'm curious about what the real-world order-to-arrival time is; what the final CC charge is, and then compare that with China. They advertise faster turnaround: Is that really true than 10 days order to arrival we are used to?
OK, Its a cool video, and wish there was more joined up thinking about keeping sovereign control of designs/manufacture - but the concept isn't new. I know the UK better, but 24 hour pcbs are a thing, we have https://www.pcbtrain.co.uk (which might outsource to china anyway) but I usually prefer https://www.eurocircuits.com/ which builds in Poland. There are plenty more CEMs
Sadly neither really compete on price with jlcpcb and despite a hemisphere of delivery advantage jlcpcb can be quicker! I once got in a discussion with a Project Manager about whether the design was worth keeping some level of traceability for ~$50... he just wanted it cheaper.
Faster than Shenzen, fine ... but quite a bit more expensive, even taking into account the USA tariffs, which we do not have in the rest of the world.
Seems to me that Shenzen still wins at least for the non-USA world.
Costs come down at scale. Vote with your wallet, tell your friends, and we just might have our faster+better+cheaper problem solved.
I don't see why non-US companies should "vote with their wallet" by over-spending so that they can have a US supply chain instead of a Chinese supply chain. They're both foreign, outside their control and vulnerable to political stunts.
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This is HN. Asking people here to consider any long-term geopolitical ramifications associated with their economic activity is futile.
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I ordered 2 power supplies from China for work, and they power supplies were $60/each, and the tariffs were $45/ea. I am all for manufacturing in the US, but holy hell, give industry time to develop the skills and infrastructure
For now.
I'd imagine that just because they've decided it's good enough to go public with it, doesn't mean it's done getting better. Or that someone else can't do it better, now that it's been shown to work.
The first Circuit Hub link posted to HN was in 2013.
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But for prototyping, paying extra for quick turnaround is often very sensible
I'm surprised they don't offer next day turn around (whenever fedex's last pickup plus however long to build). Even same day if you live close to their factory.
Meanwhile as a hobbyist I'd be glad for the discount "we will get around to it sometime in the next two weeks discount"
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Right.
Plus if you can get someone on the phone there can be value in that.
And if a sales engineer comes out and sees your operation you might get more than a free lunch…
"...supply chain you can count on"
Except the components are mostly coming from China anyways, so the same disruptions are potentially in play.
Still, cool to see domestic options.
It’s kinda funny - half the parts on my boards are TI, but the Sherman fab only does rad-hardened components. It’s cheaper to ship me components from halfway around the world than it is to run a 120mm process node in north america.
Yeah, because the demand for parts in the US is a rounding error! Build that fab in the US and 95% of its output will need to be shipped to China, because that's where all the mass manufacturing happens.
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Congratulations on this automation, which I know from first-hand experience is very difficult to pull off.
Is the robot really working with individual boards and not panels? How do you deal with balancing copper area, and varying etch times?
People often focus on the assembly side as “hard” but quick-turn manufacturing of the PCB is vicious.
I hope you move your fab to somewhere in the middle of the country. Part of the appeal of your concept to me is speed, but now I'm looking at cross-country FedEx, which is so expensive that it makes your service unpalatable. A plant in, say, Kansas, is a couple of days of UPS Ground from a huge portion of the country.
> A plant in, say, Kansas.
While logistics and delivery (both inbound parts and outbound product) are a key factor, time and cost don't map linearly to distance. Rather than being exactly central, the optimal solve is often somewhat geographically central but leverages proximity to transport corridors, ports and other factors such as weather variability.
KCI isn't a central air hub and winter weather can disrupt flow. Being further south near an East-West hub like DFW can be better (or Houston if an Atlantic port is valuable). Or if bidirectional delivery is everything, base near a Super-Hub like Memphis (Fedex) or UPS WorldPort (Louisville, KY) and go all-in on reaching lower rate tiers with one preferred domestic delivery partner.
For high-automation physical plants, scale can tend to chunk into increments beyond which 'one double-size plant' isn't meaningfully cheaper than two 'single-size' plants. Then an optimal build-out end game can be East and West plants that are each one air-hop from all major metros on that coast and a one-day truck/rail hop from 50% of customers on that coast. If it's a rapid-turn tech product, Reno can work well - half-day road trip from bay area for outbound and a Pacific port for inbound (Stockton). I don't know the quick-turn PCB assembly biz but maybe basing across the street from Digi-Key's biggest distribution center is a 'checkmate' move that beats all other advantages?
Logistics strategy is fun!
>A plant in, say, Kansas, is a couple of days of UPS Ground from a huge portion of the country.
80% of the US population lives east of the 100th meridian, which bisects Kansas.
It's probably not best to optimize for the lowest maximum ship time in the lower 48, but something more weighted for population. Lowest average transit time. I would have guessed something like Nashville, TN. Claude is telling me Nashville is up there but Dayton, OH is the best. 14% <= 1 day, 46% reached in <= 2 days and 74% reached in <= 3 days. 2.83 average.
Compared to Kansas City, KS at 5%, 25%, 61%. 3.11 average.
This fab is in South Deerfield, MA which is 15%, 26%, 52%, 3.32 avg.
I guess population is also technically not the best measure. It would be better to measure the potential customers. Which is interesting because those are going to be skewed towards the coasts to some degree.
Maybe your Kansas suggestion is more correct than I thought. I'd still wager its more like the midwest than the plains though.
The big advantage Kansas has is a living wage is lower. That probably isn't the biggest bottleneck in this case though.
I hear you. We need more locations. I'm hoping we can do a bit better than ground actually as drone delivery comes online.
I'm willing to bet most of that delay is shipping and most will wait a few days to save $100.
Logically having a robot is great, but doesn't Shenzen still have a massive supply chain for the actual stuff that goes on the boards?
Broadly speaking, there's a western supply chain and a china supply chain, lots of like for like MCU's and such in each. The western parts supply chains are actually pretty robust and built over many years so you don't hear much about them.
Awesome. Wish I could work on a project like this. I wonder how it scales compared to a long linear assembly line with lots of preloaded pick and place machines. I've been expecting the next stage of electronics automation to look more like an amazon warehouse. Parts distribution and assembly happening under the one roof, fully automated.
How long until you've built the Grid into a shipping container and are selling those?
Can't wait to see how quickly I can get boards next time I need a batch! The adage 'hardware is hard' is getting less true every day
> So you pay about $165 more than the Shenzhen shop and get your boards five days sooner, with no customs and a supply chain you can count on.
A supply chain that also comes from Shenzhen... last time I checked, North America doesn't make chips or other components either.
North America doesn't make chips or components?
That's never been true (at least since the first chips or components). A lot of my Shenzhen orders have to wait on international airfreight on US-made chips because the ones I spec'd (basically the only ones that would do the job) are US-manufactured and warehoused.
Recommend you look at a world map of Intel fabs. Or Micron Fabs.
Lets be realistic.. components meaning 0805 capacitors and resistors, small digital ICs. I can almost guarantee those aren't made in the US... and are WAY cheaper on a site like LCSC.
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Lots of use cases are more speed than cost sensitive. I.e. yes if you are paying a bunch of engineers in Boston who graduated from MIT to work on robotics $165 is a rounding error if you aren’t producing at scale.
Basically anything aerospace and defense related will care more about speed and compliance than cost.
This is great! Are you able to do IFA for UL certification? That would be a killer for us!
You don't accept industry standard formats and require source... that rules you right out of the aerospace company I work for. That's billions of dollars gone from your potential pool.
You spent 5 years developing this fab and somehow ignored regular industry standards the entire time? That does not instill confidence in your services, at least from my standpoint.
Needing to sign up for a quote? Who are you selling this data to?
We work with many of the worlds largest companies, speak to our account management team for custom contracts and such. We also support Gerbers, ODB++ and IPC-2581 if you like, the flow is just a little less slick.
Great news, wish you all the best. I just wish the PCB sizes could stretch a bit to 330mm by 330mm.
Interesting, kind of reminds me of SendCutSend
Love those guys. Happy customer also.
TIL "parity" is now measured on a logarithmic scale.
can we use an older version of ultiboard
Glad to see some homegrown companies competing with the chinese, especially with PCBs.
Amazing. Is something like this available now, or in the future, for hobbyists? Happy to pay retail prices.
The link back to your home page is a dead link. At least on mobile.
rids proto fully booked. so they have no o capacity. we cannot even get a quote to know the pricing of grids proto.
Sorry about that, we went viral in various places this week and demand has been through the roof. We are working round the clock to get more capacity online.
This is great, especially as easypcbusa is being absorbed into a much more expensive conglomerate. Looking forward to seeing if they do just-pcb pricing as well
"The Grid. A digital frontier."
This guy gets it :-)
kudos! for solving a hardwares, hardware problem, but especialy for the open, matter of fact demenour devoid of rhetoric. aaaand the web site renders perfectly on my less than standard browser, fast too.
Ah thanks!
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