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seddona

709 karma · joined August 29, 2010

Co-founder, CEO @ CircuitHub
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seddona··on The Grid, a factory-scale robot in Massachusetts that builds PCBs on demand
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.
seddona··on The Grid, a factory-scale robot in Massachusetts that builds PCBs on demand
Ah thanks!
seddona··on The Grid, a factory-scale robot in Massachusetts that builds PCBs on demand
This guy gets it :-)
seddona··on The Grid, a factory-scale robot in Massachusetts that builds PCBs on demand
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.
seddona··on The Grid, a factory-scale robot in Massachusetts that builds PCBs on demand
Love those guys. Happy customer also.
seddona··on The Grid, a factory-scale robot in Massachusetts that builds PCBs on demand
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.
seddona··on The Grid, a factory-scale robot in Massachusetts that builds PCBs on demand
I hear you. We need more locations. I'm hoping we can do a bit better than ground actually as drone delivery comes online.
seddona··on The Grid, a factory-scale robot in Massachusetts that builds PCBs on demand
Yeah Europe needs this capability too, we have offices in Europe so you can probably guess where this is going :-)
seddona··on The Grid, a factory-scale robot in Massachusetts that builds PCBs on demand
Yeah working on expanding the options here :-)
seddona··on The Grid, a factory-scale robot in Massachusetts that builds PCBs on demand
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.

seddona··on The Grid, a factory-scale robot in Massachusetts that builds PCBs on demand
We have hundreds of thousands of parts in stock ready to go on The Grid. It's actually way more integrated than JLC.
seddona··on The Grid, a factory-scale robot in Massachusetts that builds PCBs on demand
China is super impressive for sure. I agree the existing domestic options are not great and we founded CircuitHub to fix that :-)
seddona··on The Grid, a factory-scale robot in Massachusetts that builds PCBs on demand
eish sorry about the bad experience here. If you could drop a note to support@circuithub.com we'll get you fixed up.
seddona··on The Grid, a factory-scale robot in Massachusetts that builds PCBs on demand
Yeah mostly we just haven't got around to it as the burning fire is always increasing capacity vs demand. Defo agree we should not require login though!
seddona··on The Grid, a factory-scale robot in Massachusetts that builds PCBs on demand
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!
seddona··on The Grid, a factory-scale robot in Massachusetts that builds PCBs on demand
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.
seddona··on The Grid, a factory-scale robot in Massachusetts that builds PCBs on demand
Not viability but tariffs do swing in our favour, it’s a tailwind for sure.
seddona··on The Grid, a factory-scale robot in Massachusetts that builds PCBs on demand
Yeah it’s not great right now, big improvements coming, thanks for the feedback!
seddona··on The Grid, a factory-scale robot in Massachusetts that builds PCBs on demand
Yep that includes parts.
seddona··on The Grid, a factory-scale robot in Massachusetts that builds PCBs on demand
One nice aspect of automation is that we are able to pay people well due to the leverage. I'm proud of the fact we've been able to create a lot of good well paying high tech jobs in an area that really didn't have many.
seddona··on The Grid, a factory-scale robot in Massachusetts that builds PCBs on demand
Thanks! Best of luck with your project also!
seddona··on The Grid, a factory-scale robot in Massachusetts that builds PCBs on demand
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.
seddona··on The Grid, a factory-scale robot in Massachusetts that builds PCBs on demand
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.
seddona··on The Grid, a factory-scale robot in Massachusetts that builds PCBs on demand
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?
seddona··on The Grid, a factory-scale robot in Massachusetts that builds PCBs on demand
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.
seddona··on Viagrid – PCB template for rapid PCB prototyping with factory-made vias [video]
CircuitHub founder here. Most fab by order volume is in the US, but for now, at least, we do have to source some fab from overseas for various reasons.
seddona··on Launch HN: Modernbanc (YC W20) – Modern and fast accounting software
This would be super interesting as an open-core company. In particular, we would want direct access to the underlying SQL database and the ability to customize the code directly.
seddona··on The Curse of NixOS
Interesting to see exponential growth in NixOS github stars https://star-history.com/#NixOS/nixpkgs&Date . Perhaps the user base is reaching a tipping point where there will be the resources to address some of these problems.
seddona··on Wiretrustee: WireGuard-Based Mesh Network
Currently running our corporate VPN on Wireguard, would highly recommend. Wiretrustee looks like a very useful featurset on top of Wireguard, nice work.
seddona··on Mobile NixOS
At CircuitHub we use NixOS on embedded devices, x86 though. I know of a few other commercial embedded users. Works great.
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