willcarkner

It's important to focus on where real innovation in the space is happening, and to me that's in drones. Some of the hype is overstated but drones are the new additions to conflict, and they're clearly not going away.

Circuit hub has something very interesting in the works. They're a few steps ahead of us.

We however plan to own the full stack, from design to board bring-up and testing. We believe that design is becoming commoditized with AI tools, but these systems need manufacturers that are involved from the start to bring down lead times.

Volume unit costs matter a lot. What matters less is cost during prototyping and development, where speed to iteration becomes way more important.

They all have this service, but they don't often stick to these lead times in my experience. We help hold them accountable and in the long term we are opening a facility to bring the cost down further.

Interesting stuff, definitely a lot of new demand due to the FCC rules. Curious to see how they hold up though.

We source PCBs from both China and USA. Some of our customers want incredibly fast turn where Chinese shipping times don't cut it.

> How do you intend to address this supply chain risk?

Haven't yet figured it out. Options are opening bare board fabs or partnering with US fabs and panelizing orders.

Haven't yet worked with them, but that is one of our goals. We produce documentation to trace all components up the supply chain. In cases where the part is truly only available in CN, we clearly state this.

That would be super cool. Difficulty comes with multi-layer PCBs, hard to find a solution for laminating.

Non-defense teams find value in getting fab done overseas and then turning to us for assembly and procurement. Bare boards are super expensive here.

Minimum board count: 5

Releasing detailed capability docs on our website today or tomorrow.

PCBA lines are largely automated as of today, issues start when you do high-mix work. Most time ends up being spent switching between jobs and programming machines, meaning that tool usage time is low.

Possibly, but our users find value in not having to kit, store, or ship parts to CMs.

Site is not cutting it anymore, going to dedicate some better effort to bring it up to standard.

This is our first step to work more closely with the designer throughout the process.

Currently there's a wall between the designer and the manufacturer, which hurts lead times massively, we're aiming to bring that down.

This is exactly our initial market. We realized you can't beat China for a long time, so what do you do in that time? Service demand where you have a structural advantage.

You're right, putting more attention to that now.

Defense adjacent work is another place where we're seeing some strong pull.

> scalable business beyond being yet another Oshkosh

Yes, OSH Park is awesome. They could add PCBA, but we see the long-term value in owning the full stack (from design to testing of finished boards). Stops us from having a knife fight all the way down.

Thanks for the feedback. We can ship to Canada, haven't done it yet, but open to it!

Sorry for the confusion, our time was spent doing manual work because we didn't have much automation at all. For the industry, assembly is not the biggest immediate bottleneck, with it being quite commodotized. However, we plan to open an automated assembly facility in the next few months to take stronger advantage of our front-of-house automations.

Yes, pricing is much higher than China over here, mainly due to the non-existent support for high-mix low-volume work. NRE adds a lot, and so the prices are high right now. This is why we need to own the stack, optimize for high-mix, and drive down costs over time. It will take a lot of work.

Makes sense. Is it that most of the time is spent switching jobs or that there's just not enough jobs going through it?

You're right that automotive and defense make up most of the demand. We also see demand from teams who can't use JLC/PCBway due to the difficulty of cosigning parts outside their catalogue.

Not as familiar with the EU market, but have heard good things about Eurocircuits

Agreed. For this to work the entire supply chain has to support it. There are starts like mouser and digikey, but the raw materials and production capabilities are even more important.

We believe starting with defense will give us capabilities that we can then bring to other verticals, and will help us make optimizations that bring the cost down. It's impossible to beat china off the bat though.

Johnny Doyle and I are building https://syncra.ie to help companies right-size their property portfolios