Posted by fried-gluttony 3 days ago
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
Rule #23: Don't compete to be at the bottom, as you just might actually win.
Have a great day =3
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.
>what can you really differentiate in this field that isn't cost?
Don't worry about it... =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?
There was little utility in judging if it was ethical, but merely to profit by the shortsighted stewards. =3
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
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.
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.
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.
Completely agree.
Then the Semi industry wonders why they're running out of people
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.
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.
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.
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.
Bosch, Continental, Siemens, Palfinger, FAUN, Webasto, Phoenix Contact, Beckhoff, …
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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
"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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Their business model is pooling small orders and sending them to board fabs in europe, mainly germany and some in the east.
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-...
Express service adds ~20 EUR, roughly the same cost as picking DHL express delivery on 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.
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!