PCB Assembly services

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mzincali
 
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Joined: Tue Jan 18, 2022 9:09 pm

PCB Assembly services

Post by mzincali »

Any recommendations on PCB Assembly companies? I have contacted PCBWay, and will be getting some details soon.

My desired number of units is 3,000.

I talked to a couple of US companies who want to charge $10 a piece for assembly, and that does not include the components. That's really steep. I'd prefer to have this done in the US, but I need to significantly drop the unit assembly price.

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rooppoorali
 
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Re: PCB Assembly services

Post by rooppoorali »

I was about to say PCBway. I can see that you have already contacted them. You can contact raypcb, jlcpcb etc. I think there is no problem in contacting some good manufacturers and choose the most convenient one.

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adafruit_support_mike
 
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Re: PCB Assembly services

Post by adafruit_support_mike »

We don't have any recommendations for assembly houses since we build our boards in-house (and no, we don't do custom assembly.. our fab teams are already busy enough).

In general though, the secret to good experience with an assembly house is good communication. Most of them have inventories of standard parts like resistors and capacitors, and their lines are already tuned to work with those parts. Using them can save you from having to buy and deliver full reels of your own components, so work with your assembler on provisioning.

It's also worth working with them on testing. Ideally you'd provide them with a test fixture so they can plug an assembled board in and get a yes/no indicator of whether it works properly. A more advanced version would test voltages at various points to help diagnose failures. Remember: the assembler doesn't know what you expect the board to do, and there's a difference between assembly and QA. The test gear you provide is a tradeoff between up-front costs and the cost of reworking boards that don't do what you expect.

Another such tradeoff happens when the assembly house sets its line up. It's generally referred to as 'tooling costs', and is an unavoidable front-loaded expense. As a rule of thumb, it costs about as much to make the first board as it costs to make the first hundred. That cost gets divided by the size of the run though, so $1000 of setup becomes 33c per board in a run of 3000.

Doing a short run so you can inspect the boards, fix any problems, then go ahead with the large order adds more up-front expense, but usually costs less than having to diagnose and rework an entire shipment. We've gotten messages from people who saw 50% to 80% failure rates with NeoPixels because the assembler's reflow oven overheated them. They ask for the profile we use, not realizing that we do test runs to tune the process for every board we make, and that our maintenance schedule has just as much effect on the process as our board-specific oven settings.

I'm not trying to scare you away from having boards made, but these are expensive items from the "I wish I knew that earlier" folder of people entering the hardware manufacturing business. There are lots of ways to save a few hundred dollars up front that can cost you a few thousand later on.

A good assembly house will want you to be happy with the boards they deliver, and can be a tremendous resource if you learn to communicate with them well. Learning to ask, "do you see any glaring mistakes?" and "does any part of this design make your job harder than it needs to be?" will help you get to the best quality at a reasonable price. But assembly houses aren't in the business of doing design reviews for free. They'll be a lot happier to answer "is there anything we can streamline?" after doing a short run than before you commit to the first setup.

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