Products > Crowd Funded Projects
Crowd-sourced PCBs
free_electron:
So, if we impose rules : must be open source , open hardware or no desl.
then It all pivots around the usefullness of the designs...
Do you really want to stock up on 5 flavors of blinkylights, 10 flavors of a steppermotorshield ?
Maybe i'm no longer classified as a hobbyist , but in 99% of the cases i don't find exactly hwat i want so ir oll my own board. I hate contraptions made from 5 miles of wire and 15 different pcb's held together by spit and ducttape and stuffed in an old cigarbox. In the time it takes me to make suchan assembly i have captured the schematic, done a real nice layout, tweaked it exactly the way i want it and it will fit in a nice housing a look like a real product. Even if its a one off.
If you are going to build.a tube amp you also will want a nice mahogany or gold plated case with some mirrors to show the shiny glowing tubes. Nobody makes an amp as a hairball and then puts it in the living room. My hobby projects need to look like they are a commercial product. That is the fun of electronics. Building something that is 'finished' in all aspects.
So yeah , i will roll my own board. But yeah , maybe i'm not your average hobbyist so maybe what i'm saying is irellevant.. But i cant help wondering, when i visit the local electronics gathering, why all the 'arduino crowd' projects look like the stuff pigs roll in. Invariably a stack of boards and wire spaghetti. Why don't you make a nice board ? That seems to be a step too far.
So there is the problem. The arduino crowd doesnt make their own boards. They dont know how. They just buy premade and slap wires between them.
The crowd that does make boards wants nicer boards... And those are so customized the arduino crowd isnt interested in em.
Tough call...
marshallh:
--- Quote from: free_electron on May 13, 2013, 04:02:17 am ---So, if we impose rules : must be open source , open hardware or no desl.
then It all pivots around the usefullness of the designs...
Do you really want to stock up on 5 flavors of blinkylights, 10 flavors of a steppermotorshield ?
Maybe i'm no longer classified as a hobbyist , but in 99% of the cases i don't find exactly hwat i want so ir oll my own board. I hate contraptions made from 5 miles of wire and 15 different pcb's held together by spit and ducttape and stuffed in an old cigarbox. In the time it takes me to make suchan assembly i have captured the schematic, done a real nice layout, tweaked it exactly the way i want it and it will fit in a nice housing a look like a real product. Even if its a one off.
If you are going to build.a tube amp you also will want a nice mahogany or gold plated case with some mirrors to show the shiny glowing tubes. Nobody makes an amp as a hairball and then puts it in the living room. My hobby projects need to look like they are a commercial product. That is the fun of electronics. Building something that is 'finished' in all aspects.
So yeah , i will roll my own board. But yeah , maybe i'm not your average hobbyist so maybe what i'm saying is irellevant.. But i cant help wondering, when i visit the local electronics gathering, why all the 'arduino crowd' projects look like the stuff pigs roll in. Invariably a stack of boards and wire spaghetti. Why don't you make a nice board ? That seems to be a step too far.
So there is the problem. The arduino crowd doesnt make their own boards. They dont know how. They just buy premade and slap wires between them.
The crowd that does make boards wants nicer boards... And those are so customized the arduino crowd isnt interested in em.
Tough call...
--- End quote ---
summed up my thoughts exactly.. if it is worth doing it is worth making a pcb for, though tbh there is no way to NOT use a pcb for what I do
pickle9000:
--- Quote from: free_electron on May 13, 2013, 04:02:17 am --- In the time it takes me to make suchan assembly i have captured the schematic, done a real nice layout, tweaked it exactly the way i want it and it will fit in a nice housing a look like a real product. Even if its a one off.
The crowd that does make boards wants nicer boards... And those are so customized the arduino crowd isnt interested in em.
Tough call...
--- End quote ---
Nice if you have the time, now I am an old retired bastard and I hate to admit it it but I have sent some one-off's out the door that made me cringe. They worked, lasted, had documentation but looked like crap on the inside. The customers where happy so should it have bothered me, yes I'm a professional it should bother me. It is nice to do it the right way but prototyping is often messy and time constrained. As for a hobby, I say do it however you want if it smokes do it better next time.
Corporate666:
--- Quote from: benemorius on May 13, 2013, 02:05:07 am ---
--- Quote from: Corporate666 on May 12, 2013, 09:23:35 pm ---It's not hard to understand.
There are not simply 2 kinds of project, commercial where you are not 'allowed' to disclose your source and personal where you are. Some people have a design they are "allowed" to disclose, but do not want others buying it for a low price - as in FE's example of a Kickstarter project. Also, just because someone is doing something for themselves and not commercially does not mean they are OK with someone else selling their design and work for a profit.
--- End quote ---
It may be that I am underestimating the disparity which exists between the hobbyist world and the professional world. We appear to be facing this from different perspectives with several significant differences.
You're certainly right - there are still a number of personal designs that need to remain private for one reason or another which are excluded from a service like this. The commercial designs you mention, which are also clearly excluded, don't even enter the picture to begin with. What may not be as obvious as I'd have thought is that the number of designs remaining after these exclusions is both considerable and growing. Just because from where you sit you can see a lot of designs which don't apply doesn't mean that there aren't also a lot of designs which do. Most of my designs have no need for privacy, and I would surely welcome the opportunity to pay for their manufacture with the source files rather than money. For everything else, well, there are obviously a lot of other places to get boards made.
--- Quote ---I'm also surprised at people talking about "the expense of a PCB". Are people really so cheap? It does not matter at all what the cost per PCB is, unless it is a commercial design where you have a unit price to worry about. All that matters is the total cost to get the 1 or 2 boards you need. $9.90 from iTead for a small board, or $25 for a larger one is comparatively expensive? Compared to what? The cheapest shipping for a single resistor from one of the distributors is going to be something like $6 or $8. And it is very hard to do any real work in electronics without at least a couple of thousand dollars worth of equipment, hardware and software. I can't imagine there is anyone who has a design they want to implement and doesn't mind paying the single unit prices for chips, passives, switches, etc...but who then says "my god! $10 for a PCB? They must be crazy! I can't afford that!" :-DD
--- End quote ---
The disparity between worlds really stands out here. From my perspective, it does not matter at all what the cost per PCB is unless it isn't a commercial design where the cost is covered by a customer. If I'm not selling the boards then I'm paying for them myself, so you bet I care about the cost!
Your figures of $10 and $25, although not unrealistic, are based on small boards and are not necessarily typical. Further, you're only talking about a single purchase of a single design. Obviously the numbers will be all over the place since designs vary in size so much, but a good estimate for me would be more like $60* for a minimum quantity order. So that's $60 on average every time I want a board made, which could happen several times in one month. So, it isn't "my god! $10 for a PCB!" but rather "my god! $200+ per month just for PCBs!"
Since indeed I cannot afford that, I'm certainly glad to see people looking for new and interesting ways to solve the problem. As long as the monetary cost of having a PCB made remains a limiting factor on how many PCBs I design, there is room for improvement.
As a side note, any notion of needing expensive equipment to get any "real work" done is also completely absent in the hobby world. I don't know what "real work" means exactly, but all I'm interested in is whether I can call a design "useful". There are a lot of products that don't exist, not because it is required that someone to apply "real work" in order to produce them, but simply because nobody happens to have produced them yet. It is a fallacy to think that "real work" must be applied in order to produce something which is useful. In a large number of cases, all that is required is to put some puzzle pieces together.
EDIT: *actually, $60 doesn't even include the $24 charge for DHL delivery. I can amortize that all the way down into the noise for commercial projects, but for personal stuff that's a huge amount of money to blow per order/board!
--- End quote ---
I think all of this ends up being academic because we both agree at least that the proposed business idea will not work for the secondary reason that the boards submitted will be of little to no use to anyone else.
There are businesses that do not exist because nobody has yet thought of doing business in that way - and while developing a new niche usually costs metrics craploads of money, some companies find a way to make it work. Then there are businesses that do not exist because they just won't work. I think this one falls into the latter category.
edavid:
I agree that the original idea wouldn't work unless the OP could reject unmarketable designs. How about this, though: subsidize multiproject panels by filling in the wasted space between boards with small standard board designs. I'm thinking in particular of SMD to DIP/breadboard adapters, which seem to be in demand, but are overpriced even from China. Are there other small boards that could be made?
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