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.

I just wanted a quote. But signup was painful it needs a major review. Then I uploaded a zip of my gerbers and it came up with some error that I could not figure out and halted any further movement. I'd love to do my PCBs domestic but the site makes it way too hard.

I've done a lot of PCBA sourcing from Shenzhen so I have domain knowledge here.

The main latency for this is typically sourcing. The partners I've worked with will get PCBA done within a day or two once they have parts.

The claims here about a breakthrough in setup time also don't really fit with my experience. What is this, putting a new stencil in, adding different components to a hopper? I've toured PCBA factories and it's not like their lines are typically down for set-up. I think this takes like 30min?

Also, it doesn't look like they substantiate their 2x speed claims? They "benchmarked" this, but with what suppliers? Their claims would make sense if they found random suppliers, not exactly specialized in rapid prototype style PCBA, so they're not comparing like to like.

Don't get me wrong, I really want this to happen too, but the desire for this to happen seems to be making the community gullible. I'd love the founders or someone with circuithub to link to real benchmark evidence and explain why their changeover procedure can produce several days of difference.

I do a fair bit of electronics manufacturing and excited to see this pop up.

However I have my reservations because China is incredibly cheap, incredibly fast, and incredibly skilled. Our domestic made boards tend to be lower quality with more mistakes than Chinese made ones (while also costing up to 50x more).

I'll run some designs through this later, and I really hope it is broadly viable (not just unique niches that fit their tooling)

Pretty strict board requirements. They give an example motor controller, but then require your board to be 1oz copper. Motor controllers in particular often use 2oz for high current. No buried vias is an interesting requirement too. I'm not sure how often our guys use them but dense designs probably need them.

Still, looks super cool and I don't think the price difference is very high for a company doing prototypes.

I didn't like the way the example 4 layer motor controller table displayed the data. The bottom row, which says "No customs" under the image then has "5 days sooner" under their box for "The Grid", but then under Shenzen it says "$165 more", then in a tiny font "than the Shenzen shop".

I don't think it was meant to be misleading because the small font style was used throughout, and the bottom row wasn't really designed as part of the table, but it sure looks like it at first glance.

How do I select parts? That has been a historic limitation; Shenzen (What this article compares to) has vertically integrated systems. What library do I select from?

I'm not expecting it to be cheaper than China, but in the same general range, and being able to at small quantity/fast turnaround is important. Overall: I'm skeptical of the cost and time claims in the article. I am thinking "What assumptions" are here. Do they mean some part of the process is faster than that same part from China, etc. So I'm curious about what the real-world order-to-arrival time is; what the final CC charge is, and then compare that with China. They advertise faster turnaround: Is that really true than 10 days order to arrival we are used to?

OK, Its a cool video, and wish there was more joined up thinking about keeping sovereign control of designs/manufacture - but the concept isn't new. I know the UK better, but 24 hour pcbs are a thing, we have https://www.pcbtrain.co.uk (which might outsource to china anyway) but I usually prefer https://www.eurocircuits.com/ which builds in Poland. There are plenty more CEMs

Sadly neither really compete on price with jlcpcb and despite a hemisphere of delivery advantage jlcpcb can be quicker! I once got in a discussion with a Project Manager about whether the design was worth keeping some level of traceability for ~$50... he just wanted it cheaper.

Faster than Shenzen, fine ... but quite a bit more expensive, even taking into account the USA tariffs, which we do not have in the rest of the world.

Seems to me that Shenzen still wins at least for the non-USA world.

"...supply chain you can count on"

Except the components are mostly coming from China anyways, so the same disruptions are potentially in play.

Still, cool to see domestic options.

Congratulations on this automation, which I know from first-hand experience is very difficult to pull off.

Is the robot really working with individual boards and not panels? How do you deal with balancing copper area, and varying etch times?

People often focus on the assembly side as “hard” but quick-turn manufacturing of the PCB is vicious.

I hope you move your fab to somewhere in the middle of the country. Part of the appeal of your concept to me is speed, but now I'm looking at cross-country FedEx, which is so expensive that it makes your service unpalatable. A plant in, say, Kansas, is a couple of days of UPS Ground from a huge portion of the country.

I'm willing to bet most of that delay is shipping and most will wait a few days to save $100.

Logically having a robot is great, but doesn't Shenzen still have a massive supply chain for the actual stuff that goes on the boards?

Awesome. Wish I could work on a project like this. I wonder how it scales compared to a long linear assembly line with lots of preloaded pick and place machines. I've been expecting the next stage of electronics automation to look more like an amazon warehouse. Parts distribution and assembly happening under the one roof, fully automated.

How long until you've built the Grid into a shipping container and are selling those?

Can't wait to see how quickly I can get boards next time I need a batch! The adage 'hardware is hard' is getting less true every day

> So you pay about $165 more than the Shenzhen shop and get your boards five days sooner, with no customs and a supply chain you can count on.

A supply chain that also comes from Shenzhen... last time I checked, North America doesn't make chips or other components either.

This is great! Are you able to do IFA for UL certification? That would be a killer for us!

You don't accept industry standard formats and require source... that rules you right out of the aerospace company I work for. That's billions of dollars gone from your potential pool.

You spent 5 years developing this fab and somehow ignored regular industry standards the entire time? That does not instill confidence in your services, at least from my standpoint.

Needing to sign up for a quote? Who are you selling this data to?

Great news, wish you all the best. I just wish the PCB sizes could stretch a bit to 330mm by 330mm.

Interesting, kind of reminds me of SendCutSend

TIL "parity" is now measured on a logarithmic scale.

Glad to see some homegrown companies competing with the chinese, especially with PCBs.

Amazing. Is something like this available now, or in the future, for hobbyists? Happy to pay retail prices.

The link back to your home page is a dead link. At least on mobile.

can we use an older version of ultiboard

rids proto fully booked. so they have no o capacity. we cannot even get a quote to know the pricing of grids proto.

This is great, especially as easypcbusa is being absorbed into a much more expensive conglomerate. Looking forward to seeing if they do just-pcb pricing as well

"The Grid. A digital frontier."

kudos! for solving a hardwares, hardware problem, but especialy for the open, matter of fact demenour devoid of rhetoric. aaaand the web site renders perfectly on my less than standard browser, fast too.

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