Making it in the USA

In Seventies the "enthusiast" electronics market was mostly mail-order kits. With enough patience you could solder together computers, audio equipment and even televisions. Opening up consumer electronics (like the original Atari home console here), revealed something might have been assembled it on your kitchen table.
The difference between the manufactured good and the hand-made one was quite small.

This still happens. For short-run through-hole PCB assembly, there's not much point in having these made abroad vs. making them yourself. Either way an 18-year-old with a soldering iron will be doing the work. (This is my kid assembling Gameduino 1 accessories in 2011. Check out the endless solder dispenser he's constructed out of a pencil.)
That's the plan for the SPIDriver accessories. There are two boards included in the package, and we need about 350 of each. Here's one of them, it's an LCD demo board. It's three headers and an LCD. 

Assembly time is about two minutes, given a jig to hold all the parts in place. Paying a high-school student $12 per hour means the assembly cost is about 40 cents. This is a very competitive price.

(It's also good just to get young people involved. Often when we're thinking of ways of introducing people to technology, we think of putting them in class. They already spend a lot of time in class! Much better to engage them in something practical and slightly unfamiliar. They seem to find it satisfying, and catching the inevitable failures gives them a hands-on insight into how things work.)

What about the components - the PCB and the headers? Surely buying them in the USA is more expensive?

Actually no, thanks to Chinese manufacturers selling directly to the US. PCBs are now really easy to buy online, and in quantity 350 the price is great. Parts are no longer a problem due to Chinese distributors now selling directly. For example 350 of the 2x5 header used above cost $144 here in the US, and $15 when ordered from LCSC. I find this price difference very puzzling!
Lastly, it's unavoidable that you're going to have to test every part. Having them made elsewhere does not save you from the burden of handling each one, testing it, and potentially reworking the failures. By making them yourself, this is all one process. You (or that high-schooler) makes and tests each piece as they go.

So it really does make sense to make some things yourself. I'm still working on just where the cutoff is. Certainly easy low-tech things like placement stencils move that cutoff upwards. More on this topic in the coming weeks.


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