YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Making 1,750 programmable PCB badges for Canada's biggest hackathon

23 points va3ndf 2 days ago 6 comments

FLeXMurphy 1 hour ago | parent

> JLCPCB

Unfortunate that Canada doesn't have its own (at least) small-time fab for these things.

Looks like Hack The North is located in Waterloo? Their website is very confusing to navigate.

Aurornis 16 minutes ago | parent

There are small-time assembly houses everywhere.

They’re going to be much more expensive than JLCPCB, if they take the job at all.

Some conferences can find small businesses trying to get started who do the jobs at cost or a loss, but that’s rare.

va3ndf 1 minute ago | parent

Yes, Hack the North is run at the University of Waterloo!

Mostly cost for us. JLCPCB's scale lets them make money on orders that would be too small for most fabs. Quoting, ordering, and part selection are all a battle tested web form. They also stock most of the parts in-house, so a small order costs them almost no engineering time. A local fab probably wouldn't have any of these advantages. JLCPCB really have it down to a science.

robertclaus 51 minutes ago | parent

We do a run of 250 similar badges for a non-tech convention every year. ~$10 per badge is about right all in. We've also done runs without ICs (just LEDs, a switch, and button cell battery) for about ~$4 some years.

andrewstuart 48 minutes ago | parent

I’m curious to know - the author describes many pitfalls.

But - how much work is this for an experienced PCB designer?

How long would it take someone skilled to get such a thing designed?

va3ndf 6 minutes ago | parent

Author here! I'm sure an experienced PCB designer could get it done quicker, but we were in it for the learning aspect too. Hack the North is entirely student run!

My best guess is an experienced designer would have made fewer mistakes and been more familiar with the process, so maybe they save two iterations and can get the initial schematic capture and layout done in a few days rather than a week.