CircuitHub's robot factory builds PCBs in Massachusetts twice as fast as Shenzhen

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.

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?

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.

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.