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points by schobi 1 day ago | 0 comments

Even deeper - go have a look at the huge catalog of basic parts of jlcpcb. There is no procurement process and delay needed, those seem to be already on the shop floor or maybe even on a feeder of a pick and place machine!

The integration of lcsc is incredible.. let's see how they beat this in practice

[–] mrandish 1 day ago

Not being familiar with this, I'm curious where the humans are still required in the process of doing a dozen or hundred of each board. I assume the parts still arrive from distributors on rolls inside boxes or on pallets and a human has to scan, open, unpack and load them in some feeder?

[–] crote 1 day ago

Pretty much, yes. Is it why JLCPCB has a bunch of "standard parts" which are always already present on the assembly machine, and charges a $3/part loading fee for the stuff which isn't.

[–] lightedman 1 day ago

"Not being familiar with this, I'm curious where the humans are still required in the process of doing a dozen or hundred of each board."

Some components have large amounts of mass and need to be manually placed because the PNP doesn't have the vertical space for pickup and movement to the pad or do not have feeders which can successfully hold onto the part.

And some times it's just faster to have the human place the part because they're faster than the machine due to physical limitations (like needing to move slowly so as to not drop the component or throw it at the end of travel.) Many board shops will have the PNP places the ICs/Caps/Resistors/diodes and then the placement of connectors (especially zierich) or inductors gets done manually. That is how it worked where I worked. This also provided an opportunity mid-process to do quality checks instead of just letting things go from the PNP straight into the oven.

[–] foldr 22 hours ago

A lot of it is moving small objects precisely from point A to point B while integrating expert domain knowledge and general awareness of what’s going on. This stuff can be automated in principle, but with diminishing returns after a point.

[–] seddona 1 day ago

We have hundreds of thousands of parts in stock ready to go on The Grid. It's actually way more integrated than JLC.

[–] kragen 1 day ago

I'm assuming you mean SKUs. Is there a list? JLC says they have 751,878 SKUs in stock, with 1586 "basic and promotional extended" parts they always have mounted on a PnP https://jlcpcb.com/parts/basic_parts, and there's a queryable mirror of their database on GitHub.

To take a particular example, they claim to have 11065 SKUs of microcontrollers in stock https://jlcpcb.com/parts/2nd/Embedded%20Processors%20&%20Con... of which 6 are "promotional extended": STM8S105K6T6C (1213 in stock), STM32F103C8T6 (231496 in stock), STM32L151C8T6 (287 in stock), ATMEGA328P-AU (40476 in stock), STM32F030C8T6 (73009 in stock), and STM8S003F3P6TR (152762 in stock). 100 units of this last one will cost you US$30.47.

Where do I find the corresponding information on your web site?