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What If Your Electronic Parts Were More Like Legos? (electricdollarstore.com)
Long-time Slashdot reader beckman101 writes:
This week Electric Dollar Store opened its doors, selling interchangeable postage-stamp sized I2C-based modules for prices between $1.00 and $1.80. The modules include lights, buzzers, counters and sensors — the range is aimed at electronic makers. These aren't manufacturing rejects shipping from Asia — they're assembled, tested and shipped from a small farming town in California, where winter labor is cheap.
All the code for the project is BSD licensed.
The project is a spin-off from the popular open-source I2CDriver hardware debugger.
All the code for the project is BSD licensed.
The project is a spin-off from the popular open-source I2CDriver hardware debugger.
Little Bits:
https://littlebits.com/
Gakken EX:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Snap Circuits:
https://www.elenco.com/brand/s...
Then there are the domain specific building block electronics - Arduino shields, raspberry pi blocks, MakerBlocks, mBot modules...
And, of course, all the modules for Mindstorms, both from LEGO and third-party.
These look kind of neat, though. Price is right!
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
The plural of Lego is Lego.
We already imagined that as kids in the 80s.
I'm certain, our grandparents did too, on their first mainframe/supercomputer.
And back then, for most parts, they were! Backplane, bus, cards for anything, peripherals for anything else.
The thing is, that integrating ALL the things and disabling what you don't need just became cheaper.
But it quickly became a trap too, since the buses and modularity were done away with too! So you could not even do it if you wanted!
I still imagine a backplane-like system with cards emerging out of the Raspberry Pi headers and stacking shields.
And a similar back-"spine" system for mobile phone sized devices, where the bus is in the center and it's like a ribcage where you snap in the modules, and close the lid/battery/display/keyboard back side.
My point is: Ee dreamt about this for a long time, but until now, for-profit lock-in and cheap mass-manufacturing always prevented it.
So unless you have a novel was to counter those underlying problems... no dice.
These look pretty neat. Probably worth having a bunch kicking around to save on a lot of faff for the odd one of and/or experiment. Much like arduinos. I probably won't get many though since for my hobby electronics I like doing things by hand, especially doing analogue things. But I only like doing the bits I find personally interesting by hand.
I expect we'll get some people ragging on makers inn this thread though because we always get that, especially arduinos.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
So I'm greatful a website finally caters to me by presenting a title and menu that is 15cm high on my screen and scales all normal text to size 32. You know ... because I read Slashdot from the other side of the room and all.
Combining all of these sensor capabilities with a 128 core Jetson Nano should offer some interesting monitoring opportunities.
It would be really awesome to build a community around this.
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of congress. But then I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain
having a huge tunnel up my ass
I'm on it.
Sincerely,
Elon Musk
Boring Co.
If you are trying to solder stuff yourself at home. It would make life a whole lot easier for me if certain IC's were available as SOIC or PDIP even. Hard enough to get the damn things working at times without having to check under a microscope to make sure you soldered the damn thing right.
Well, as someone that runs an electronics factory, I mostly agree with you.
The first part is: what do you mean by "electronics"? Are you talking about PCBA (i.e, assembled/populated circuit boards), or do you mean "consumer electronics" - i.e., cell phones, AV receivers, computers, etc. etc.?
For me, "electronics" means assembled circuit boards. And sadly, there is a surprising amount of labor involved. Kitting - getting components ready to be placed. Receiving materials, Shipping. Paperwork. Regulation compliance.
That being said, most of this can be automated away. But today, largely, it is not that way. So the truth is that America _could_ be cost competitive, but today, is not.
Hint: the entire American market for assembled circuit boards is for small-to-medium delivered quantities - almost always under 5000 units, typically under 500. Offshore is not competitive with smaller quantities, and that's why my industry is still a $60BN industry :)
I'm conflicted. On the one hand, things like this (and Arduino, and RPi, and so on) make things more accessible to the 'masses' -- but on the other hand, it seems like it's 'dumbing down electronics', taking away any requirement that you actually learn how electronics works at the component level.
I can't easily count how many people (probably teenagers, really; this is the internet, who can tell?) were spending inordinate amounts of time just getting an Arduino (or similar microcontroller-based toy) to make an LED blink, or something similar, and they would talk about how they were 'doing electronics'; contradict them, and with a straight face, not kidding with you, would claim that "if it doesn't use a microcontroller, it's not electronics", and how 'analog electronics is old fashioned and obsolete, no one uses that stuff anymore'. I kid you not. Meanwhile they'd need an Instructible and a YouTube how-to video to build a basic crystal radio, and they'd be utterly clueless as to how it works -- assuming that is you could convince them that it would even work and that you weren't trying to troll them (less than half a dozen parts and no microcontroller? How does it do anything?).
Someone else mentioned 'Lectron', from back in the 1980's; my brother had some of those, although I was never allowed to mess with them. Some might argue those were on the same level as what we're discussing here, but the fact of the matter is, those were just 'sanitized' versions of discrete components, eliminating the need for soldering or any sort of solderless breadboarding, you still had to understand electronics enough to make something work.
I mean consumer electronics, and I am well aware of how much labour goes into such things - not too much. I can relate a bit to your experience, but what is "a lot of manual labour" in USA is still nothing really in comparison to industry standards.
In CONSUMER electronics I deal with, the manufacturing itself takes much less time per units than testing/inspection/QA/binning/labelling/flashing/factory configuration/packaging. And we are also not dealing with particularly big batches, 10k unit runs usually, nor do we economise on labour, now re have an option to design stuff to minimise assembly costs (client orders)
Even in such arrangement, all human labour barely makes even 20% of unit cost. Properly run manufacturing lines are amazingly efficient even without much automation. Running factories is pure management science - that is something what should really be done by all those MBAs.
Salaries for professionally trained workers in China are not so far from USA. 15000 CNY is around 2200 USD. We can still hire complete random people at like $800, but we opt not to do so, because that does not pay off, simply. Yes, we have an option to hire people at 2.75 times lesser price, but we really don't care much about manual labour given how little it contributes to the final cost. To add to that, we only do 1.5 shifts - 12 work hours. Automated SMT lines work lights out 24/7.
4 SMT lines are tendered by a single person
Warehouse - 4 persons
Line staff - 36 persons working in 1.5 shifts.
Parts inventory - outside managed
Security guard - contracted out to security company
1 Janitor
1 guy doing all office work - comes once a week, a contractor specialising in that kind of business
And this is only a kind of prototyping business. We cam make like 2000 units of really unwieldy, bulky things like toys a day, or 5000 units of "optimised for manufacturing" gadgets (snap assemblies).
... would they hurt like hell if you stepped on them by accident?
If you believe in privacy, and believe you have "nothing to hide" at the same time, you're a goddammed idiot
There is nothing making electronics manufacturing financially impossible in America, and manual labour costs are nowhere as important as some believe.
Depends on what. What you can't get manufactured in the US is the bottom of the bin, razor thin margins, low quality stuff. You need easy access to the Shenzen market of super low quality components for that, with ready substitutions and even re-used parts at times.
If your part is very labour intensive to make that doesn't help either.
If there's some kind of reasonable margin and then yes you can (and I have). It wasn't complex from a manufacturing point of view: all surface mount, almost all parts on one side and I took care with the DMF to minimize the amount of hand work needed.
What can be profitably manufactured in the US is maybe a smaller subset of what can be profitably manufactured in China. But if you've got any certification, quality tracking stuff then it's one hell of a lot easier to get it done in the US. You'd need immense volume before the cost of the effort to do all of that in China was exceeded by the difference in margins.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
The problem today with having digital electronics as a hobby is not hardware-related, it's simply thinking up useful things to do. How many times have you seen someone ask "I got this Arduino/Rasberry Pi (as a gift, in a contest, some other way), what can I do with it?"... If you can buy from China sources, the prices of most common components is very very inexpensive. Chinese Arduino clones cost $2-$3, and for just a few dollars more you can get boards with other processors that are much faster and have more memory--assuming you write a program that needs either of those things. Display screens cost $3, basic GPS chips cost $1, various wifi/wireless chips cost $3, CCD cameras cost $3, laser rangefinders cost $8, a cell phone radio (requires a SIM) costs $8.
I do think that the main reason for the popularity of Arduino is that both the hardware and the software were made specifically to be easy to use.
Interest/sales of a given processor or IC tend to pick up a lot after there is an Arduino IDE board definition or library for it.
I suspect that people assume that if they cannot get the "professional" dev environment to work, they assume they can still get it to work in the Arduino IDE.
I deal with non-consumer stuff. Contract manufacturers are still used much of the time for convenience and cost. They can be set up to have orders shipped directly from factory to the customer. Onshore manufacturing is good for prototypes, test runs, getting the kinks worked out, or final assemblies (for more complicated stuff). Much of the cost comes from testing the products during manufacture since they're being sold to more discerning customers and failures means more cost to us in the long run.
Salaries is mostly about personnel to set up and monitor the production lines, once it's ready to go most manufacturing is not labor intensive. Almost none of this is like the old assembly lines from the past. Some bits may need humans (attaching antennas, plugging in cables, etc) but that's for final product and not the bare boards.
Don't forget the Lectron blocks.
Bruce Perens.
They've always been like Legos! Even back in the late 70's / early 80's... Yeah, you may have had some pull up resistors, or other crappy discrete glue, analog/linear bullshit in between something, but...
Now get off my lawn!
I have none that I know of--yet, but when I do I hope I don't find them by stepping on them like Lego.
So how do they handle address conflicts? I've been a dev on a highly I2C'ed system, and while there are also electrical issues to having lots of devices, the big one is how you set an address. Most chips only have two or three address select pins, if that many. Even if you use a microprocessor as the slave device, there still needs to be a way to configure it. About the only truly reliable way for a hobby-brick system is gating SCL for each device.
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