Semi OT: making money

Dec 31, 2015 62 Replies
J

I never borrowed money or sold stock; our company has grown on earnings. I did have $20K in savings and collected unemployment for a while.

Test equipment is amazingly cheap nowadays. A 30 MHz scope used to cost more than a Chevrolet, and now a 100 MHz Rigol costs about 2% of a Chevrolet. I paid 10 cents for a resistor whan I was a kid, and now pay about 1/1000 of that in real dollars. Google has made print advertising and trade show booths unnecessary.

You can generate a lot of value by assembling cheap parts. The trick is to pick the right product, design it reasonably well, and find real customers who need it, and give them good support.

Don Lancaster wrote a cute little book about starting a business; he sent me a free copy, can't remember why. He says that the first tool you need to get is some diagonal cutters, to snip the power cord off your TV set.

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc lunatic fringe electronics
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J

Thew problem with contract assemby/manufacturing is that they are only cost- effective in larger batches. Those larger batches mean a lot of expensive parts that you already paid for sitting on the shelf waiting to get sold.

I have my own pick and place machine here so I can do smaller batches, the only cost is the time it takes me to set up the specific parts on the machine. That is a couple hours tops for any board. I started out doing

10-12 boards as a batch, now I do 30 - 60 at a time. it takes me a couple months to sell those.

Jon

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J

Once you understand SMT, it is actually FASTER than through-hole. With through hole, you have to bend resistor leads, insert, solder, and clip the tails. That's 4 steps. With SMT, you just place and solder. That's something like 1.5 steps, because the two steps are sort of combined.

And, of course, with a P&P machine, a board can be assembled in minutes. I have a pretty hefty P&P, but do the reflow in a GE toaster oven with a thermocouple controller. Most of my boards will fit 6 at a time in the oven.

Jon

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