It is unlikely to happen. Software makes it easier to reconfigure things. It will almost always make sense to rent time on a better machines. Few people run their own public facing arm servers at home, because you can rent better performing and easier to manage servers online.

Proximity and flexibility still matters somewhat though, so there might still be a market for a pick and place machine between this type of machine and a professional one. In China there are pcb factories offering assembly for a low fee. They have a multiple pick and place machines with common components after each other.

The reason it seems like a good idea is people don't see things like the time spent tweaking as a cost. It is also to some extent true for laser cutters and 3d printers.

Macrofab(macrofab.com) is pretty close to this, as is SeeedStudio (SeeedStudio.io).

Seeed is wonderful. I’ve run over $80k of boards through them and while I have experienced one big error in a build they worked with me to fix it and in general they have wonderful service considering I’m one person working out of my apartment. Bigger shops charge way more or don’t work with me, and smaller shops don’t do as much as Seeed does.

Can you tell me some details on what exactly they do? I've designed and ordered my own PCBs from DirtyPCBs (recommended, I love them) but I've only assembled them myself (I only needed one or two pieces) and I have no idea how I would scale that to larger production.

Can you tell me what the basic steps are? Pricing information would be appreciated!

Also circuithub, and potentially tempo automation , once they'll have some more capacity.

Tempo Automation has historically been super high priced. I haven’t looked in to their prices lately tho.

I’d like to see that but I think the turnaround and unpredictability of third parties adds a lot of risk to a product development cycle. If you look at lead times for PCBs and population for example it can be a 30 day turnaround minimum for every cock up you make on a prototype. During that time your engineers may be dead in the water. To get around that you can pay a 20x premium to have your boards shipped fast. Two iterations will pay for a pick and place machine and a basic PCB fab environment and fill the boards yourself. You should already have the rework tools in house. Same with plastics where a 3d printer will get you close enough to get the production tooling done.

The big issue is really setting up manufacturing and supply chain on a large scale when you do get it working.

I'm curious, what prices are we talking about? Around here I'm seeing prices of PCBs in 2 working days for under 70€/PCB - it doesn't seem that expensive if you only need a few boards for development.

I'm betting that's a 2 sided board? PCB process technology seems to have a fundamental time limit that's a multiple of the number of layers.

We're building prototypes of a complex bit of consumer electronics for consumer testing. We can do full industrial design, mechanical design, electronic design get the components made, assembled and delivered in 6 weeks. The fundamental limiting factor on how fast we can do it is the time it takes for the PCB to be made. From an electronics point of view, schematic capture and layout can be done in a week, and board assembly can be done in a day (if you're in a hurry) but there's nothing we can do about the 3 week lead time on the PCB because it's 8 layers with blind laser drilled vias.

Those are likely pretty trivial boards which you place parts yourself. I do that at home with crap equipment. It's not quite as easy if you have to have someone to place parts for you, which is required without significant investment if you are placing BGA / 0201 / 0402 packages reliably etc.

At work, we typically budget around $5,000 per PCB spin. That assumes a 4-6 layer board, parts procurement and assembly at quantity 5-10.

Having an engineer who would otherwise be billed out at $150 - $200/hour hand placing parts and soldering boards is a waste of our in-house resources.