#699 – CircuitHub, 12 Years Later with Andrew Seddon

Welcome Back, Andrew Seddon! Founder and CEO of CircuitHub.

• Andrew was first on episode 131 of The Amp Hour


• CircuitHub has a partnership with Worthington Assembly


• Worthington and CircuitHub host the Pick Place Podcast


• Mimicing silicon manufacturing


• Common parts library


• Setting the factory up to have only 50k SKUs in house for speed of loading / attrition


• Driving people to 2000 parts was the original intent, but didn’t hit the mark


• Level of production needs to be high


• Many parts need to work in conjunction
  
  
  
  • Reflow
  
  
  • PnP
  
  
  • Throughhole
  
  
  • Selective soldering
  
  
  • Inspection
  
  
  
  


• Need to solve for the whole setup. Making smt 10x better doesn’t make overall 10x better


• Starlink manufcaturing localy


• PCB fabs in the US, 50 left, getting rolled up under Private Equity (as are things like machine shops)


• AI with VCs


• How it impacts the electronics industries


• KiCad


• More AI stuff


• Automation on checking


• Still humans involved


• PDKs for chip companies


• File checking / JLC


• Types of customers
  
  
  
  • 10 largest companies on the planets
  
  
  • It’s individuals who order and try it out, that often becomes a repeat business thing
  
  
  • Customers / types of boards / size of orders
  
  
  • More startups who also want production
  
  
  
  


• Future serving lower cost areas


• Proto service 2-4 layer black soldermask (unlisted)


• See the CircuitHub capabilities


• Going high volume


• People making weekly or monthly units and spreading it out


• Spinning up custom in-house high volume


• Flattenting the price curve


• Tariffs


• New customers approaching them because of it


• Can consumer be done in the US?