Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Pitches with Prototypes: Electronics Factory”.
Hi, my name is jeff mccalve and i started temple automation with the express purpose of making electronics development move as fast as software development. One of the things that i found is that rapid iteration is a powerful tool for solving hard problems. One hard problem the businesses face is a problem making a product that their customers want. A good way to do.
That is to get something in the hands of your customers as quickly as possible, observe uh the customer’s experiences and refine the products based on that feedback. By cycling, through that process, at a quick pace, what you’re able to do is make sure the product that you make matches the needs of your customers with software. The tools have been built out to make this process move really quickly. Electronics on the fact, on the other hand, move slowly so take. For example, the experience of sally carson sally carson is the co-founder of internet of things.
Company pinocchio uh sally in a recent make interview lamented the fact that, whereas with uh with with software and web development like she was used to she, she was she won. She was used to um iteration cycles on the order of uh hours to days, whereas with electronics she’s frustrated with the fact that it takes weeks to months the she continues to say that the reason behind this this long lag time is the complexity involved with electronics Development, making a circuit board means being able to find a place to buy it, finding the component components that you need to go and put on it lining up an assembler to put it together and testing all before you can get in the hands of your customers. In addition to being really laborious and cumbersome, it’s also expensive. So with electronics, it’s almost so here’s some quotes from some leading electronics manufacturers. I think using the software analogy, it’s almost as though pressing compile takes a week and cost fourteen hundred dollars, so sally and startups like hers, are not the only ones that experience this problem. So it’s anybody from small businesses like uh eldon, synthetos contract product developers, like quirky r d groups, large companies like the google x group and also university labs like university of colorado’s robotics lab. So what would happen if electronics development moved as fast as hardware development with electronics factory it can? Electronics factory is a desktop robot. It’S like making bot for electronics. So, whereas makerbot is a robot capable of producing mechanical objects by extruding plastic electronics, factory is capable of making electronic devices. The interaction we have in mind is somebody with load.
Somebody would load a design into the robot and come out with a functioning board, but what that would allow you to do is keep the cycle time in the order of minutes instead of the weeks to months as that are currently experienced by many folks, developing electronics. So, in order to pull this off, there’s a variety of processes that electronics factory needs to be capable of um. We chose to focus on just one of those processes for the first version of our robot and that that process is pick and place.
What what pick and place uh does? Is it moves from wheels of components like these uh? These contain looks like i got started, so it moves uh from wheels and components, as shown here um and is able to go and pick up the components and place them on the surface of the board. The reason we chose this step is that we found that electronics with electronics. The assembly is one of the most time consuming and expensive parts of the process.
So once we can get the pick and place version up and ready to go, then we can go and tackle some of the other steps of the electronics manufacturing process and bring that cycle time down from the weeks to months that many people experience now down to The the hours and days that people enjoy in web in web development, if you want to learn more about electronics factory or help temple automation with our goal of making electronics development move as fast as software development. I look forward to meeting you out there afterwards. Alternatively, you’re welcome to visit us online thanks for your time. .
