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Interview
Sensor Readings
Sensor Readings
Chips with everything Circuit boards Prices of robots are falling, and that will have an effect on the electronics industry. Pickand-place robots, in particular, are becoming affordable for many small- and medium-sized enterprises. Here, Andrew Seddon, CEO of CircuitHub, talks to Sensor Readings about how the business started and what the future holds
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dvertising copy, the text or words in an advertisement, is fundamentally designed to sell product. But sometimes, effective advertising copy can be insightful and thought-provoking. It can strike a chord. One example is a Nike magazine advertisement I saw many years ago. The only line I remember from it is, “In order to do more, we must first decide to do less”, or something like that. To some, it might have read like a piece of cod Confucianism, but being young, impressionable, and always looking for ways to justify my apparently minimal-effort methods (some would call it laziness), Nike’s words made perfect sense to me. “Of course,” I thought to myself. “In order to do more, we must first decide to do less. I’ll tell that to the next person who says I need a kick up the a***.” I wasn’t lazy. Just more efficient. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. Nike’s ubiquitous slogan, “Just do it”, was probably adopted by the sportswear company around the same time as that “do more, do less” line, which I googled but couldn’t find any reference to. It was before the days of the worldwide web, and the copywriter who came up with that sentence deserves some credit, in my opinion. The other, more well-known quote that’s relevant here is, of course, “Necessity is the mother of invention”. But it seems to me that the whole endeavour of invention and innovation, especially in engineering, is built on the
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desire to do less. Or, to put it another way, the desire to do more with less. What is automation if not the creation of systems that enable us to do more with less time and energy? Same goes for robotics, or virtually anything really, any progress at all. If everyone did everything in exactly the same way as they’ve always been done, we’d have gone the way of the Neanderthals, and probably much before them. The industrial revolution unleashed great forces on the world which are still having an effect. Mechanisation led to computerisation. And now everyday household objects are getting smarter, more intelligent, more able to make routine decisions that only humans used to be capable of and were obliged to spend time and brainpower making. But while smart homes full of connected gadgets are still not as prevalent as they almost certainly will be in the not-too-distant future, the industrial sector is seeing an acceleration of progress in the process of manufacturing that will have profound implications on the way things are done. The electronics manufacturing industry, in particular, has gone through significant transformation. It had to. Otherwise, the world would have had to wait several years for the next iPhone instead of the several weeks they currently have to wait before the one they have becomes old. And all those other smartphones, tablet computers, and mobile technologies would not exist if manufacturing had not changed its processes
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Andrew Seddon, CEO, CircuitHub (inset)
Interview
in ways that the vast majority of consumers do not see. But not all the changes have run their course. It could be said that those changes were only the start. The electronics industry is continuing its journey down the road, and now has arrived at a critical juncture. Much like many other monolithic industries, it’s facing a period of fragmentation and miniaturisation. And some very interesting companies are emerging. One of those companies is CircuitHub, which describes itself as a “scalable electronics company”. CircuitHub provides on-demand manufacturing from one single unit to 10,000 or more, depending on the customer’s requirements. A startup, it’s backed by Y Combinator and Google Ventures. To date, it has raised $1.3 million in funding, and is currently operational, serving thousands of engineers around the world. Smarter by design In an interview with Robotics and Automation News, CircuitHub’s CEO, Andrew Seddon, says the idea for the company was the result of the frustrations he experienced in his career as an electrical engineer, designing a wide range of electronics products – such as industrial components and wearables – and getting them manufactured. “What I found was that the process of actually getting stuff manufactured was incredibly difficult,” says Seddon. “It takes a long time, it’s very capital-intensive, and there’s a lot of ways in which things can go wrong. “It got me thinking, ‘There’s got to be a better way to do this’. I started looking at what the problems are and why this stuff is so difficult. And what it came down to, for me, was that there was a real divide between the people who want to get stuff manufactured and the
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people who can actually manufacture things. You have your design engineers on one side, and you have your factory on the other side. And there was no method for them to communicate efficiently. “That was the idea behind CircuitHub. We thought, ‘What if we could develop a software platform between the factory and the design engineer, or, typically, the OEM [original equipment manufacturer] and the startup that’s looking to get something made?’, and really make that process of the two of them communicating much more efficient? “So what we did was build a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that sits between the design tool that the engineer is using, and at the other end, the shop floor of the factory. By doing that, we’re able to make the process much, much more efficient.” CircuitHub’s platform augments popular design applications such as Eagle, Altium and KiCad. The company has also built a community of reference designs, featuring open source hardware that engineering designers can use as a starting point, which has cost-saving advantages. The time-saving advantages come from manufacturing within the US. Seddon recalls one of the contract-based design projects he was working on. The product was produced in large quantities – millions, in fact. “That was real eyeopener,” he says. “The process was pretty much exactly the same as when I was making stuff at home as a hobbyist.” That experience was the catalyst for establishing CircuitHub, which Seddon and his co-founder Rehno Lindeque officially started in 2012. It took a couple of years of iterations for the company to reach its current form, which was crystallised in 2014. CircuitHub concentrates on electronics devices, specialising in supplying fully populated printed circuit boards, which is at the centre of more or less any electronic device. Almost all the boards CircuitHub’s clients manufacture have a programmable component, and are intended for smart devices. The company also provides consultancy services to clients who need larger, or more specialist, manufacturing capabilities. Among the interesting clients it works with is a group of neuroscientists that grew out of the Massachusetts Institue of Technology (MIT), Open Ephys, an open-source electrophysiology company. Simply put, the group develops devices that can read minds, or brains to be more precise. Open Ephys has designed a number of components, which are available to buy individually through its online store. But CircuitHub supplies the complete, ready-made product. “The core of what we do, and what we’re really good at, is the circuit board assemblies,” says Seddon. “We do those mostly for hardware startups. We’ve done work for various robotics companies, and drones manufacturers.” Other companies CircuitHub does manufacturing work for include Pebble, the smartwatch manufacturer, and Formlabs, which claims to have developed the first high-resolution, desktop stereolithography 3D printer. Spotting trends is a favourite pastime of journalists, among others, but by now, most people have heard of 3D printing and know what it is. And it doesn’t take too much imagination to see the potentially revolutionary impact of the technology. Stratasys, one of the leading manufacturers of 3D printers, recently published a survey in which it says approximately three-quarters of manufacturing companies will utilise the technology in the next three years.
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