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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
A
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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7
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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Interview
Sensor Readings
The CarKnow team worked with CircuitHub to build its Carduino prototype board
Confucius he say, ‘What flows around, flows around.’ Just to be clear, that was a joke. No offence intended. Confucius, the ancient Chinese philosopher, did not actually say that, as far as I know. Actual documented Confucius quotes include, “Time flows away like the water in the river”, “The one who would be in constant happiness must frequently change”, and of course, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with one step”. But whatever Confucius said, and whatever China learned from him, his modern-day compatriots have built a nation which is home to arguably the world’s largest manufacturing industry, and much of it is involved in making electronics products. The nation of 1.4 billion people is currently claimed to be the leading manufacturer of personal computers. Since the liberalisation of China’s economy in 1979, when it effectively went from being a communist state to capitalist one, the country’s electronics industry has been one of the fastest-growing sectors of industry. However, that growth is built on foreign orders. China is essentially a massive assembly line for overseas companies. If some of those foreign orders – perhaps the smaller ones – were instead diverted to 3D printing companies locally, and to more agile assembly companies like CircuitHub, things may be different going forward. “The general mega-trend that’s going on right now,” says Seddon, “is putting circuitboards into things that didn’t have circuitboards before. “If you look at the Internet of Things (IoT), what we’re seeing now is that everything is starting to get circuitboards put into it. There’s been some very successful companies that are putting circuitboards into travel luggage – the Bluesmart case. Those guys are doing incredibly well. You look at a product like the Lunar smart mattress, which is a mattress that measures your sleeping patterns. “It’s still a relatively nascent industry, but it’s really growing. There’s a lot of applications for this kind of pervasive data collection, and internet connection, and what you can do when you pool all that data.
“
he general mega-trend right now is to T put circuitboards into things that didn’t have circuitboards before” Andrew Seddon, CEO, CircuitHub
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One of CircuitHub’s clients is the company that makes the Pebble smartwatch
“But at the heart of these things is the internet connection, or the IoT. You’ve got to get these things hooked up to the internet, you’ve got to get the sensors connected. And that means putting electronics into things. That’s a real growing trend.” Seddon says CircuitHub’s core demographic is startup companies like these, which are inventing and innovating new products that either never existed before, or never took the form that they are taking now as a result of the internet and electronics. Essentially, everyday objects are getting smarter. How fast this smart technology market will grow is anyone’s guess. Analysts can make forecasts, and they’d probably be correct in their positive projections. But the reality now is that the US, North America, Europe and most industrialised nations have been hammered over the past few decades when it comes to manufacturing. Mostly because of cheap labour in developing nations. China is claimed by some sources to have overtaken the US as the world’s leading manufacturer at the beginning of this decade. However, the data supposedly proving China’s pre-eminence is sketchy at best. The US is still at the very least one of the world’s great manufacturing nations, and certainly one of the most innovative. The US may well make a comeback, which it currently seems to be doing, according to a report by the US Federal Reserve. The Fed says the US manufacturing sector has been making modest but consistent gains over the past four years. Nonetheless, the consequences of the emergence of China as a global manufacturing hub have included the wearing down of manufacturing bases in many other countries around the world, including nations which thought that their emphasis on, and expertise in, advanced technology would ensure their survival. But for many manufacturing companies outside Asia, it did not. And while manufacturing still exists in most industrialised nations, it’s mostly a shadow of its former self. Moreover, the global financial turmoil we are seeing now, with stock markets reportedly crashing in China and the US, and even shares of Apple losing several billion dollars in paper value, assigning a monetary figure on the manufacturing sector of any nation is tricky at best. I, robot, will change everything It’s pure speculation, but robotics may well be a factor in the downturn in Chinese and other national stock exchanges. Some analysts have already forecast that industrial robots will have a much greater impact than previously thought, and it could lead to mass unemployment much earlier than more reassuring projections would have it. One of the key reasons for this is the dramatic drop in the price of industrial robots. They may take all sorts of shapes and sizes, and come with a wide range of price tags, but as with all technology, they are getting cheaper. It used to cost around $180,000 for an industrial robot less than five years ago. Now, the same machine can be bought for $50,000 less. And that is the old, familiar industrial robots, the giant orange or red beasts of burden which tend to be fenced off, and kept separate from human workers. The new generation of so-called “collaborative” robots are often much smaller, built to human-like sizes, and are intended to work collaboratively with humans. They can be kept within
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Interview
Sensor Readings
This giant robot version of Confucius, entitled ‘Breathing’, was created by artist Zhang Huan
touching distance of human workers, are significantly cheaper, and capable of a wider variety of tasks. Universal Robots claim that the three robots they make can provide a return on investment in around 200 days. Scott Mabie, Universal’s North America manager, told Robotics and Automation News recently: “Unlike traditional industrial robots, collaborative robots are lightweight, flexible and can easily be moved and reprogrammed to solve new tasks, meeting the short-run production challenge faced by companies adjusting to ever more advanced processing in smaller batch sizes. “With traditional robots, the capital costs for the robots themselves account for only 25 to 30 percent of the total system costs. The remaining costs are associated with robot programming, setup, and dedicated, shielded work cells. “The ‘out of box experience’ with a collaborative robot is typically less than an hour. That’s the time it takes to unpack the robot, mount it, and program the first simple task. Average payback period for UR robots is the fastest in the industry with only 195 days.” Mabie also said that Universal Robots is growing so fast that it is currently selling more robots in a week than it did in the whole of 2009. That means there’s a lot more Universal robots out there, a trend that the company says looks set to continue. A factory at your fingertips Then there are other co-bot makers, such as ABB, which makes the dual-armed YuMi robot. And Yamaha recently launched duAro, another two-armed collaborative robot. It’s a trend that will surely see many other manufacturers launching similar robots. All of which means there will be more robot peripherals made by companies such as Robotiq, and more potential orders for electronic circuits from companies like CircuitHub. “We’ve done a couple of circuitboards for robots already,” says Seddon. “And it’s certainly something we see as a growth driver for us. “I think what’s happening in robotics now is sort of what happened in the 3D industry, which is a consumerisation of the technology, or at least wider availability. I know several startups who have developed robotics applications which were previously only possible if you had the kind of resources that large, multinational companies had.
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“
Average payback period for UR robots is the fastest in the industry – only 195 days”
Scott Mabie (below), Universal Robots
“But now, startups have the option of using a lot of off-the-shelf robotics technology, combine it with 3D printing, and services like CircuitHub, to really drive the cost down on those robots they’re building.” A very typical profile of something that a customer will manufacture on CircuitHub, says Seddon, is a microprocessor or microcontroller connected to a bunch of sensors, and possibly some output devices to perhaps control a motor, and the embedded computing platform that has input and output specifically designed for the application that the customer intends to use it for; and they are then able to program that microprocessor appropriately. Seddon says the lines between microprocessors and microcontrollers are blurring, with companies increasingly producing both and embedding similar functions. “We see a lot of things based on Atmel chips,” he says. “Atmel have a range of microcontrollers, and they were used on the Arduino.” Arduino is an open-source electronic prototyping platform popular with engineers who want to create interactive electronic objects. It’s also one of the most popular robotics platforms. Other well-known platforms include Raspberry Pi, and Redtree Robotics. “The type of customers we have are electrical engineers, and they give us very precise specifications about the thing they want to get manufactured. They upload their CAD [computer-aided design] data files to CircuitHub, and we give them an instant quote on how much it will cost to manufacture, and how much time it will take. “They can just click a button and pay for it on the CircuitHub website, and we go off and purchase whatever parts necessary and perform the pick-andplace manufacturing process, which is largely robotic.” CircuitHub uses a number of different robot systems, but mostly it’s a 3-axis robot, which can place 10,000 different parts on circuitboards every hour. New companies usually have a healthy growth rate, starting as they do from zero, and CircuitHub is no different. At the moment, it is seeing order growth of 30 per cent a month. It has five employees and looking to hire more. “We are a new type of company,” says Seddon. “The core industry that we serve is mature and well-established, but the way in which we serve it is very innovative. This idea of having a factory at your fingertips, as an engineer, being able to log onto a website and remotely control the factory through a web interface hasn’t existed before. “The way you would get things manufactured before, you would probably visit the factory, build a working relationship with the people there. That takes a lot time and is very labour-intensive. What we’ve done is take all of that process and make it available online.” Most people would probably agree that nothing can replace human relationships, even in business, and certainly for large multinationals it would seem appropriate to visit the place where your product will be rolled out in its millions. But business is almost entirely about the bottom line, and compared to, for example, a week-long business trip in a strange land to meet and greet a maze of potential manufacturers of your product, uploading your CAD to CircuitHub and letting them do the rest seems almost too simple in comparison. It’s an efficient process, and it’s the one I’d choose if I were an engineer looking to get something made – I could get more done in less time and with less effort. Some might say that means I’m lazy and need a kick up the SaaS, but what do they know? See what I did there? Peace O**. That’s Peace Out. No offence intended. l
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