Yes, Hack the North is run at the University of Waterloo!
Mostly cost for us. JLCPCB's scale lets them make money on orders that would be too small for most fabs. Quoting, ordering, and part selection are all a battle tested web form. They also stock most of the parts in-house, so a small order costs them almost no engineering time. A local fab probably wouldn't have any of these advantages. JLCPCB really have it down to a science.
We do a run of 250 similar badges for a non-tech convention every year. ~$10 per badge is about right all in. We've also done runs without ICs (just LEDs, a switch, and button cell battery) for about ~$4 some years.
That's awesome! I'm really happy to see non-tech conventions running badges. It's so cool that with today's technology you truly can "just make things".
Author here! I'm sure an experienced PCB designer could get it done quicker, but we were in it for the learning aspect too. Hack the North is entirely student run!
My best guess is an experienced designer would have made fewer mistakes and been more familiar with the process, so maybe they save two iterations and can get the initial schematic capture and layout done in a few days rather than a week.
A good experienced designer who has done esp32 before will have all these modules or similar enough in a library and can just plug them together.
Possible in a day depending on risk tolerance, almost always better imo to sleep on it. There would be no iterations.
But they will not likely do it happily in that timeframe. And you would practically never get them to quote it at one day, especially not without an inflated rate.
Super cool to see what goes into this, all the design and planning. Very fun to be able to play around with the device virtually and see all the stuff that was managed to be packed in there too!
I'm sure this makes me seem like a "get off my lawn" type of person but is anyone considering the environmental impact of making almost 2000 "throw away" pieces of electronics just for a convention?
Yes, I get the cool factor and I love blinking lights too, but the low-cost factor comes from the environmental pollution occuring, it's just been pushed over to China.
These are programmable devices given to programmers. The rate of these being thrown out or underutilized is so much lower than so much of human activity.
On the scale of hosting a hackathon, a few kgs of badges likely rates below the trash generated for just the take out food in terms of impact.
Maybe we can recognize that this is so minor of an issue that we don’t need to start here, or even really look too deep at this. Let’s fight these problems on a scale where it really matters.
EMF Camp in the UK is looking at this and doing an experiment: The same badge back with most of the electronics on it, the same battery, and a swappable front plate to give some variation and new functionality. The badge is intended to last 3 events (6 years) and has thus far done 2 events.
We're also hoping the expansion connector might be used by other boards - i2c, 4 fast gpios, 5 slow gpios/pwms, 700ma of 3.3 power. A standard similar to SAO for identification via i2c flash
Definitely hoping that more events adopt these kinds of creative approaches!! Love to see it. Thinking of supplying something similar and customized for my hackathon!
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[ 74.9 ms ] story [ 393 ms ] threadUnfortunate that Canada doesn't have its own (at least) small-time fab for these things.
Looks like Hack The North is located in Waterloo? Their website is very confusing to navigate.
They’re going to be much more expensive than JLCPCB, if they take the job at all.
Some conferences can find small businesses trying to get started who do the jobs at cost or a loss, but that’s rare.
Mostly cost for us. JLCPCB's scale lets them make money on orders that would be too small for most fabs. Quoting, ordering, and part selection are all a battle tested web form. They also stock most of the parts in-house, so a small order costs them almost no engineering time. A local fab probably wouldn't have any of these advantages. JLCPCB really have it down to a science.
What does your badge do? I'd love to see it!
But - how much work is this for an experienced PCB designer?
How long would it take someone skilled to get such a thing designed?
My best guess is an experienced designer would have made fewer mistakes and been more familiar with the process, so maybe they save two iterations and can get the initial schematic capture and layout done in a few days rather than a week.
Possible in a day depending on risk tolerance, almost always better imo to sleep on it. There would be no iterations.
But they will not likely do it happily in that timeframe. And you would practically never get them to quote it at one day, especially not without an inflated rate.
Yes, I get the cool factor and I love blinking lights too, but the low-cost factor comes from the environmental pollution occuring, it's just been pushed over to China.
These are programmable devices given to programmers. The rate of these being thrown out or underutilized is so much lower than so much of human activity.
On the scale of hosting a hackathon, a few kgs of badges likely rates below the trash generated for just the take out food in terms of impact.
Maybe we can recognize that this is so minor of an issue that we don’t need to start here, or even really look too deep at this. Let’s fight these problems on a scale where it really matters.
We're also hoping the expansion connector might be used by other boards - i2c, 4 fast gpios, 5 slow gpios/pwms, 700ma of 3.3 power. A standard similar to SAO for identification via i2c flash