Printed circuit board

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Before we dive into this wonderful conversation, would you be able to define what a printed circuit board is, please, for our audience?

Sure.

A printed circuit board, or you often will hear it referred to as a PCB.

is the physical board inside an electronic product that connects and carries all the components that make the electronic works.

So it's where All the silicon components sit.

So the real time is where everything's going.

So then I'll ask you this then, what becomes the brain? What becomes that digital thread that connects all of this, or if you want to use the AI term, the MD file?

The thing that's very unique in electronic design and PCB design is it's one of the few tools that sits that spans and i'd like to think about this as a bridge and on one side of the bridge is the digital world where engineers are designing their products and on the other side of the bridge is the physical world sourcing manufacturing the whole physical end of the implementation and The PCB design flow is in one spot where those two things come together and bridge those two worlds.

I just have this painter tape just so that they don't fall out.

they're very generously sized for bigger cables if you ever want to use those but um otherwise they stay in there you can see there's some slack here that um that just get where am i it's backwards yeah there's some slack here but you can get a look there at the um the individual uh neo pixel jst breakout so they're just single neo pixel 50-50 sized NeoPixel LEDs that are on a PCB that has two mounting holes and two JSTSH connectors, the three pin ones.

So there's an in and an out.

Very simple, but it's really great for this project because this is a no solder, no code project.

What a great reason to do a project.

But that's all the CAD parts.

Yeah, there's a little PCB mount that has built-in standoffs that are sized perfectly for the Sparkle Motion mini board.

And then there's that little circular tube that connects to the back of those branches.

So we design a new machine for this requirement.

After the customer give me the PCB dimension, what is the weight of the PCBA, the material they're going to use, and obviously the conformal coding application map.

We can work with our R&D team to make a DFM according to the customer requirements and present it to the customer.

We present this to the customer.

I did it for multiple years as an internal manufacturing engineer.

Then I got promoted to become a manager of avionics R&D, which is a little bit of everything, machining, PCBAs, wire harnessing, electromechanical assembly, just all the parts that went into a rocket and a satellite.

And what got me obsessed with wire harnessing is I started my career at SpaceX, moved into a little more of a broader role, and I started bringing things like machining and PCBAs and electromechanical assembly in-house, but we outsourced like 95% of our wire harnessing at that time for Falcon and Dragon.

And it was like, wow, this is pretty crazy that we're spending this much money on it.

It's a bottleneck for the company.

We do have a couple of little beacons near the Hack Your Badge area and things like this, but mostly we don't do that.

And then the other thing we did hardware-wise is, because we print nice designs on it and we have nice graphics and things, and we've got nice graphics on the new one that kind of look cool and are very GitHub-y, but actually it turns out that these PCB graphics are capacitive controls.

Wow.

And so you can, when you flip it up, you can now use it as a full gaming system.

And so we've set the PCB up so it actually feels and looks an awful lot like a gaming system.

So you can sit there and play games and stuff and just use the printed circuit board kind of buttons as... as hardware buttons.

And so again, that increases the kind of playability and the immediate hands-on, I want to build something with this.

Yep.

A rapid expansion like that in PCBA and also embracing a new, even more demanding technology has got to put a lot of strain on your senior management team, I would think.

Correct.

And the only way to actually make sure you're doing well We want to make sure that our customers keep that confidence, that level of confidence, that level of commitment that they have from us.