Board Design For Manufacture

One of the big tasks for commercialization of the Voltmeter Clock is reducing the number of assembly steps it takes to put the thing together. The prototype was cobbled together with a lot of hand soldered wires and I might estimate it at 10-15 minutes of labor, and that's if you had a plan going in.

Even assuming minimum wage plus overhead costs, (the assembly houses we've worked in the past pay way better), that could easily add $5 to the raw goods costs, which is really like adding $20 to the finished product when normal markups are added in.

The messy prototype

Cleaning it up

The strategy for reducing cost was to eliminate as many wires as possible and place everything on a single board that could be quickly screwed down. By using right angle knobs, it's possible to eliminate all flying wires and connect directly to the voltmeter screw terminals using traces on the PCB. I'm pretty sure this is the right direction to go in. Integrating the PCBA into the housing should now take less than 20 seconds.

Here's a link to the design memo on github with more detail about selecting specific knob components from the wide world of Digikey.

What's Next:

We've already selected a chip, we selected our major electro-mechanical knob components, and we've now started on schematic capture.

We still need to resolve

• Wall wart selection
• Best way to route power through the housing and attach it to the board
• Need for voltage regulation on the board, if any (how good is the wall wart?)
• Finish schematic capture and start on board layout

Ongoing marketing activities

Our goal for this project is about 250 units in sales to make volume order of components worthwhile. Our email list doesn't have 250 people on it yet! If you know groups to reach out to, EE professors, product designers, or anyone else who'd be interested, we're happy to talk to them and have them check out the product page.