Home Automation Hangout 2021-11-21: Who makes Freetronics boards?

[Music] so good morning everybody and welcome to another sunday live stream uh special good midnight to johnny thanks for starting so no i was gonna thank you for starting so late i apologize for starting so late in your time zone but first i acknowledge the traditional owners of this land i pay my respects to their elders past and present and to aboriginal elders and peoples from other communities who may be taking part in this live stream today now for those of you who haven't been to my live streams before oops i've just locked my computer that may seem like a strange way to start a live stream but it's just part of my ongoing effort to educate myself a little about the um the history of the aboriginal people of this area the warren jerry people in uh where we're on so this is the way we're on area so lip sync issues possibly possibly uh okay maybe i need to do the whole live stream like this yeah i i am uh okay right before the stream now i did a uh a mac os update sometime during the week and just before this live stream started the thunderbolt display adapter that i use that i normally feed the video from here into my atm for a capture stopped working it's just not even appearing as a monitor so i've had to do a very quick grab some hdmi cables and an hdmi splitter and i'm using an external monitor running off a splitter which is also splitting to the atm and then yeah so there's stuff going on it is quite likely that i have sync issues and i i need to yeah steve's lips say hello say hello steve so it is quite likely that i have sync issues so add a couple of frame delay on the sound input ah okay i don't know if that's something that i want to mess around with right now while i'm on a live stream but it's probably going to drive people nuts if i don't so let's see atem software control i'll fire this up and we'll see if we can fix it in a jiffy before i break everyone's minds because some people it uh yeah it really messes with the head media audio audio okay i'm in there how do i add a delay ah yes that's the lag cause uh how do i add a delay in here meteor switcher maybe it's in the setup i don't know lipsy maybe it's in the oh sorry about this audio input mark selector general split and i don't want to split multi-view labels i'm not even sure where this is in the audio tab okay i'm in the audio tab it's got split audio in general options input one front oh so steven asked have i replaced the mini with a macbook pro no i'm i think looks okay to me maybe i don't know what it is all right it's not really the right time to be messing around with this hang on audio pan on off auto fv i can't see anywhere to do the delay so all right yes we'll just pretend that i am my name now is max max headroom all right since some people aren't seeing it i am going to stop messing around with the sync issue and the thing is that for a lot of this i'm going to be showing stuff on the screen anyway my head is going to be up squished in the corner somewhere and this isn't going to be too much of a problem so i've got a few things today a few things in fact right before the um the live stream started i had an unexpected sunday delivery and this arrived so we may even get to the point of opening the box on this i unwrapped it and haven't opened the box but that is something that i've seen a couple of people um general 42 said pretend you were watching a karate video all right hang on i am just going to pull something up notifications all right i'm gonna i'm gonna pause this i know this is a weird way to be starting a live stream this came up in my facebook memories as a seven-year-old uh memory where am i going okay so this is the video of me and daniel schuart so it's me in the white and this was seven years ago today when we were at the gym just messing around uh with a few things and daniel said hey let's do flying armbars daniel's in the blue so that was that's just me doing a flying arm bar on daniel um that was so much fun okay let's get rid of that and go back to here yes i had here then um now there there is actually a topic for today it's an important topic we will get to it you know how these things go it always starts with me just randomly rambling now the um this is something that i've been thinking about for quite a long time and various circumstances have come about that have made me think screw it i'm just going to like talk about it it's something that i have kept behind the scenes uh for okay i am i'm mentally reviewing how i'm gonna explain this let's just do it in the usual random chasing squirrels way now what i'm going to be talking about for a fair bit of today is business related and uh many of you know a lot of the backstory of my own business situation with so over the years i've had several businesses the most i was going to say the most successful but it probably it would be the most successful but depends on the metric not successful in terms of quality of life or mental health or anything like that definitely not the most successful from that point of view but for most uh conventional metrics the most successful business i've had has been internet vision technologies which at its peak so it picked it i had 42 staff and it was doing pretty well for a while um had some really serious problems along the way which i won't get into because that's not really the point of this whole thing but i've had different experiences in the business context over the years and some of those experiences have been fantastic some of them have been horrible some of them have been in between like everything and so a lot of people particularly that come along to these live streams know me from the context of super house and slightly you know one step removed from that freetronix and have probably heard a little bit about the backstory of other things i've done like ivt and way back in the past an electron like back when i was at uni i had a small electronics business called rotor systems research and i used to do automotive electronics so building aftermarket devices for primarily for rotary powered performance like street cars and that was back when i was like 20 to 22 23 years old in that sort of region and uh so oh and also i i worked for a security company for a while as an employee and then after that i actually restarted my own security company and provided some services like contracting for for people running events anyway where is all this going the point of all of this is that i don't love business many people do and they see business as a as a game or a challenge or a puzzle to be solved and it has rules sometimes those rules can be broken there are principles that you follow and for many people the business is the goal it is it almost doesn't matter what the business is it is the game that they are playing and people play it in all sorts of different ways there are people who play it in a very aggressive way there are people who play it in a very collaborative way and there are people whose sole goal is to win regardless of anything else and i've seen plenty of those there are people who uh like um so there are plenty of people particularly at the higher levels of business who are who would be classified as sociopaths so they have a lack of empathy and the ability to make decisions on the basis of what is going to be most beneficial to them directly personally regardless of how it affects anyone else and of course people with those sorts of characteristics can tend to be more successful in some ways because they don't have the the same restrictions i suppose on the way they think about things and the way that they approach things it's which doesn't necessarily mean that they act in a short-term way they can act in a you know long uh in a long horizon sort of way and they can do things that will be mutually beneficial in the short term but ultimately your well-being and success doesn't matter to them it's like it doesn't even register it's about how to engineer the situation to their own benefit so i've had as i said before i've had lots of different experiences and some things have been really really good some things have been bad some things have been in between and so sorry i'm just doing a doing the moderation thing allowing a comment through yep cool so uh all right so this is all kind of background where i'm going with this is i'm going to talk about the arrangement that freetronix has had for more than a decade with a company in china based in beijing i'm going to show you all the information about them so we'll get to that what i'm trying to get to here is explaining some of the background partly of why i'm revealing this sort of information and why it's commonly not revealed and this ties into where i'm thinking of going with my own life and what's important to me the things i want to achieve and how i want to go about achieving them in a way that i feel good about and that makes the world better for not just for me personally but for anyone that i work with or anyone that i interact with that's kind of the context of all of this so um oh peter i just saw you won't be sticking around because you got a migraine i'm really sorry to hear that i hope you feel better so yes a dark room may be the solution yeah take care peter all right so one of the things that can force very secretive behavior right backing up the usual approach in business is if you have an upstream supplier such as a manufacturer who is making your product for you you the the supply chain from the the creation of the product to the end customer has a number of steps typically like an oem there'll be the manufacturer who may be working on behalf of the original designer of the product it then can go through the owner of the product my terminology is not necessarily that clear it's all a bit fungible then typically there'll be a distribution chain like on the wholesale side so it'll go through distributors and then distributors to retailers and retailers to um to the end customer so there are a number of steps of the chain and at each step of the chain there is value added and there is cost added so what the end retail customer is paying is typically many many times the cost of the raw bill of materials of the item that starts so you've you have a product that might cost ten dollars in raw biller materials by the time it ends up in a customer's hands they might be paying a hundred dollars for it or two hundred dollars for it that's sort of just the way it works because each step of the chain does provide value and they also don't want to be cut out of the chain and bypassed they want their value to be valued so in the case of distributors for example wholesale distributors the manufacturer of a product could sell directly to retailers but there is a big overhead in doing that you have to interact with the retailers directly you might have many many retailers you have to do things like um warehousing and distribution so physical distribution of the goods whereas if you go through a wholesaler that wholesaler can then have existing arrangements with all of the retailers and the retailers buy from the wholesaler and so the wholesaler doesn't want to be cut out of it because potentially the retailers could go behind their back and buy straight from the original supplier and get a cheaper price but the wholesale the distributor is providing the value of keeping the stock there making it available having a single point of relationship for many different products so anyway it's a i'm not i didn't start out with this talking about the structure of business that wasn't really the point of it so the um the point is that there are many people along the way and for most people in this chain starting from the factory that makes the products to the end customer the consumer that gets it at the end of the day it's a one-way relationship and the idea is that each one of those steps traditionally is like a valve product can go from the factory and end up in the consumer's hands but at each step of the way each of those people acts as a gatekeeper and they don't want the relationship to go behind them and move back up the chain because they want to stay in that part of the relationship and stay valuable now i'm not really explaining this very well but part of this is about how this information is protected if you're a consumer and you have a product in your hand like this star tech com thing that i had plugged into my computer the display link adapter that just stopped working right before the live stream i bought this i don't even know where i bought it probably uh office works or something so i bought this from a retailer i don't know who their distributor is or the wholesaler they got it from i might be able to find out if i went back to the wholesaler then i wouldn't know who the factory is that manufactured it and they don't want me going back up the chain because what they don't want is someone at the end of the chain going further back up the chain and buying directly and bypassing them so that sort of information is usually very well protected and of course there are lots of contracts and things that are in place like non-compete agreements and exclusive distribution agreements and all of those sorts of things it's all designed to keep the system uh i think i use the word stagnant but that's not the right word stagnant is not the right word it's because that implies that it's bad or destructive or deteriorating and it's not really that it's not it's more a matter of static i suppose is a better way of putting it it's a way of keeping the structure in place and maintaining it and to some extent with open source projects and the sorts of things that i do that is all turned around a little bit or it's all a bit shaken up because if i sell a board to someone okay say this one say we've got the the rac32 board this board how much am i listing it for 119 which is a lot i admit that's a premium price for a little board like this if you look at the cost of the bill of materials it's not 119 worth of parts on there but the thing is that i've published the designs for this like all of the source files the eagle files the schematic the pcb layout everything is all published under an open source license on github if someone looks at this and says i would like that but i don't want to pay 119 bucks for it i want to just make it myself i have published the designs so that anyone can go and do that you can download my files you can generate gerbers you can send them off to a pcb fab you can have the pcb made you can buy the parts you can populate it etc so you can bypass that entire chain but this is the thing most people don't have the knowledge the resources it doesn't make economic sense it is simpler to simply pay 119 by this and you've got the problem solved versus spending probably days of time in generating the files finding a pcb place getting them manufactured sourcing all the parts assembling it you're not even necessarily sure if you're going to get it working properly it hasn't been tested so you've got to do it yourself if you just want a one-off it makes no economic sense to reproduce it yourself it's much simpler to just buy it because i've solved that problem and so this is where the commercial relationship with assemblers and all of those sorts of things come as in so if i um [Music] alright so this is where stuff can be secretive even in the open source world because the relationship that i have now in this particular case this this is actually not a good example for what i'm talking about because i personally assembled this board right here in this room all of the rac32's i've personally assembled so it's not part of this equation what i should have done is planned ahead and got something to wave around as a prop in fact i am going to show you some free tronic stuff and i want to show you some packaging as well because this is part of the value of what i want to get at and some of the services that this company that i'm going to talk about provides and maria says sell it as an nft yeah yeah so david yeah chip says status quo yes you're right maintaining the status quo so david a few people said that yeah now okay i'm so this is super house stuff which i produced here i have had super house boards produced in china as well at uh at this other company but what i'm going to do is grab i'm going to grab out a thing from just here because i know it might seem a little bit unnecessary to have props to wave around at you when i'm kind of explaining things but i like to explain things with props and it also gives me a chance to show you a couple of other things related to it in terms of packaging so i'll just okay so freetronix that's what i'm talking about today and you can see there there is a board in retail packaging it's got the hang tag so that it can go into a retail store and people can walk up and buy it and take it to the register and scan the barcode and buy it it's a proper retail product and this particular product the board was assembled in china in beijing and which it may not be where you expect you probably thought it would be in shenzhen or somewhere like that and the packaging was also done in that area and i'll show you some packaging information a minute including the plastics in here which are all custom plastics [Applause] the injection molds and everything were made for us so for free tronics so it's all custom done and yeah so peter says planning a live stream over my dead body yeah it's not planned the general topic is planned and then i'm just going to ramble so okay now this is the thing coming back to the history of freetronics and how this has all come about and some of my not so fun experiences in business have been in relation to freetronix freetronix in general has been pretty good it's just you know there are a couple of hiccups that happen along the way including the whole experimenter's kit fiasco that many of you would know about so in the early days of freetronix to give some context one of the reasons that it came about or one of the reasons that it ended up being successful and shipped a lot of product was the relationship with electus distribution and j-car so jacob being the retailer with stores all over australia and i think elsewhere now new zealand definitely a lecturer's distribution is the wholesale arm that is behind jkhar so elect us purchases from all of the suppliers and then sells to jcar and then jkhar sells to customers so we did not supply j car we supplied alectus distribution which then supplied jk that's the way the relationship worked and uh oh this is slightly off-topic but carl asked do i have an idea on the ratio of people buying the prefab and assembling board versus making themselves making them themselves with open source projects like this and the short answer is no i don't but that is something i've thought about a bit and maybe we'll get to that topic so okay so the issue with selling to selling through electus and j carr is that we were doing large volumes like we're talking up like shipping container sort of size and or lcls which is what's called lcl is less than container load it's when you have like typically pellets loaded with a forklift and the pellets go into a container so your what you're paying for is part of a shipping container and uh that's the sort of volumes that we used to do in fact there were some i had a photo at one point where my entire double garage was stacked like on the floor up to like above head height so like two pellets worth of height multiple rows just filling the double garage and that was a stock that had come from china and was then dropped off at my place at my house and then from there was shipped to sydney uh that didn't usually happen what usually happened was we had an arrangement where after manufacturing there would be overland freight from beijing which i'll get to in a minute all the way down china is a huge place but so it would take a multi-day trip over land from from beijing which is way up in the north right at the top it would end up all the way down in the south and go out most commonly on a container ship going out of hong kong it would go from hong kong to sydney and then from sydney it would go and be distributed all over australia but i would not physically see that like there would be shipping containers that would travel and it would all be numbers in a spreadsheet and i didn't actually physically have any contact with any of it the relationship was managed by doing the arrangements with the uh with the assembler in beijing and then logistics to get it to the the collection point and uh i think the collection point from memory was actually in shanghai stretching my memory now so electus had a collection point and we would do um shipments into their into their depot and from there i think it went overland to hong kong and then from there on the ship heading out anyway this is all sorts of details in the weeds that don't really matter all that much but the result was we shipped literally container loads of arduinos we were doing pretty big volume but margin was pretty close to zero now this is not really the place i hadn't really even been intending to get into this this is like um this is not really the point of the story and uh but this is just to give some context because a lot of people when they hear about freetronix and the sort of volume that it does or that it did they think i must have made bucket loads of money out of it but the reality is that i would be doing like 100 000 orders and making almost nothing so and in some cases making negative profit because part of the commercial arrangement originally was that all of our prices to elect us were quoted in australian dollars all of our costs are in us dollars and the margin was quite small so as the exchange rate fluctuated as the australian dollar fell our costs would go up and we would be paying out our costs in us dollars and selling in australian dollars there were a few times where we would get an order um like we might get an order for 40 or 50 000 worth of arduino boards and it would actually cost us money like we would lose money on the order because it cost us more to manufacture them and get them into the depot get them transported to the depot then we were being paid for them in australian dollars by the time you work it all backwards so it was really really marginal doing big volume shipping a lot of boards like a really freaky number of boards but making essentially zero on it and what that was doing was that but that volume gave us some benefits one of the benefits was that we were not just going to assemblers and saying uh can you make me 50 of this board or 100 of this board we were going to them and saying can you make us 10 000 of this board and it gives you it gets you a totally different level of service and engagement all right um oh uh daniel said uh please the github link with eagle files for pcb presented before which one do you mean the freetronix one that one that's the so this is one that was done as a crowdfunded campaign um many many years ago this one and hasn't been actually sold for years this is a brand new one in its box and kind of kept as a memento because it was from a successful crowdfunding campaign what do you mean the rac32 so i can yeah both of those are on github uh yeah so daniel whichever one you prefer i can whichever one you need i can give you the links to those um yeah and mako says i'd be paying i'd be scared we're paying for the initial investment bill for a large order that's the other thing is that the capital involved is significant and the trading terms really really matter and if you have to front up for a 40 or 50 000 production run and then you are getting and there are all sorts of terms that come into this i'm not going to get into this this is still background i'm still not even getting to the point that i want to get to which it like there are all sorts of terms like fob like you'll see trade terms like fob china or whatever so like freight on board and that sort of thing and fob and cod and consignment arrangements and yeah lots of things so one thing i will say now over the years i have said some bad things about electus one thing that they did early on which really really helped and i've got to give them credit for this is they were willing to negotiate our contract terms in terms of um in terms of deposits and those sorts of things so typically when you're dealing with very large companies you have to foot you have to wear all the risk you have to pay for everything up front you ship your goods to them they don't even necessarily pay you for them like sometimes it'll be their credit terms will be 90 days end of month from receipt which means if you deliver them like in the middle of the month you won't get paid for three and a half months and in that time they've probably sold a bunch of it and they've got the money in so what it's doing is putting all of the risk on you and they take none of the risk and or it might be a consignment deal where they take it all and then they pay you for what they sell now in the early days there were some people that we were dealing with at electus who were who were hard-nosed and they wanted the best obviously for their business but they recognized that in order for that to happen they had to make it possible for us to supply them and so they were they were actually very good about providing things like deposits and upfront payments for some orders which is really really good and that was what really allowed freetronix to scale up to those sorts of volumes very quickly with a very small capital investment it was essentially a whole bunch of time and arrangements putting in place the relationships and setting things up with the with suppliers and things and um uh yeah oh sorry daniel uh after the one with the esp32 and ethernet yeah that is the rac32 i will drop that in the chat rack 32 and here it is so practicing what i preach if you want to buy it from me you can buy it from me the stock level is actually zero right now that's another story i've got a whole rack of these ready except for loading the final firmware and stock level should be added on that very soon but if you do want to look at the design files it's all there i'm not hiding it from anyone now okay so where to go with this all right the segway to the thing about the actual company that does all and still after 12 years provides all of the services to freetronix is that and what's really prompted me to bring this whole subject up and talk about it in a very open way now is thinking about what what i want to be doing and i've kind of got into that maybe it's because i'm doing that transition now to being a grumpy old man where i just don't care anymore and i will just say things because it's like repercussions who cares there have been a few um ooh austin says we have new firmware with ota awesome so the um uh okay i've had enough conversations with a number of people recently like at my similar sort of age range to me so i'm 51 and there i've had multiple conversations with people who have said some variation of i'm i'm just thinking about what to do with my business over the next 10 years or so i need to you know make some i need to plan what the next 10 years is going to be because that's going to take me through to retirement and it's made me think wow uh yeah that kind of is at this age that kind of is the situation it's thinking about that very finite amount of time that is left and what do i really want to be doing do i want to keep doing the things that i've been doing all of this time do i want to be experiencing the anxiety and all of the all of the negatives and doing things that i don't want to be doing and yes i know this sounds like a mid-life crisis talk it kind of is it's but it's not just midlife it's it's a matter of having some perspective on life and do am i doing the right thing this is a question that you can ask yourself at any stage in life it's just that at certain certain things happen or certain conversations happen that bring it into focus and then for me at least i start thinking do i want to make changes if i'm going to make changes i should just do it why think about oh i'm going to do that in a few years time like do it now think about it now and that's really where i'm at and so thinking about all of those sorts of things and a large part of this comes down to that pick and place machine road trip as well so yes austin said dreams tweet super house yeah so the opportunity and there is a whole series of dominoes that have led to this point i'm not going to backtrack too much and go into all of this but where i have ended up having this opportunity where i put out that it began with that oh if anybody knows of a pick and place machine sitting in a corner that needs a new home let me know that was an almost flippant tweet i had like a vague hope that something might come of it but i didn't really think that only weeks later i would be driving to canberra and picking up pick and place machines and bringing them back to melbourne and thinking okay now where are these going to live what am i what am i going to do [Music] james says summary you only live once yes so what it's done is opened some possibilities for me and made me think there are avenues i can pursue there are decisions i can make and changes that i can make that will maybe there maybe it's a mistake i don't know but let's give it a go let's just see where this leads and so i've been thinking more about this whole thing of business circumstances and business relationships and what sort of business i want to be doing who i want to be doing business with what customers i want to be doing business with what suppliers i want to be doing business with and how to make those relationships as positive as possible and is beneficial to everyone as possible i started thinking about the whole thing i was talking about earlier with the supply chain and the secretiveness and not wanting to expose upstream and so and this is really where the whole train of thought about electus came about so in the early days of electus uh and freetronic supplying electus my um my business partner mark alexander who for i don't know like the last nine years or something has been lifex however long that is is um was very paranoid about exposing anything to electus and i think probably with very good cause considering what happened considering how things went with alectus and the experimenter kit fiasco and all of that sort of stuff he was right absolutely right to try to hide as much from alexis and jacar as our customers as possible so that they could not go around us and bypass us and go to our manufacturer and source directly and cut us out because if the opportunity was there i'm pretty sure they would have done it so what his goal was was to prevent that opportunity from coming up now we um there were a bunch of things we did one of the things was that every time stock arrived in our hands the very first thing to do was to anonymize everything all of the shipping information any invoices packing lists any piece of paperwork that was related to upstream was destroyed immediately and so all boxes were opened they were checked to make sure there was nothing inside them like no packing lists inside them nothing that have a name on it or anything like that the whole goal was to anonymize the upstream sources of where all of this stuff came from so that by the time it went down the next step in the chain there was no way to trace back to where it came from that was like an information file wall and because a lot of what we were doing was uh was lcl shipments within china directly to the distribution point or the pickup point in shanghai what we did was register a company in hong kong so we set up so in conjunction with our manufacturer in beijing we registered a a corporate entity so a company in hong kong which acted as the exporter and the idea was that that would act as a barrier so that when shipments arrived like if we had a a truck that arrived in shanghai and with a whole like pallets full of stuff to be loaded to go into a container the shipper of that would be the hong kong company and that hong kong company was us it was freetronix essentially and so it couldn't that was once again an information firewall it was to prevent someone in the distribution center or the collection center in shanghai from receiving a shipment and grabbing a piece of paperwork and saying oh this came from the factory there and so pass that information along and then our customer bypass us go straight to the factory and say please make us a hundred thousand of these and uh we would be out of the game so that was the approach for in and that approach has pretty much continued for the entire history of freetronix it started out with that it started out with that approach that mindset of don't trust anyone and protect information and of course if things had continued well what ended up happening things went sour i'm not going to dwell on it too much things went sour with alectus that relationship has ended we're not supplying them we haven't supplied them for years if you walk into a jaycast or in many stores there is still free tronic stuff they still have some stock of odds and things it's probably all like faded by now but even reasonably recently it was still possible to go into a jk store and you could still see a few of the blue and yellow packages and uh where was i going with that i need a quick drink fancy i'm drinking out of a glass today yeah so so that has been the approach and over it has been a very [Music] adversarial mindset to business and a way of thinking about my customers or freetronix's customers almost as the enemy which so this this is starting to come down to the whole thing of my my change in philosophy about this and my grumpy old man uh mindset that is developing of just not caring anymore because i don't want to have that mindset anymore i'm tired of it i don't want to be looking over my shoulder and being paranoid about people ripping me off maybe this is maybe this is opening myself up too much maybe this is giving people the opportunity to take advantage of me and to that i say go for it not quite but i can't be bothered anymore dealing with rubbish and doing things in a in a paranoid way what i want is to be able to conduct business in a way that is respectful and mutually beneficial and trusting not necessary there is a limit obviously i'm not here to be taken advantage of there need to be boundaries there needs to be acceptable behavior in all relationships and so what i'm not saying is hey go and rip me off and take advantage of me i need to still be able to enforce boundaries and this is a large part of it is not doing business with people that have that sort of approach that adversarial approach and this is something that has really changed in my own head over over the last little while my for most of the time that i've been in business like through ivt days and all of those sorts of things i've had the um the grab more of the pie sort of approach of thinking that all customers are good customers and the more we get the better but it's not true sometimes the dealing with business partners or customers or suppliers who are who are a negative in the relationship takes away your time your energy your focus your opportunities to deal with people that are much better to deal with and this has really been driven home to me over the last two years in particular so i've been it's nearly two years now that i've been doing contracting work for a couple of clients well more than a couple but i have some contracting clients and you've seen me you've all seen me talk about the water cannon and so simon who is my customer for the water cannon awesome guy really really good to work with his project is technically interesting it's challenging and he is fantastic to work with he's very very smart he talks things through he listens and understands he has his own perspective it's one of those positive constructive relationships that makes it a pleasure to work on that project i want to work on it because not only because the project itself is good and he pays me i want to work on it because he is a great customer and and i really value the relationship and i can honestly say that for every customer that i am now working with on contracting projects the um simon is okay for me to talk about his water cannon publicly like i've shown it on live streams my other clients for many reasons don't want their projects disclosed so but in terms of the way i work with them it's very similar the relationships are really good i'm very very happy in working with them and it's there is that mutual respect that that just makes it all worthwhile it makes it good now the thing is that if i was working with other clients who were not nice people they might have they might have good projects like the projects could be worthwhile they could be technically interesting they could pay well but if the relationship with the client at a personal level is not there and it's not good that then is taking away from my opportunity to work with people like simon and not just do something good and not just make money from it but also feel good about it and have a good time doing it so that is and so saying no to people and not pursuing projects or not pursuing customers or suppliers or whoever can be as important as saying yes it's a matter of giving yourself the space to do those good things and work with those good people and once again this comes back to this i'm turning i've been saying grumpy old man but i think it's it's not so much grumpy old man it's more a matter of why do something that isn't good or why do something that has all of these negative connotations and side effects and um why work on things that are going to cause anxiety and yeah and i understand just as a slight side line i understand that being in a situation of being able to make those sorts of decisions is a privilege and for many people it it i'm not quite sure how to put this the fact that i am now in i'm going around a round of different ways to put it i am now in a situation where from my own personal satisfaction point of view with the projects i'm working on with my commercial contracting clients also with chris on the assistive technology projects my personal satisfaction level is the highest it has ever been in like my entire life the things that i'm doing feel like they are worthwhile good things and all of the people that i'm working with are good people and being able to get to that point meant saying no to some things it means walking away from some things now that can be tricky there are it's definitely possible to be in a situation where you can't turn down business even though it's a negative relationship because you don't have any other options now i recognize that and i'm not even really sure how to address that that is a whole squirrel that i could chase but let's not um because i want to get back to the other the main point so yeah steven says learning how and when to say no is a life skill yeah yes uh okay so getting back to getting back to the freetronic supplier all of this has been setting the scene for explaining why i have kept this secret for all of these years and the mindset that i've had for all of these years and how that has changed and um um so okay on the so on the subject of relationships with customers and suppliers and business partners and that sort of thing i've been coming more and more to the conclusion that it has to be beneficial to everyone and so what i've been talking about so far is wanting to have relationships that are positive for me but i also have to think about it in terms of there are other people having a relationship with me that is positive to them now if i am not giving them something that benefits them and the relation and they are not having a good time in their relationship with me that's no good like it could be a fantastic deal for me i could be getting paid lots of money and having a great time and think it's all good but if the if the other people that i'm working with aren't also benefiting from it it's not good it needs to be mutual and that sort of train of thought is really where it's gone from gone to in terms of talking about this this company so i realized and this this has all come about like within the last week it's only within in fact sooner than that it's only within the last couple of days that i have thought hey why don't i that i've yes sorry i'm being a little bit scattered that i have thought i have been getting benefit from my relationship with my my supplier in beijing for 12 years i have been buying from them like paying them to do assembly but i've also seen their business sort of you know go through ups and downs over the years 12 years is a long time to be in a business relationship with someone with one company and it made me think about what benefit do they get from having me as a customer now there is the obvious thing and that is i buy stuff from them i send them money they send me goods it's a win-win but it needs to be more than that and that's where this whole thing about the attitude to business and the mentality comes in because they have been extremely good to me and i want them to succeed i want their business to do really well and that is not just a matter of yeah and that goes beyond having me as someone who sends them money in exchange for goods if their business is going to succeed then there is more that i can do to help them succeed i want their business to go really well and one of the ways i can do that is reveal who they are because it's um it's like having a um i don't know i was thinking of analogies it's a terrible one but it's like having uh say you're you have a a shoe shop and you're the the famous cobbler out the front of the shop and you've actually got a bunch of unnamed people slaving away out the back making the shoes and you're out the front selling them and taking all the credit and they're not getting the credit for the work that they do so anyway what am i going to do what i'm going to do is i might as well just bring this up i'm going to bring up a website what have i lost my internet connection um let's see oh here we go okay um so this site i'm gonna drop in the chat there we go it's too late to back out now uh where are we desktop desktop this company which um funny thing was that for years we'd never actually heard their name said and didn't know how to pronounce it so well i will say it the correct way first it's scottry but for years i was pronouncing this as shot tree and so then when when i discovered that it was actually meant to be pronounced gotri my it just seemed totally weird to me so this company uh which was started by michael shang and a few of his friends i'm not sure what their actual company structure is now but michael is definitely the uh the person that is has been running the business for the the time that i've been dealing with them also one thing i should say is that um this site looks terrible that's just the way it is but okay i'm going to talk a bit more about what they do for me and explain why if you are looking for a a company to do a whole range of services for product manufacturing etc packaging all of the associated stuff why you should go and talk to these people and why i like them so much they've just from a business point of view and this comes down to the the whole relationship thing as well and doing business with good people the um in all of the time and all of the orders that we that i have run through shotree i said it again i've got to get into the habit of saying scottry um i um they have never done anything wrong by me they've never leaked information they've always been fantastic to deal with and very helpful gone out of their way to to solve problems etc so anyway where this is we're moving into a different phase of the conversation now so well i think it might be time for another drink but now you know this is the name of the company that has been making freetronix boards and packaging since 2009 i think it is i'm pretty sure it's 2009. and shipping container loads of boards all right now maybe a little um i need to explain a little bit of background as well so that you understand the nature of what this company is and the different types of companies that you will find now if you are going to if you are looking for assemblers so there are different terms i'm going to use all sorts of different terms here some of them probably in the wrong way there will be terms that you will find if okay backing up a little bit who cares about this if you have uh if you're maybe in the open source space and you want to take the next step and have your products manufactured rather than be assembling a few boards at home yourself or you have a business where you want to you want to outsource a whole lot of things like board assembly and testing and firmware loading and packaging production and potentially distribution and other related things then there are a number of businesses that you can engage different types of businesses as well terms that you'll come across are things like pcba which is printed circuit board assembly and there are many companies now like jlc pcb which provide yeah so what you'll find is that there are companies that start with one part of the chain like bare pcb manufacturing and then they add a service to that so if as a hobbyist you are accustomed to going to somewhere like jlc pcb or all pcb or pcb way or pcb cart or one of the many other or dirty pcbs you know one of the many chinese bare pcb houses excuse you i apologize to your ears i should have muted before i did that so what if you're accustomed to going to those sorts of places what will happen is that you order a pcb it comes to you as a bare pcb it is your responsibility then to do everything from that point on you have to buy components and you then have to fit them on the board so you have to do the assembly you have to do the cleaning firmware loading testing packaging and everything else now that sequence starting from the bare pcb what you'll find is that many companies begin to work along that value chain and add those services so lcsc for example which is the sister company of jlc pcb will source is a place for you to source the parts then you can go to jlcpcb and say i want you to make my pcbs and also assemble it so they provide the pcba service but they won't do or maybe they do i'm not sure but i don't think they will do any testing they will take your board they will put the parts where you tell them they will send the boards to you whether it does anything whether it works that is entirely on your shoulders you have to solve that problem so then the next step in the chain is the testing and then all of the steps that come beyond that so what you'll find is that depending on what your needs are in terms of your scale and your capabilities there are different companies that will provide different parts of this sequence everything from the bare pcb and nothing else all the way through to companies that will provide you with the retail packaged product with the instructions printed and stuck in the back the firmware loaded fully tested the boards washed they printing the packaging injection molding the plastic ready to go so this for example i haven't actually opened this box this arrived in this form go to the overhead camera that arrived in my hands in that form from scottry in china i have never opened it never had to do a thing i can put that in a box and send it to a customer my job is done so that is the other end of the scale it is when you get the entire package with all of that value added and you end up with a complete thing at the end of the day so that is so bare pcb through to complete retail ready packaged product that's kind of the scope of what we're talking about now um i stephen says the the design looks very web 1.0 yes very you find that with a lot of chinese websites some of them are very flashy and uh quite up-to-date but a lot of them a lot of chinese sites look like this sorry i should be on the desktop that one yeah oh okay so let's um now where are we home okay so that's just to give you some context about the the sorts of services or the things that you might want done maybe you only want bare pcbs maybe you want retail ready stuff in a box you know or package ready to go and so and so what they do is okay so the way scottry works the closest analogy i can think of is that they are project managers or an agency because they don't have their own factory like in terms of they don't have a factory with pick and place machines they don't have printing presses they um for doing the packaging they don't have injection molding machines what they have are people who have relationships with suppliers for all of those things and so yes johnny says jlc is a prototype service and not a manufacturing service yeah um and so what scotry will do is act as an intermediary and act as your agent on your behalf in negotiating and interacting with the local suppliers of all of those services now as i mentioned previously they're located in beijing which is way way up to the north it's right at the top end of china and you're probably accustomed to uh you're probably accustomed to most electronic stuff coming out of shenzhen down right in the south of china just over the border from hong kong and so it seems to be a little bit strange that they are located here but there is a there is also a very strong tech industry oh i just got a oh speaking of which i just got a notification pop up on my phone from dhl saying that there is a jlc pcb order arriving today it's on a truck right now that will be the rockling pcbs for everybody that's following that project and the um and the swag badge pcbs the tuck swag badge uh so yeah anyway it's it might seem strange to be getting all of these services out of beijing but there is a very strong tech industry in beijing as well it's one of the like the tech hubs of china particularly like 12 to 15 years ago like back around the times that all of this stuff started uh yeah so johnny says for large or does he go to a contract manufacturer yeah so what scotry do is have relationships with those local factories many of whom do not have representatives who can speak english they are typically dealing with the chinese domestic market there are like as westerners we are accustomed to dealing with a limited number of suppliers within china there are companies in china that are outward facing like jlc obviously and you know many other companies but that is a very small subset of the companies that operate in china the chinese market the domestic market is enormous it's one of i you can't even get your head around how big it is like the number of units that they sell uh domestically it it's like i don't know there are all sorts of things i could talk about like um there's a little car company i mean this this may no longer be true but a couple of years ago um there's a little car company in china called byd and byd which i'm sure that for the vast majority of people here you've never heard of byd uh biggest electric car company in the world and um also the biggest battery manufacturer in the world you've never heard of them they're the biggest in the world because they sell their cars in china so the sort of the the scale of industry that exists over there the number of companies and businesses is enormous and almost all of it is invisible to us as westerners we don't have the um we typically don't have a way to interact with them or to engage them and so where scottry fits in and where they have been so good for freetronix and for me is acting as that interface they deal with all of the local suppliers and they they act as me in china and maintain all of those relationships and stay on top of things they will physically go to factories and oversee what's happening and make sure that boards are being assembled correctly one thing that i will that i really admire about the service that scottrade has provided me over the years is their obsession with quality and making sure that what comes out is exactly what i want like there have been um many many times where there has been something that has happened with a supplier and something like one thing you would have seen in fact this pcb the one that i was waving around before it's a yellow pcb yellow solder mask is really really hard to do and it's very hard to get consistent yellow as a paint has almost no opacity it's like a tint that just shows through whatever is underneath it so getting a good yellow finish is really hard and there are many times that i have had people from scottry contact me saying oh we've had these boards made but look at the color of it it's not quite right what do you think is this acceptable and they'll have they'll send me a photo of two boards side by side and one is like a reference color or a previous production run and one is the new run that has just come out of a factory and most suppliers wouldn't have even questioned that they would just say you asked for yellow it's yellow you get what you get but they they're there they are there obsessing over the shade of yellow to make sure that it is exactly what i wanted uh yeah david b says cadmium and titanium pigment yes so uh titanium powder is typically what's used in things like white paint to make it opaque i used to work in a paint factory a long long time ago at a place called the paint factory that people in melbourne may remember there was a franchise business well originally it was companies and they accompany stores and they started opening up franchise retail stores called the paint factory it had a big buy one get one free promo for years and they had an actual factory in bayswater it was just down the road from me it was where all the paint was manufactured in big vats so yes big bags of titanium powder being poured into the into the vats anyway this has been your regularly scheduled squirrel uh all right so let me just talk about this so the um the owner slash manager of this business is michael um and the over the years they they've been very consistent with their staff that's the other thing the number of people that i've interacted with i've interacted with people over many many years they have very low staff turnover and let's just have a quick look so all of this live stream is kind of a promo for scottri oh well that's the way it is uh let's see what services they've got electronics manufacturing i think there are some um there are some photos of freetronix things in here machinement machining valuated no um easy bomb cool pcb anyway uh what am i looking for is easy bomb no anyway they've got these different names oh look there are some freetronix products there's a freetronix box so the um yeah well this kind of summarizes it just focus on your design we do the rest for you so what they've done is i'm going to switch to overhead camera let's have a look at this not that i'm going to look at this open this box up now this packaging the external cardboard box they had made and you can see that it's actually a relatively complex job because of the finishes it may not show up all that well on the camera but there is a uv over print there is an embossing you can't maybe you can see it from the back this yeah this little ridge you can't really see it but what's happened is that this cardboard has been stamped in order to cut out the shapes like it was obviously printed as a flat sheet all of the shapes were stamped out of it and it's also been stamped with an embossing stamp so the logo that is on here is raised you can just feel that it sticks out and on the back there's a little indentation so the whole sheet has been stamped in order to do the cuts and do the embossing and it's been printed and it's also been uv over printed now if i get the angle of the light just right you can see that hang on i've got to do this again that's better if i get the angle of the light just right you'll see that it's shiny through this blue area it's not shiny in this yellow area and that's because there is uv over print on top of the blue to make it shiny this is a satin finish and then you'll see there are strips here that are also shiny so there is uv over print on those strips so we've got a custom made box this was this box is actually designed by mark in adobe illustrator and um and we send it to them as an illustrator file they have done the custom uh cutting printing uv over print the embossing so that is not a simple box oh and it's glued so it's been folded and glued there's a glue joint through there and if i open it out it doesn't matter anyway the point the whole point is producing something like this level of retail packaging is not a simple job and these plastics these are all custom plastics that were done for free tronics if i open this up it's two clam shell halves that clip together and the board sits in there and there is room in there for usb cable there's foam in it there are instructions that are printed and folded so we've got instructions that go in there these plastics are all custom injection molded we had yeah so this was all designed in solidworks and the solidworks files were sent over to them they had the the moulds so it's there are actually four originally there were four now there are six different pieces of plastic because we've got a segmented version there is a single compartment version and now there is a short version and they've got top and bottom pieces so we sent them the solidworks files and they did the rest this is what we got it's amazing i'm really really impressed now this was 10 years ago 11 years ago that this was done and what they did was work with a local packaging company to uh well yeah to do the the machining for the the molds for the injection molding and then they had a whole lot of these shells made in a reasonable quantity and okay so this packaging this custom made plastic package and this complex over printed stamped embossed full color cardboard shell like the this together i think it costs us i haven't looked at the numbers for a while but it cost us something in the region of 50 cents so yeah the way that we achieved that and this this once again is one of the things that i um that i am appreciative to alexis and jake r for is they gave us the volume in the early days that we could go to packaging companies and we weren't just saying i want you to make me a hundred of this box we were saying we want you to make 10 000 as our first batch and then we'll order more after that and uh and that's really what got us over this because things like making the molds like the cnc machined molds that are used for the injection molding you can pay ten thousand dollars just to have the molds made and so you've really got to get that sort of volume in order to be able to make that possible but the thing is that in terms of making the arrangements this was all done by scottri we sent them the solidworks files we liaised with them they talked to the local companies that did the injection molding so that would be one company that does the injection molding another company that does the printing and the box you know stuff and then they pull it together and arrange how these two things come from those two factories and end up in the same place and then they arrange for the people to stick this in the box and close it all up and put it in a shipping box and then the shipping box goes in no yeah they put it into like a little six-way box which was also custom made for us we had boxes made so if you've bought something from freetronix or super house and it's coming one of those white boxes it's like it's kind of like half a shoe box size that box was custom made and that was custom made specifically to fit six of these boxes into it they like it fits the size perfectly and then those boxes go into shipping boxes and then those shipping boxes go onto pellets and then the pallets go into a container and it all scales up but achieving that was literally some emails between us and um it was sonja at the time so the uh the person who was managing our projects at scottry her name was sonya and she's no longer at the company but she was there for like seven years or so a long time and she did all of the arrangements for that so the name of the person that i'm oh john says the clear packaging is vacuum formed not injection molding ah right yeah so this is yeah this was done multiple times in multiple ways and it took a few iterations to get it right one of the big problems with this was the fit and somewhere around i've still got some early prototypes that where it didn't quite snap properly and it would end up either too tight and it would deform when it was closed or too loose and it would just fall apart so it went through a few iterations but john you're right i think you're right yes i am misremembering this because this is ancient history it's one of those things where it was done so many years ago and then it has just continued ever since so this this possibly is just vacuum formed in any case it was something that uh took a surprisingly small amount of effort from our part to make that happen okay so uh yeah where are we so the name of the person if you are interested in any of this the name of the person to talk to is alec and if you email sales easyoem.com then it is probably either alec or michael that will respond to you and so what they've done what i'm going to do let's see if i can find some i should move that off there so i don't reveal it too much i'm going to find some photos from beijing no that's the wrong folder i'm looking for let's see let's see so probably when would it be june i'm just scrolling scrolling through a whole bunch of things it'd be june 2013 i think would be in one of the interesting trips i am here we go okay let's look at some photos it's photo time hang on i'll look at it there are going to be some photos here you'd probably hate me showing this but anyway this is um this is in one of the factories where we're having some boards made that's mark my business partner at freetronix and you can't quite see her but in the green dress just behind him is sonja from scottry and let's try uh um what am i looking for yeah i'm just trying to find some more pictures that one that one no what happened to that picture i don't know all right so here's another picture this is inside a factory or you can see an out-of-focus sonia in the background there so this is boards that we were having made at a factory uh in beijing and what you'll find here basically this is a whole bunch of photos i took these photos which means that i'm not in any of them and it's just a bunch of photos of mark and other people at the factory so these are some boards that um that freetronix was having made at a at a factory outside in beijing sort of on the outskirts and we were going there to check it out what was going on with them we were over there visiting scottry and went on a we visited a bunch of factories on that trip so this was as you can see it was june 2013 and uh what else can we find oh yeah so here is mark talking about the end of line testing procedure now this is one of the things that they um they take really seriously as well we were in the factory so you can see this pc and what was this running it might have even been running the arduino ide i can't remember i think the test jig for this job was was done was basically built using an arduino that was probing a whole lot of things that the board was doing so this was part of setting up the um the test system at the factory so that they could be doing verification and these were some notes that we were showing and [Music] i don't even know if this is interesting probably not it's interesting to me looking back at this historical stuff let's find oh somewhere here what's this one oh this is a an old photo of shenzhen i think was this in shenzhen yes i think it must have been because on the after um i've got to find yeah yeah i think this was after leaving beijing somewhere here i've got a photo of oh there it is look at this for those of you who have been dish engineering this is a bit of a historical photo this is the um so i think that's wai chung north road um i can't remember anyway ah clicking through a random slideshow of stuff is something that i should be doing in my own time not when you're here looking over my shoulder somewhere oh okay yes i've got photos here of what's this one oh look it's a little pick and place machine this was this photo was taken in waichong bay going through the markets in there what else is there oh yeah yep more stuff in waichong bay if you want to set up a car park then this is where you buy the barriers and all that sort of thing so this is getting off topic the point of all of this is that this company has been very very good to me for a very very long time they have produced a large number of boards they've done more than just they've done more than just make pcbs they have done all of the packaging the end of line testing they've built test jigs so this is one of the other things is that testing of boards is hard it sometimes in fact maybe a lot of the time it takes more effort more time to design the test procedure and build the test system than to design the board that you're testing which seems like a a total uh yeah it seems like a total backwards thing but testing is really really important a lot of factories will just take the attitude of we put the parts on the board and you get what you get but with one of the things that i wanted to do right from the start with freetronix was to be really cautious about only providing boards that i knew would work so if i ship aboard i know absolutely 100 that it has been tested and that it worked at the point at which it was sold and that obsession means that the number of returns has been incredibly low the number of sometimes boards will fail like the boards always fail you can have a board that you're shipping it works perfectly and then you take it out of the box and it doesn't work these things happen because of temperature variations and rough handling and all sorts of reasons but one of the um one of the bits of feedback that we got from electus early on was that they didn't have any warranty claims with our staff so and and this was really really satisfying um typically what happens is that if a customer if a retailer buys from a supplier and they have boards coming back or product coming back for warranty claims they will then push that back to their supplier and claim they'll either claim for replacement units or for credit of net future order orders or something like there will be some compensation the end customer like not the end customer the retailer wants 100 yield on their sales they don't want to be wearing the cost of warranties and after we'd been selling boards through j-car for a while um there was some time i think it might have been when i was in sydney i was actually at the um the jaycard electives offices and we were talking about stuff and the whole subject of warranties came up and the feedback we got was the usual arrangement the usual thing was like where are the warranty claims what's what's happening with warranty returns and their response was basically we don't have any like people just don't return freetronix boards and i mean obviously it did happen from time to time but the number was so small the percentage was so small that they didn't even notice it was it was irrelevant to them and that um that was something that i personally found was really satisfying and so other things that they would sell uh they would get you know a certain percentage and they would track it because this is an important business metric you need to know what your returns are because it eats into your your margin it's also a very big burden because the cost of dealing with a return is significant it's it's an exception to the normal sales process you have the customer has come back into the store you've got the product now that product you need to get a credit for so there is a process for accounting for it and then that working its way back up the supply chain to whoever is going to honor the warranty and cover and where the cost of the fact that that unit failed or was returned under warranty so the cost to a business of carrying warranties is more than the cost of selling the thing in the first place so if you get something that comes back under warranty you have to sell multiples of that same thing to get back to zero to make it up and so things like rate of return is really really important and the obsession that that we had and mark had as well so mark really taught me a lot about end of line testing and making sure that the boards that go into boxes you are absolutely confident are doing exactly what you intended and the result was that what ended up in customers hands almost always was solid and worked so part of the point of telling you that is when you are talking to an oem or a company that is going to provide services to you for manufacturing that sort of attention to detail and setting up test procedures and making sure that what you get has been through that filtering process boards have been reworked if necessary they come to you clean known working in good condition if you can end up in a situation where your relationship with your suppliers means that you and you have essentially a 100 yield that puts you in a really really good position because for every percentage that your yield drops you're adding a burden to yourself and adding an expense to yourself so you don't want those exceptions you really need to avoid them ah okay um where am i going with this what hang on i'm heading towards two hours that's not possible i can't talk for two hours i can never talk for two hours you all know this yeah so that is a free tronics box you can see it says six pieces this was back in the early days we um the this photo is old years and years old so these boxes used to be made out of this unfinished cardboard so it's just like a brown surface cardboard and part of that was that in the early days we very much wanted to deal we very much wanted to make sure that the packaging was recyclable and and minimal impact and that's carried through with lots of things and in fact this is something that that mark thought of and i think is actually really cool is well this is cardboard that's recyclable that's no problem now one idea he had was to design these the actual clamshell normally when you get a product the packaging is a throwaway item you rip it out of the box you care about this you don't care about this and so he had the very cool id idea so it says free project parts tray included make the packaging actually have value so it says our product holder especially designed to be reused as a project parts tray so the idea is that you have taken it out of the box and once you're done with this this is actually useful but you can have that on your bench you can what have i got here oh look i just happen to have some nozzle holders that might happen to come from a ko a4 pick and place machine so you know you can use it as a tray you could reseal it and use it as a container to put things in you could cut it across here and have two small trays this the other version of this which has this all as one big opening compartment oh look yeah here's a here's one of the small ones so this is the the one from the shorter box that's a tray i had this on my bench because i use it regularly as a tray to put parts in and so it's not something that you just throw away and waste at the end it's it's kind of sustainable and cool so yeah david t says mixing epoxy i i do the exact same thing i have a little stack of um these trays ah something else i'll show you let me um there's another type of package uh modules modules i'm looking for where uh oh come on and yes i know my box finding things should solve this problem for me but it's not running right now i've pulled the camera and everything off the thing somewhere oh there it is i have a box up there i'm probably going to bump that overhead camera and box up here with modules so i have photos of the machine that does this let's see if i've got an open one oh there's one that's off and this and this and then i'm going to find a photo that goes along with this so this is one of the other retail things that we did so this is for little modules like the humidity sensor this is a light sensor and the idea is that this is retail friendly it can hang on a you know a store display and it has the module in there the module is attached using removable glue and if i peel this off it's got yeah the back of this has come off clean there's nothing on it and there is this glob it it's kind of like silicon it's weird stuff i don't even know what it is but it's like a glob of glue that gets put onto the um oh i can see my jlc pcb delivery is i'm watching on the the camera at the front i've got stencils and jlc pcb has just arrived so yeah there is this glob so what happens is the way this is packaged they print the cards it goes into it gets a glob of this special glue put onto it it's a glue that doesn't leave residue basically it's tacky so you can put something on it and it will stick there but then you can peel it off and it comes off cleanly and you can like if i do this i'd be able to roll it off the the cardboard as well well it doesn't come off the cardboard as easily it comes off as it comes off the pcb which is perfect because then you end up with a nice clean pcb so they print the cards they put a dob of the glue on there they put the module on it and then what happens is that this little plastic cover sits in a machine and i'll show you a photo of them in the shade in a moment so this sits in a machine in a little cavity and this goes on upside down so it sits on top of it and then the machine comes down and then it does some kind of like an ultrasonic heat welding thing and the plastic gets welded onto the cardboard and it ends up like this so this is a sealed one so you can open it up just by you know grabbing and ripping it and peeling the plastic off of the front but that is how it ends up so in order to do that what scotry did was buy a machine just for us um let me find a photo of it it is i am sure i do have a photo of this somewhere somewhere backing up backing up uh oh yes i think i'm in the right area now this is a kind of out of focus photo i will throw back to the desktop i've got more photos as well show it a bit better so you can see there's a little machine down here that does some kind of packaging and then this is the what does it say automatic impulse blister ceiling machine so um scottry bought this machine just so that they could seal freetronix products and you can see down here there is a little piece of timber that's been machined and it's got cavities where those uh where those little things go in i'll find you another photo maybe this one at least this one's in focus that makes a change so there we've got the machine and you can see it's got like this turntable in front of it and the turntable has three of three sections each section has four slots and if we zoom in here if i can zoom in you can see the guide pins so what they do is take the these little pieces of plastic and they drop them into these holes face down so that the the cavity goes down into it and then you can see the guide pins so the the cardboard the piece of cardboard with the module attached to it is dropped in between the pins so that it is all nicely aligned it fits into that area right there ends up in the right spot and then the machine comes down basically so they'll load a bunch and turn them the turntable so that that bunch go underneath the working area of the machine here which then comes down and you know they press the the big go button this comes down and smooshes onto the top of it and it does its like ultrasonic thermal whatever magic and it bonds the plastic to the cardboard and while that is happening the one that has just been done is being unloaded by someone sitting on this side of the table and the next one to be done is being loaded by someone sitting on this side of the table so the whole thing is like a it just goes in a circle person unloading complete ones on one side and someone loading new ones on the other side oh look you can see there's um there's a there's some freetronix packaging sitting in the background there and a bit of foam so if you have bought a freetronix module that has been on one of those little retail hang cards with the blister cover over the top of it it was probably sealed in this machine uh what else do i find any other photos oh yeah so this is uh mark and alec i think that's alec next to the the blister ceiling machine so yeah that was in um scotray's office in beijing yeah as as the date says that was back in 2013. all righty so where am i at where are we at i don't know i am i have not been paying very much attention to the uh to the chat so i hope i haven't been ignoring too many questions i probably have um yeah so oh chris says i always assumed the freetronix items were mass-produced on big production lines not four at a time great insight yeah there are certain parts of the process peter says six minutes there are certain parts of the process that are done manually the um the pcb assembly that is definitely automated that's pick and place machines and um if you've seen my video from a few years ago where i went into i did a tour of one of the it'd production lines that's basically what it looks like now this is the other thing is one of the differences with dealing with um with scottry is that they maintain the relationships with multiple suppliers and this gives them some flexibility it um there are in terms of things like pcb manufacturing so the um in terms of where the bare pcbs come from there there are certain factories that have different strengths it might be based on scale there are some that are fantastic at producing 10 pcbs because you want to make some prototypes there are some factories that won't talk to you unless you want 20 000 as an moq and um johnny just sent me a super chat to remind me to thank henrik for the super chat so thank you henrik and thank you johnny and henrik had a question is it hard now to create these pcbs because of the world chip loss yes that is a real problem there are a bunch of products that i i cannot fit technically yes i could produce them but it's not practical from an economic standpoint the classic ones are the wiznet based and well any 18 mega based stuff is ridiculously expensive at the moment you can buy avr processors but their price is just crazy like a chip that you would previously have been paying two dollars for you have to pay 20 bucks for you know that sort of level of difference in price and so there are many products like the ether 10 the ether mega that are really popular and i wish i could produce them but if i was making them now it would be costing me more to make them than i'd be selling them for it's just not viable and it is possibly uh yeah i want them to come back because they're good boards and they're really popular lots of people rely on them i've had there's a one major customer in new zealand which is a white goods manufacturer who previously has bought heaps of ether megas from me like they would order hundreds at a time and they yeah they want them and i can't produce them it's it's just it's frustrating so yes the chip shortage is a problem uh yes oh it is just about lunchtime now i wanted to talk more about scottry because these people are cool they've as i've said before they they have looked after me looked after freetronix right from the start and done i think they've probably given me a false sense of how easy it is to do business with chinese suppliers you can probably hear that whippersnipper can't you it's very loud here they've given me a false sense of how easy it is because what they do i can go to them and say okay there there is a hurdle to get through you have to get through the whole process of setting up for a new product you have to convey all of the information required about the design how you want it assembled how you want it tested how you want it packaged all of that sort of thing so there is a effort and time involved initially when you are beginning to ramp up for making a new product but for something like an existing product like say a freetronix 11 or you know one of these modules i was just showing you [Music] that's really loud they know exactly how to make those now they've been making those particular products for me for years i can send an email to alec now at scottry and say make me a thousand of the eleven and he'll say no worries and then a while later some boxes will arrive like that is literally how easy it is for me to uh to make that stuff happen and that is because of the work that they have done to uh to well to make it easy for me to take a whole lot of that stuff out of my hands so that i don't have to worry about it we've already done the legwork of figuring out all of the packaging and all of the other things that go with it so um yes just glanced across in the chat and i just saw a comment journal 42 says giant bees what [Laughter] oh giant oh i know john i was thinking giant piece what the hell are you talking about no it's um yeah the the whipper snipper over over the fence is the giant piece ah okay now um so um oh mark smith just said ten dollars for an atmega328p from lcsc yeah that's that's not as bad as it has been stephen w says a single 2560 chip is 20 bucks yeah it's just crazy and i'm not there is a whole other conversation about the economics of manufacturing and how the the cost of the bill of materials relates to the final retail product i'm not going to go into that right now that is a i've talked about it a bit in the past and the multiplication effect the fact that if you have a certain percentage increase on one part in your raw bill of materials the ripple on effect that that has on the final retail price it is a multiplier it's not just a case of this chip cost me one dollar and now it costs me two dollars so therefore the retail price is one dollar more no no no it has a much bigger impact than that that's a whole other complicated conversation and it's probably a conversation that would be good to have with someone else as well like seon other people that have experience with this and have their own perspectives on it all very interesting but slightly off their subject so peter is telling someone to turn the lights off all right um so uh if you have she who shall not be named next next you hit that mute button right now because i think it is time for me to wrap this up and say alexa please turn off the office lights okay and now i'm sitting in the dark oh that looks what sitting in the dark i have no idea what that was um uh it just recorded my own voice and played it back to me that looks really spooky this is like the halloween edition i don't know why so um yes i am oh so henrik is in talon i love talon that is such an awesome city i'd love to go back to talon one day and i really hope to peter says evil john yeah it's lunch time so i am going to go i'm going to open the box maybe i should do that on a live stream i was gonna say i should open the box from jlc pcb that is currently sitting at my front door because it has the rockling pcbs in it for the open hardware mini conf that's coming up it's like yes aaron says like holly from red dwarf i am holly um where i'm going to leave this with is a very brief summary going forward my attitude what i had thought i was going to talk about today was all my plans for superlab and that sort of thing i've got heaps of stuff to talk about with that but where this leads to is what i want to be doing which is having positive relationships with good people doing business in a way that is respectful and where everybody wins and doing that and part of that is i want these people scottri to win they have done good stuff for me it's like this whole live stream has been a big promo for scottrade um but if me doing a live stream results in them gaining customers and their business succeeding then that's worth it i want to do that because it's one little thing that i can do to help repay them for all of the years that they have helped me so uh adam says can you tell scotty to enable https [Laughter] i don't know um oh henrik says make arduino basic video what it is and how to use uh thanks for the super chat um maybe there seems there are a lot of resources about that already but thanks for the suggestion that could be worth doing so i'm going to wrap it up today and what am i going to do i need to everything is messed up with my streaming setup right now so i am going to hit play on this and you should either go and have lunch have breakfast or have a three a.m what is it a 305 a.m snack and i will uh oh colin said will you ever get to a stage where you help incubate startups and pass on other related experience i don't think i have the knowledge all i can do is i don't have the breadth of knowledge all i can do is explaining is explain what's happened for me it's just sharing my story oh no i locked my computer again i keep accidentally locking my computer all right as seon says scratch you all later and have a fantastic weekend and i will catch you all really really soon okay so see ya so [Music] you

Channel: SuperHouseTV

Views: 2,153

Rating: 4.9166665 out of 5

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Id: g7GT7N6vhLc

Length: 126min 57sec (7617 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 20 2021