Ask HN: How do you estimate the cost of a board?
Flavor text:
To keep it brief, I'm starting a new position in the cost engineering department. It seems that the electronic components division is fairly understaffed (only 1 guy can work on boards, the rest do cables), and my training supervisor intends to assign me to that division.
I don't really have a lot of experience in the field expect half a degree in CS and the awarness of reddit and this site.
NOW:
How do you estimate the cost of components of a board?
I understand the existance of sites like digikey, rs-online and some comparator sites (octopart and findchip) but i would like to know more about the logic behing logic cip design to at least understand what types of components i'm looking at.
Any resurces i should look at?
Books about circuit design and components and how should i price components, i should every time email suppliers? this seems really....inefficent
I listen to the Embedded podcast. https://embedded.fm/ They on occasion talk about the process to make boards that are ready for manufacturing.
They talk about the difference between boards that will me be made in small quantities (less than 100) or large (10,00k to 1 Million) The rule of thumb they used was BOM (Bill of Materials) should be 30% of the retail cost of the board. Large scale manufacturing can lower the the percentage.
Remember the cost of firmware (hours paid to develop) is not included in the BOM cost but is divided up over the number of units made using that firmware revision.
There are also design to manufacturing issues to take into account. Designing to make the manufacturing easier is above and beyond just making a functional board that works but is hard and expensive to manufacture.
It strongly depends on the quantities you're dealing with. From the sounds if it you're working at low volumes, so you're not likely to get much of a response from the manufacturers themselves. Instead, you're basically gonna be working with the big suppliers like digikey, mouser, etc. You can get a quote for a BOM from them, and sometimes that'll be a discount, but also in general you're gonna be spending a lot more on overhead of organising/setting up/building a board than you are on the components for a small volume run.
this seems really....inefficent
Inefficiency is probably why the company is employing people to do the work.
Estimating is exactly the practice of obtaining prices for material and labor contained within a bill of materials. The more accurate the information, the more accurate the estimate.
Efficiency is only a result of meaningful experience doing tasks inefficiently but correctly.
On the other hand, if the company is an ongoing concern, it has institutional knowledge and practices and vendor relationships. That is where you should start because whatever HN tells you is not what your boss will expect of you.
Give yourself time to learn and have a beginner’s mind. There are complex considerations that you simply don’t know (vendor relationships and the CEO’s expectations for example). Good luck.