I'm in a similar boat. Does anyone know any US PCB assemblers similar to PCBWay or JLCPCB? (e.g. small volume) I couldn't find any when i looked about a year ago
We work with a few, but they just do assembly, you bring the parts and PCBs.
They are also insanely expensive if you are used to China prices. Boards with 10-15 components being $100+ each. Couple that with a domestic PCB manufacturing which is ~10x the cost of China, you are looking at something like an Arduino costing $250.
I don't know where you are located, but if you just search google maps for "electronics assembly" you can find places to call. You really want something nearby because it is pretty much the only upside that you can go and talk to them while going over the board and you don't have to hassle with shipping. You can also go inspect the first few boards done before they do the whole run.
I mean in this case the upside for me is no tariff. I don't mind paying some premium for assembly in USA.
Perhaps I'm missing something, but I haven't ever had to 'go over' the board with PCBWay. Maybe why they are so cheap, but I've only ever had one quality issue.
I send the gerbers and pick and place and take it from there. I approve photos If they have any question (which is rare) its over email. I don't even mind sourcing the parts/pcb/stencil myself. Its the components which make the tariff painful.
I used OSH PARK ~ 10-12 years ago - it looks like they're still around and somewhat affordable, but that was just a 20 second scan of their homepage. They used to be the affordable choice back in the day.
If I remember correctly they were just over $200 per smartwatch. We saved some costs by putting the assembled boards into 3D printed cases ourselves using student labor:
It was a double sided, 4 layer board with two small sub-PCB's (touch pads and a power board I think). My experience with Emerald Technologies (then called DataEd at their New Hampshire location, seems they've been bought out by a larger firm) was very positive. They were quite helpful in bringing the project to completion.
The cost per board would have been less if we had ordered more of them. Ours was a fairly large job for DataEd at the time, though they would have been happy to make a thousand of the devices. For tens of thousands or more they would have recommended another affiliated company. They were more of a prototyping company, though that may have changed since the merger. I see that part of Emerald is located in China now, though the DataEd facility is still part of the company, so they might be interested in some US work to carry them through the tariff chaos.
Edit: I should mention, I supplied some of the parts that I prebought to lock in a supply, the MSP430's and touch sensor IC's for example, and they supplied the rest. We had them do minimal QA on the boards, without firmware loaded and we did final QA after programming the boards ourselves. They would have been willing to do those tasks also though.
