Hey everyone, happy July! Here's everything that happened last month:
Lead Times
I've been going on about lead times in every one of these updates, and continuing to talk about how they'll be coming down shortly. But what's been happening, and why I keep saying the same thing, has been a very good, difficult problem.
We are doing lots to increase our capacity. We've moved into 4x the square footage, hiring more assembly techs, and decreasing the time it takes to build hardware. But these things have not made us faster than our growth rate. Every time we make an improvement, expecting to reduce the lead time, our volume increases and we're back to square one. We need to get ahead, not just keep up.
I've been spending a lot of time thinking about what needs to happen to actually make this change. We've been acting too linearly about what we need to do to make an appreciable dent in our lead time.
We have the space and the inventory, what we need is help. And a lot more than I was originally thinking about hiring. If you're in the Pittsburgh area and interested in helping make a change in prototyping and manufacturing, please don't hesitate to apply!
As always, the official lead time on each product's product page is the most accurate metric for when you'll see your hardware ship. There's a good chance we ship early; LumenPnPs are shipping quite a bit ahead of schedule, but we keep it where it is to ensure we're able to stick to our estimate.
16mm and 24mm Feeders
They're finally here, available for sale! If you've been looking to automate your wide tape feeding in your machine, you can go to our web store now and pick up some 16mm and 24mm feeders.
We sold out almost immediately of our pre-built stock at launch last week, but we're doing everything we can to get more inventory in-house as quickly as possible to bring the lead time down.
Reel Holder
We also released our Reel Holder last week!
This thing has made running the LumenPnP so much smoother. Reels having a dedicated location beneath the machine, and having their cassettes be individually removable makes swapping reels so much easier.
Viagrid and Paste Extruder
With the move and launch complete, we've resumed working on the Viagrid prototyping system!
The community has made a lot of wonderful improvements to the size, layout and alignment features of the Viagrid blanks, and I'm working on adapting some designs to the new layout. A lot of the work that needs to happen is creating a standard workflow for designing for a Viagrid blank and lasing the board.
Viagrid gets a lot more useful when you also don't need a stencil for your board. We're bringing on an engineering intern this summer to work on getting the paste extruder consistent and reliable for 0402 pads.
Job Postings
Now that we're in our new space, we're spending a ton of time looking for folks to join our assembly team! If you're in the Pittsburgh area and want to help us build pick and place machines, please apply.
You can check out our careers page for all the details of the jobs we have available. If you or someone you know would be a good fit for any of these roles, please apply!
We're currently hiring for:
- Assembly Technician
- Helping us assemble LumenPnPs, feeders, and accessories in our Pittsburgh office.
- Customer Service Specialist
- Responding to customer inquiries, managing quotes, helping customers get up and running
- Responding to customer inquiries, managing quotes, helping customers get up and running
- Social Media Manager / Video Editor
- Integration Engineer
- Full stack engineer comfortable with mechanical CAD, PCB design, software, and firmware. High agency, fast execution. Working on new projects.
Reach Out
If you have any feedback, questions, or comments about this update, please don't hesitate to reach out to us here.
Thanks, and we'll see you next month!
-Stephen