Working Conditions

Hey,
this might be a little weird and everything, but I just need to go for it. I ordered PCBs quite a few times and you’re service is great! The only thing that stops me from recommending it to like everyone I know is that I don’t have a single clue how you can offer it so cheap. I mean, can you tell me anything about the working conditions at your PCB house and everything? I know it’s not the same as in germany/usa/whichever but you hear bad things about child labour and such.
Well, it’d be just great if you could provide some information. If people would have a better feeling ordering on here I’m sure a lot of them would consider having a PCB produced for way more stuff. You do make profit from this, right?
Thank you!

Hi,

Actually, we don’t make any profit on the most common sizes, like 5cm5cm and 10cm10cm. We do so is hoping to make the DIY affordable for the community. We don’t hire any chirld labor. Every Seeed stuff get a good pay. :slight_smile: We plan to shoot a series of veidos to let you guys know more about us and Shenzhen, where Seeed located. Keep eyes on~

Hey,
that sounds great! I’m really looking forward to watching the video!
I’m quite astonished to hear that you don’t make profit from the PCBs. Is it just non-profit or do you actually make loss with every PCB order? If so, how much would you have to charge for every order to not make loss?
You see, I’m okay with paying for a good service, and this certainly is a good service. Why don’t you put those information on the Fusion-PCB order website? I mean, you could make it “pay as much as you’d like”. That means, offer the PCBs at a reasonable price (non-profit-non-loss would be great) and tell people they can “donate” any amount of money. You have those custom-payment units anyways.
This is a great service and I don’t want it to go down or anything! Thanks for your great reply!

You have accomplished this, and I thank you, thank you, thank you!! You guys totally rock. You’ve turned me into a cheerleader for seeedstudio.com! You think of “us little guys” and I truly appreciate that. Shapeways has done the same thing for 3D printing – they totally rock, too.

I’m so glad I came across your site a few months ago. Now I can try to make my crazy ideas come to life (and look great, too) without that huge price barrier to entry, and I don’t have to worry so much about blowing lots of cash if I make a mistake.

I’m also looking forward to seeing the videos.

Cheers!

@alex11, thanks for your kind words. It is the best gift to us. :slight_smile:
@TokyoDriftPSP, thanks. We definitily don’t make loss. Don’t worry. Donate is a good idea, but not feasible I am afraid. If we do so, our finance would complain of getting a lot of unidentified money. :wink: We are expanding our capability to provide more valuable and affordable service to the community, like the turn-key manufacturing service, Acrylic service, prototype service and ect.

Liao: If I happen to visit Shenzhen someday (been wanting to to that for a long time now) can I get a tour of your office?

In regards of new services - Solder paste stencils lasercut out of Kapton would be fabulous!

@matseng Welcome to our office for a visit. You can reach us here:
seeedstudio.com/depot/page.html?id=21
Thanks for your suggetion. Will take it into consideration.

Multilayer PCBs would be AWESOME! I mean, 4 or 6 layers. Of course the price would be higher but over here a (ONE!) 6 layer 10x10cm PCB is hard to get under 200 Euros.
And (not concerning seeed in particular) the Open-Hardware scene (should we really call this a scene?) finally needs a revision management software. Like SVN. But what we need is a software that can handle both, code (all common languages INCLUDING VHDL/Verilog) and design files. As there are quite a lot of design tools out there the only way to manage PCB designs is by comparing and showing the gerber files while providing a download of both, gerber and system specific files.
For example someone designs an embedded system with a CPLD and a microcontroller. For the hardware design he uses Altium. Now he uploads the microcontroller code, the CPLD description files and the altium PCB file. ADDITIONALLY he uploads gerber files. Someone else downloads the altium file, changes something, uploads gerber and altium files again. Now the server compares the gerber files and shows differences online, but offers the altium file for download.
Oh, and of course we’d need a way to share and compare schematics. Is there a standard file format for schematics? I don’t think so :frowning: .

We are considering to provide 4 layers Fusion PCB service.
For sharing the design, maybe http://upverter.com/ is a good choice though it is not mature yet.

You, sir, your company and your services are simply AMAZING! :slight_smile:

I know that website, I’m not a huge fan of having applications in the cloud though. I paid for an awesome EDA tool (AD10) that I can work with quite…err…let’s call it fluently. I have the whole design cycle in one tool, it’s just what you’d expect an EDA to be. I fear it’s quite expensive (about 5000USD), but as a student you (read: I) can get it for 120Euro per year. I don’t see why I’m supposed to use some web-based thingy instead. I need a web based service to manage my designs, to let me share work with others. Actually Altium offers that, but obviously it’s limited to Altium users. Oh well, you can’t have anything, right? :slight_smile:

Anyways, keep up the great work!