| It depends on the design (PTH or SMD). A lot of PTH takes a lot of people, as many parts still can't be machine-placed. The facility we use an hour from us runs about 600 PTH units (about 40 components/board) on one assembly line with 10 people in about 4 hours. I doubt one would always work them at that level. Lead-bending, wave soldering is all pretty much automated. The bulk of an SMD process is done by pick-and-place, our stuff gets run on 10,000+ CPH machines. You need one person to load/de-load panels and switch out feeders - and one person can work multiple machines if everything is set up right. The machines in general are really good these days. Printing and machining the PCBs takes some time, but this is a process that can flow continuously once you let a little backlog build up at each stage. Electrical testing can be slow at the back-end, as is polishing board edges, packaging, etc. I could see it taking 30 people to do 10k a month, but the same 30 people possibly capable of 60k+ a month. It depends on where you load them in the process. The more SMD the more volume you can get up to the testing/packaging stage. rPi is mostly SMD, with some PTH - so they have to mix the processes, but its really hard to avoid...) Notably, however, if you look at the Hackberry (which I like better, btw!) the vast majority of the connectors are SMD. I wonder if the rPI could see some labor savings (at higher BOM) by switching to them. One thing we've been working on in-house is making big automated jigs to program and test entire panels of devices at once, before they're de-paneled. These are really expensive to make though (think $5k+ per jig) - but they save us thousands of hours of labor a year. We're moving to make machines that can do it without jigs now. Fun stuff =) |