I get asked fairly often why we don’t offer kits and if we plan on offering them.
Kiitting (make a kit) is labor intensive, and has a lot of extra steps that require more labor than building/testing a board myself:
- Pulling all the parts and labeling them so the customer can identify which part is which.
- Documenting substitutions – we do change values of capacitors and resistors during the lifetime of a product.
- Some boards need modifications. We do find design flaws and make the changes for the next spin of the board, but I really can’t afford to toss out hundreds of dollars of boards, so as I build a board I apply the required changes. A kit would need additional instructions and some customers might not be comfortable cutting traces and installing jumpers.
- New documentation has to be written with building instructions. There also needs to be a debugging section for when a board doesn’t work.
- Many parts need to be tested before being packaged, as opposed to my building a board and then testing it as a single piece. I’ve also got test software to help automate some of the testing.
- I can’t control the customer’s build environment; do they have a decent soldering iron, are they skilled at soldering, are boards assembled in an ESD safe environment?
- More emails from customers with questions on how to build a board or asking why it doesn’t work.
And the single biggest reason:
- Due to all the extra labor, the price would be exactly the same as an assembled and tested board!
So the short answer is that we’re not planning on offering kits short-term, but might start making this an option for some of the simpler boards in the future.