EP#425: MacroFab Platform Updates from Kyle McLeod and Nicholas Lundgaard

Episode Transcript
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Parker Dillmann (00:11):
Welcome to circuit break from MacroFab, a
weekly show about all thingsengineering, DIY projects,
manufacturing industry news, andrecent MacRAB software releases.
We're your hosts, electricalengineers, Parker Dillmann, and
Steven Kraig. This is episode425. And this week, we have Kyle

(00:31):
McLeod. I even asked right forthe podcast and Nicholas
Lundgaard hi hi for the fun.

Kyle McLeod (00:41):
Yeah. We're excited to be here. Good to be here.

So Kyle is the o e project manager, and Nick is
the o e team lead. So what is oe?

Nick Lundgaard (00:50):
O e is order experience.

Not not original equipment?

Not original equipment, although definitely
did start out as OEM.

Yeah. Yeah. We are the order experience team. So
that involves anyone uploadingPCBs and placing orders.

Yep. That's right. Yeah. Design file upload
experience, the BOM population,part placements, all that good
stuff, getting you to a quoteand then placing the order,
taking it in. We also have somepretty extensive interfacing
with the order view team aswell.
So we we manage the theinterface that Macrofabrics use

(01:32):
to to validate your partplacements and other aspects of
your design before we go aheadand process your order.

So you'd be safe to assume, basically, if
anyone's using the MacFabplatform as a customer, y'all
are the ones that Yes. That'sabsolutely right. So what are
y'all's email addresses sopeople can tell?

Product atmacrofab.com. We really read
that one. I I like read all thecomments you send there.

Yeah. And likewise, you know, if you get a
customer care ticket that isthat is complicated enough that
our customer care team needshelp, you will you will find me
helping you out there.

So you actually do get the respond to customers?

No. Not directly.

Hop on chat for the first time the other day. Did
some live chat with a customer.

Oh, yeah. The the what's that module called?

It's a live chat.

I think it's just called live chat.

It's called live chat. Yeah. There's actually,
like, really good people on theother side of it, though. It's
one of the things I think peopleare probably skeptical of
because you think you're gettingsomeone, like, you know, in
another country or who who knowswho but we're actually getting,
you know, our our support teamwho's very well versed in the
Macafab platform and sometimesyou're getting the the product

(03:00):
manager who will try to come inand help get your bomb ready.

Stephen Kraig (03:06):
So so you guys are watching on the back end, I
guess, of what people are doingand trying to sculpt the
experience, such that it's what?As pleasant as possible in terms
of ordering a board?

Yeah. We we get a lot of We set a lot of tracking
events. So we have events whenpeople upload PCB files. You
know, we we don't always jump inand look at each one, but I try
to look at, I don't know, 3 to10 PCB uploads a day just to see
what people are doing. And then,you know, we have data and
metrics around, you know, howhow we're doing.

(03:40):
I mean, really, are people ableto get their design files from
their EDA into our platform in away that makes sense? Are they
able to, you know, get theirbomb components uploaded? Do we
match them with market parts? Dowe have those parts available?
We're tracking all of that, youknow, as a metric for our

(04:02):
excellence of, like, are we arewe getting you, like, what you
want, which is, like, you wannaautomatically price your PCB,
but we wanna deliver that assmoothly as possible.
And so we track that at a, youknow, big picture level of, you
know, looking at metrics andthen, you know, individual
boards. I'll jump in just to seebecause there's some nitty
gritty details sometimes, youknow, someone says they can't

(04:24):
get their components in throughtheir o d b plus plus project.
Okay. Are those components inthe component layers and we're
just not grabbing them? Are theyusing, you know, some
manufacturer MPN names thatwe're not extracting from?
You can try to, like,troubleshoot that stuff to get
as much of the data out and intoour platform as possible.

Before we dive too much more back into that, I
wanna know more about y'all'sbackgrounds. What led up to
y'all being on to this podcast?Because I know Nick was like,
no. I've never been on a podcastever.

That is true.

Kyle was like hell yeah let's go. Like 2
opposite spectrums here.

Yeah for sure even.

Yeah. So I have a mechanical engineering
background. I started out as a,design engineer and
manufacturing engineer, butdoing, oil and gas drilling
equipment. Did that for a fewyears and then decided I wanted
to get into product managementand tech, and so I went back to
school for a couple of years,like, my MBA, and then was at a

(05:37):
software company that didinsurance marketing, which,
while not exciting, there's alot of awesome data and
marketing experience that Igained from that and then got an
opportunity to join Macrofab andsaw it as an awesome opportunity
to kind of combine that passionI have for engineering and

(05:57):
building things with somesoftware experience and desire
ahead to, like, actually launchsoftware products that, you
know, while while we don't buildthe cool stuff, like, we, you
know, we help people buildreally cool products and so that
that's that's what got me here.Yeah, and I'm on a podcast

(06:18):
because I run the customerfacing stuff and I was like,
anything to talk about, like,what we do, and, you know, I I
help our customers get to see,you know, who we are and what
we're passionate about and, youknow, that we, like, care and
really wanna help them get stuffbuilt.

(06:39):
That's that's

why I'm on. Yeah. And Nicholas here. I went
to, oh, sorry. My background isin computer science.
My grandfather actually wasworked at Los Alamos National
Lab. He was a lab tech there for30 years. And I got I got the
opportunity to, to do, you know,internship there when I was in

(07:01):
college. But, wound up inactually oil and gas here in
Houston. And, and then,actually, worked at Alert Logic,
before before Macrofab.
I met Misha at a at a foodevent, actually, and while I was

Misha is our CEO.

Yes. Misha is our CEO. That's right. So I met
him and he he was and we foundout that I was in when I was a
software developer, he,basically started interviewing
me at this restaurant that wewere, that we were randomly
placed together at. And ended upat Alert Logic for about 10
years.
My background is very much,microservices, functional
programming languages, and justback end systems. I'm I'm very

(07:44):
much like a a systems person. II do love front end user
interfaces. I love to see themcome together. I love to see
them how they're presented, howthey're presenting our back end
work to users and giving value.
But that is my background and mybread and butter for sure. And
so I, you know, progressed tothe role of technical leadership

(08:06):
and then met met Dan Holm atEuler Logic and he he was
looking for people here atMacrofab and kind of sold me on
the experience. I I don't havean electrical engineering
background. Don't know too muchabout PCBs, but it was super
exciting to get the experiencefrom from Chris Church showing
us the the the showing us, like,how the the manufacturing floor

(08:29):
works. This the process end toend and the UI demo for how the
platform works.
Yeah. I wanna I wanna go buildsome stuff. I wanna help people
build stuff. So yeah.

And how long have both of you been a part of
Macofab?

I'm coming up on 2 years.

Yeah. Same here. It'll be 2 years in July. Nice.

Do you need my answer, Steven?

What what are you what are you sitting at now? You
you're you've gotta be over adecade now. Right, Burger?

Yeah. Actually In it's actually a year and a
half. Not gonna be at 1 third ofmy life.

Yikes. Hey. Hey. Technically, next year is a
decade for me. Oh, yeah.
Yeah. 2015 is is when I jumpedon. So

Yeah. This this October will be 11 years of the
company because we had our 10thanniversary last fall. Yeah. And
then basically another year anda half is be like I'll be, like,
38, and I'll be at the companyfor 13 years. So man you're

(09:46):
crossing that third third ofyour life can you have a middle
age crisis not I guess that ismiddle age When do how do when
do they consider middle age forpeople nowadays?

Isn't it forties? For like 45, something like
that?

Can you be middle aged with a company? I
guess I'm already way past thatpart.

Yeah.

I don't know. Yeah. You've been doing all the
car crap for so long. You wereyou were middle aged in your,
like, mid twenties.

I don't have a Corvette yet.

No. That's true. You just have a box truck that
you're retrofitting.

Yeah. So I I got Kyle and Nick on. Nick
really wanted to go on thispodcast. But, basically, talk
about our software releases wedid last year and then what's
coming up next. So last year, Ithink, is probably a very
impressive list of just releasesthat kind of went under the
radar from a customer experienceside.

(10:42):
And so that's why I wanted y'allon to talk about those and
showcase kinda like all the workwe did. Because from a customer
standpoint, the biggest one was,like, in 2018 where we released
the new interface. And mostlyfrom last year there's a lot of

(11:03):
under the hood changes for thecustomers and so yeah. Let let's
just rip through that list.Sounds great yeah Kyle can't see
the list

yeah. What? He is

he is correct. I I had to listen.

You have to listen.

I'm only when

I can see the list.

No. He's probably sitting there thinking, oh my
gosh. I have to remember ofthis, recall it all.

Yeah. I was like Yeah.

No. No. So one of releases we had a I'll
actually, I'll just go throughthe whole list, and then we can
start talking about them. Okay.We have improved design file
uploads, completed board photoupdates.
I actually worked on that. Abetter park placement
experience, customer furnishedmaterial options, intelligent
overage logic. I guess thatmeans it was done before. And

(11:50):
then we have we have ITAR, whichwas the big one, and then PCB
file view.

So Yeah. Yeah. I'll start with the ITAR compliance.
That's one of our biggest ones.Yeah.
Nick Nick and

I are actually wearing our ITAR shirts.

I know. Yeah. You're wearing ITAR shirts. It
feels weird looking at thevideos you guys. Yeah.
Itar compliance is a big effortby really everyone at Macrofab
because that, you know, thecustomer what the customer sees
is they see, you know, a reallyeasy ITAR interface. Like, you
just click a box and, you know,it says ITAR, you know, ITAR

(12:29):
PCB, ITAR order, and what goeson behind the scenes is a really
impressive suite of, like,software tools that take that
flag that you've checked andsecure every touch point of your
order from who gets to see yourPCB files, like, how, you know,
what papers have ITAR markingson them. We had a consultant

(12:52):
come in, and we told him what wewere doing, and he said, Oh,
this is, like, way over the top.In a sense, we didn't think it
was over the top. We thought,you know, ITAR, we've gotta lock
this down.
You know, we have this softwarethat already handles
manufacturing. Let's just addit, you know, from the get go
and then, you know, flow thatindicator through our whole
system to to lock lock all the,you know, manufacturing touch

(13:16):
points down as far as dataprotection goes. And so, it's
it's you know, it's one of thosethings that probably as a
customer, you like assume thatevery manufacturer does that but
you know, a lot of manufacturershave more paper oriented
processes or, you know, sendingmore things through email where
there's, you know, either a,like, a higher risk that they're

(13:38):
gonna send it to the wrongperson or send it to, you know,
a a group they're not supposedto, But also, they're gonna send
it through a service that isn'tITAR locked down. Like, they
don't they don't know about, youknow, gov cloud. Like, they're
not they're storing stuff on,you know, gov cloud secured ITAR
servers and so, that was areally big effort that we
undertook that we're reallyproud of because it's a really,

(14:01):
probably awesome ITAR offeringthat, you know, I think
customers, like, you know, won'tnecessarily see the, like,
thoroughness of our ITARcompliance, but it is, something
that we're we're proud of andlike to talk about.
And then, yeah, the the the PCBfile uploads, that's kinda one
of those things that's like partof Itar. Is that we needed like

(14:23):
a We have these Previously wejust tried to You you upload a
PCB file, we wanna process itand render a design from it, but
there's a lot of stuff that's,you know, just not not part of
the Gerber files or bomb data,you know, the PDFs, you know,
for construction, stuff likethat, that we want stored
securely on the platform andattached to our PCB. And we had

(14:44):
places for that, but we'veexposed it to our customers this
year, and wanna expand that asan offering of, you know, we
understand that there aredesigns that, you know, aren't
just simple PCBA and we wanna beable to to support that and
handle it as best as possibleand, you know, part of that is
just getting getting those fileson our platform where they have
traceability and, you know, goodhistory and are attached to

(15:06):
PCBs. Nicholas, do you wannatalk about the, you know, upload
enhancements we did?

Yeah. Sure. I just, another I mean, another
brief point to call home, like,how much effort engineering put
into well, software developmentput into the ITAR effort. In
October of last year, wemigrated our entire platform
from AWS into gov cloud. Everysingle piece of it.
And that was, that was donewith, a very, you know, very

(15:34):
brief amount of downtime. But itwas done quite seamlessly. I was
just it was a joy to be a partof that. It was impressive to
see my colleagues workingdiligently on that. There was so
much preparation that went intomaking sure that every detail of
that migration would go asplanned with practicing and all
of that.
And the team just

Did you guys do that at 7 o'clock in the morning
on a Sunday or something likethat?

We we did start we did start on a Saturday
night. And it it just went wentthrough the night and and was
completed by the next afternoon.That's right. It's in Saturday
afternoon.

Do do we have any stats on did anyone actually
hit the outage? No. We publiclyannounced that we had an outage.
And then, like Yeah.

Yeah. We did. I I we definitely had a redirect
to a page. I don't know that wehave stats on on how many how
many visits we had visiting thethe I

wanna upload my new PCB now.

I was about to say that there's, like, someone
who's I need 10,000,000 PCBsright now at Saturday at
midnight. They're like, oh, damnit.

Yeah. Yeah. I think

it was, like, so short that we didn't even
bother, like, looking to see

Sure. Sure. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Because it was

planned for

Which is ideal. That's exactly how you want.

Yeah. It's just I have, you know, all the emails,
like, drafted of we're sorry,like, it's taking longer, but
luckily I didn't have to sendany of those.

One one very distinct memory I have working
back at at MacroFab was being inthe Hutchins location and and we
there there was there was a I'mdoing air quotes conference room
in in there. It it was this itwas this one room that was just
like table and chairs in it. AndI remember being part of the
move of going from Hutchins overto Governor Street, and and

(17:16):
having Chris Church look ateveryone and go, and he said
very clearly, we're doing thiswith military precision in terms
of how we're moving all of thisstuff over, and it's still
etched in my memory. I canrecall that. And so I can only
imagine Chris doing the exactsame thing with we're going to,
you know, switch all of theservers over to to GovCloud with

(17:37):
military precision.

Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, the entire
team, pitched in on on preparingus for that, doing extensive
testing. I I've known of Idefinitely have to call out,
Isaac and Tim on ourinfrastructure team.
They just, the amount of workthat they did to, to make sure
that that process went smoothlywas astonishing.

And and I I gotta I gotta think, you know, a a
standard Centimeters doesn'tnecessarily have the same
platform that you guys do thathandles all the file and and all
the data transfer witheverything. So so, you know,
having an ITAR in my myexperience with with working
with with ITAR regulated circuitboards has been frankly not

(18:22):
terribly difficult. We encryptthe files, we send passwords, we
we we get a way to get the filesover to the Centimeters and then
we're, like, okay. There you go.It's in your hands kind of
thing.
But with you guys having theplatform, it seems infinitely
more difficult to, you know,cross all the t's and dot all
the i's in terms of who'schecking everything and and
making sure that everything isdone properly. So it I I'm all

(18:45):
I'm saying is it's veryimpressive.

Yeah. Thanks. Yeah. And I guess moving back to
to file uploads. Yeah.
I think one of the themes lastyear, in addition to just, you
know, improving improving,adding a new ability to upload
non designed files has has beenjust improving the reliability
of our Gerber processing. We'vedone some significant speed

(19:09):
enhancements to Gerberprocessing, you know, by adding
parallelism and these kinds ofthings. And also done a number
of bug fixes with respect to,with respect to complex border
detection. And, you know, thenet, the net results on the
other end is just a wider arrayof design files can be uploaded
to our platform with withoutneed of of any support from from

(19:33):
our MacFabb experts.

Yeah. I think you had Colin on the podcast

earlier. Right? Yeah. We had Colin on before he
was a MF er.

Oh. That's hilarious. Yeah. Yeah. So he's
on our team now and we turnedhim loose on a lot of the like
file upload because he is aelectrical is he electrical
engineer by the time?
Okay, yeah. Electrical engineerand just like Also a physics. In
physics. I Yeah. Yeah.
I can't box him in. I think he'stoo old to

list all

of us.

I would box him in as a polymath. Yes.

Yes. That was episode 328. Where Colin talked
about we called it berry basedphysics.

Mhmm. And what really happens down on the
quantum scale with

Basically I've learned as a product manager
just to give him, you know, freereign over our file imports.
Say, what bugs you, Collin? Andgo you go Just go do it. Just
go. And then he'll be like, I'veimproved this part about, you
know, 5 x speed.
And I'm like, that's

That sounds too low.

Yeah. You're not giving him enough credit.

No. It's just Well, I'm sandbagging. I had okay. I
promised I promised myself Iwouldn't come in here and over
promise our anyone productfeatures and improvements. So
I'm gonna stick with 5 x andhope it's sounds good.

But yeah. Yeah. Working with Con is is a is a is
a humbling experience to say theleast. He's he's just, just
brilliant to see what he bringsto the table, on the on the
platforms. And we have somepretty exciting stuff coming up,
I mean, even in the next fewweeks.

(21:25):
So nothing that you'll nothingthat you'll see, you know, just
right away. Just some platformenhancements, that are gonna
make the the performance of the,the design view in particular,
but really just platform widesome performance enhancements to
the web page.

So I wanna talk about this intelligent overage
logic because that implies thatour logic before was stupid.

No. I mean, so, you know, part of you know, our job
is to, you know, give factoriesthe Enough parts, you know,
these parts are tiny. Like, theylose, you know, they need a
little extra if it's a real,product to to load it in the
feeders, you know, and theyalways ask us for for more more

(22:14):
parts in case they, you know,lose something or, you know have
issues on the floor and so, youknow, our customers like we
don't want to charge them formore parts because you know, I
don't want to pay for

more than than you you want. I ordered 10, I
want you to buy 10. Yes.Exactly.

Put 10 on the boards. Yes. And so we're, you
know, we want to have as much ofa balance as we can there and
part of that is, you know, for awhile we were saying, you know,
small packages, we're gonna use,you know, standard overage of
50, or, you know, for thosereally tiny cheap resistors.
Most of our customers don't careabout that. We found, you know,

(22:52):
some places in the middle whereit's, you know, starting to get
into your more expensive, realparts.
We just started pulling in morevariables, you know, into that
calculation. We say, you know,okay, like, as a customer, you
know, you wanna not pay for aton 50 overage if it's a, you
know, a dollar part, becausethat can start to add up. And so

(23:15):
we, you know, started justputting in more variables into
that calculation. You know,trying to think of what does our
factory really want? You know,and what can we be like, hard on
and be like, you know, hey,like, you're Like, I know you
wanna run this through Pick nPlace but it's a, you know, $5
part, like, you're gonna handYou're gonna hand place it.
We're not gonna charge for a 100of So we've basically taken our

(23:38):
overage calculations and justkind of added some more
intelligence. We sayintelligence, it's it's more
around, like, the margins ofIt's more if if else loops now?

Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, we we we are
comparing, you know, the thecost of of hand placement with
the cost of the overage that thepig in place would want. And,
you know, if if we determinethat you come out ahead with
with hand placement, we will gowith the hand placement amount
of overage, which is typicallyquite a bit smaller, right, by
percentage. The, the overagealso just scales neatly with the

(24:14):
cost of the parts.
And, which is how it's alwaysbeen. But this yeah. The as as
Kyle mentioned, the the packageoverage is is the main feature,
the main headline function thatwe added, last year. And then
we've we've been iterating onthat over the over the last year
to to add even moreintelligence. And then the other
the other piece of this puzzleis really the quality of the

(24:38):
data that we're able to get, youknow, whether whether we have
those those packageidentifications for parts that
we haven't seen before in theplatform.
And so we are working this yearon improving our our part data
sources. So we will be justenhancing the number of packages
that we've identified so that weget more accurate overage
calculated for your BOM, whichis gonna result in, you know,

(25:02):
faster order processing and andjust better deal for the
customer.

So so does does the platform indicate to the
user, you know, here's here'syour price for parts, but here's
your overage. Does it tell you,oh, you're also purchasing an
additional 5, or does that justkind of get I shouldn't say
swept under the rug, or does itjust kind of get combined in
with all your other parts?

Yep. We do it as If you look at your BOM, view or
even the components breakdown onthe quote and order tab of your
PCBE, you'll see the overage. Sowe're very transparent about
overage. We'll tell you ifyou're getting 50 overage, like,
it's there on your bomb and on,the quote and order, page for
you to see, so we're transparentabout it. I I I think it's I

(25:54):
mean, I don't think we break itout as a separate, like, line
item summary for your order, butit's pretty easy to get at.
If, I can tell you fromreceiving customer feedback, our
customers know how much overjust costing them.

Yes.

Because I've gotten those emails and I appreciate
them because it's You know, ohyeah that Oops. Like that's
that's a corner case that youknow we can dig into a little
bit more and enhance ourcalculation based upon.

Well and and that's just the thing. If you're
going to manufacture something,we all know that it's going to
that overage is just a part ofthe equation. Mhmm. And one of
the more difficult things,honestly, that I've experienced
with with CMs is trying to guesswhat their overage is. And and
I've certainly got it wrongbefore where, you know, they

(26:43):
wanted a 100 extra parts and Ibought them 80 or something like
that.

Yeah.

And and then there's a whole conversation
around that. So it's nice tohave automated where you guys
make the decision. I just giveyou the bomb and you tell me,
we're we need to buy this thisfew extra. Now now, working in
aerospace is kind of interestingbecause sometimes, you know, if
it's if it's a if it's a 10¢0402 resistor, yeah, sure. Buy
300 extra.

(27:08):
I don't care. Right? But, youknow, the just the other day, I
got some quotes for sometransistors. They were $1700
apiece, and they have a leadtime of 32 weeks. So if one of
them falls on the floor, I wantyou guys to tell me that it fell
on the floor.
You you your overage is 0. Ineed you to place every single

(27:28):
one of these because I have togo to my boss and say, hey, we
consume too many. So so yeah. II don't know. It scales with the
part.
Right? It it it it

it all depends.

But but yeah. You have

told me that I'm gonna be, like, digging
through the vacuum cleaner.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Or the bag.

I want you to sweep the floor, put it in a
bag, and send me everything youfound.

Vacuum cleaners are allowed on the floor. No.

They shouldn't be. Yeah. Yeah. Excuse me. So
please don't do that.
That was entirely a joke. Do notdo that. So how about this
customer furnished materialoption? I'm curious what that is
in relation to.

Yeah. We used to, you know, as you're building out
your bomb, make you designate,am I going to supply this from
inventory? Am I going to consignit? And we found that, you know,
our customers don't want tonecessarily make that decision
at that point. You don't want tobe uploading a bomb and think,
Do I have enough inventory tosupply this part?

(28:29):
You just want to build a bomband then say, you know what, I'm
gonna supply, you know, these,this list of parts and then
after you order, that's reallywhat, we don't need that
information to place your order.We just need you to tell us
which parts that you're going tobuy, which parts that we're
going to buy and then, you know,after you place your order, you

(28:50):
can go in and say, well, I'vegot these in inventory. Take
those from my inventory. I wannaconsign these parts, you know.
I'll send them to you.
So we basically have movedaround some of the decision
making flows to where, like, wethought and got feedback that

(29:10):
our customers, you know, wantedto make those decisions. So, you
know, it's a lot of it was, youknow, on the, on the
manufacturing side is, you know,similar like, we still, you
know, let you pick inventory orconsignment, let you, you know,
have some flexible sourcing. Wejust moved a lot of the decision
making pieces to where wherewhere it made the most sense.

Yeah. Basically broke out sourcing is now
separate from a bill material.

Yeah. Exactly.

Yeah. Separate from the bill of material. And
even I mean, of course, theturnkey, you know, macro fab
buying your parts or yousupplying them, decision you do
need to make right up front.But, you know, whether you
supply from inventory orconsignment, you can you can
wait days after your order tomake that decision if if you
have a need to for any reason.The the decision is is fully

(30:02):
after order placement happens.
And and we're already processingyour order, reviewing it,
sourcing the parts that you wantus to source. So maximum
flexibility.

So So so I guess that gives 3 different places
where your components can comefrom. Right? You can either have
Macrofab go out and buy them.They can either come from an
existing inventory that's there,or I could supply them to you,
me being whatever the customeris. So so that brings up a
question.
Let's say, I did a run withMacrofab. I'd I'd manufactured x

(30:34):
amount of boards and partsreturned to inventory. If I go
and produce those boards again,I can pull from that inventory
if there's excess parts.Correct?

Yeah. If there's enough, like, inventory, like,
we don't typically store, like,overage in inventory. Yeah. That
kind of stuff, because that'stypically, like, just too hard
to find, but if you have, likeone of the benefits of storing
inventory with us is you can doexactly what you said, if you go
to build with us and we don'tuse all the overage, or you

(31:08):
know, like, you have a giantreel, we don't have to, like,
you know, lop off 50 parts everytime we run that job to to, you
know, run the feeders to themachine. So, yeah.
The customers do the benefit ofbeing able to put that back in
inventory when they're done.

Yeah. I like that. I like that from a long
lead time perspective. If youhave parts that take forever to
get, put those in inventory andthen get your jelly bean
resistors and caps closer to theactual build date.

Yeah. Exactly.

So what about this complete I I actually know
a lot about this because Iworked on it yeah completed
board photo updates yeah wetalked about that Yeah. I didn't
do any of the back end or thecustomer facing, but I did all
the back end work, I guess. Sothis is for QA, our quality

(32:05):
assurance team.

Mhmm.

And it allows our quality assurance team to
basically take photos fullresolution photos of the boards
and then securely uploads firstarticle that the QA team has
approved. And so then you as acustomer can view basically the
first article that the QA teamhas approved. And so the the
whole initiative idea was toallow customers to see their

(32:29):
boards faster so we can if therewas an issue, let's say, there
was an issue assembling theboards, you can catch it faster
before we ship them out to you.

Does does the customer have the option to also
approve before shipping basedoff that

image? Good idea. The problem with that is
it would halt the

Oh, yeah. That would gum up the mix like crazy.
I'm just wondering if if youguys had already tackled that.

No. That that's something we've tossed around.
It's just the it halting theline and Yeah.

If you reply to that email, we will jump on that
order and stop it

ASAP. We could jump it gets jumped on really
fast. The the main thing is itprevents the back and forth of
shipping everything.

Yeah. It's just a nice I mean, you think of I
don't know. Amazon getting,like, the picture of your
package on your door when itcomes in just, you know, most of
the time I I don't know if we'veactually had any customers,
like, jump in and say, Hey, youdid something wrong. But, we've
had a lot just really like thatthey can see their board's

(33:34):
progress and just, you know, seethat we're doing a good job. And
just, you know, see the productbecause it's it's not, again,
not something that like atraditional Centimeters is
necessarily gonna provide.
You know, unless they're like,unsure about how how your
board's being built. But we justdo that on, you know, any board
that comes through because like,we I mean, honestly, because we

(33:58):
we have the the AOI machinetaking photos. We have smart
people who can get those photosinto a database, and then we
have smart people who can buildworkflows to put those in front
of our customer. And so we'relike, well our customers would
like this. Let's like go buildit and make it something that's
a nice extra feature for them.

(34:20):
So the

I won't name the names, but we've already
have other CMs copy thatfeature. Is that right?

That that

it happened very fast. You you see

you see what what first came to mind was the the
Domino's pizza tracker

where,

you know, like, what what when when you're at
the end, it's, hey. Your pizza'sready for for pickup. Well, why
don't they send They they don'tsend you a picture of your pizza
because I'd I'd open it up andbe like, yep. That's a pizza.
Cool.
Thanks.

No. I'd love to see that picture.

But why is

that why is it missing a pepperoni right there?

Yep. Yep. Send it back.

Why doesn't that look like the ad copy?

Yeah. Yeah. True. Yeah. There you go.
That's why they don't send youthe picture.

Yeah. I mean, you know, there's there's a one
point for PCBs. They they dolook like the ad copy.

Yeah. The that was such a the the initial
version of that uploader was areally it's a it's a really old
MerTech. It's called Speed DemonMerTech. It's before they were
numbered MERTEC AOIs, and therethere's a Python script. Oh, oh,
and that that AOI runs WindowsXP.

Wait. Was was this the MerTech that was there
when I was there?

Yes.

Oh, okay. Yeah. I remember this.

Yeah. And so and that that thing's just been
collecting dust forever since wegot our new MerTech sixes, and
they didn't want me to startmessing with the new ones
because they were using them forall the runs. And so I'm like,
oh, I can just use this old AOIto experiment on. And the I
think the most interesting thingwas getting Python to run on
Windows XP. Yep.

(35:57):
It's Python 2.6. Yeah. You can't

run That is ancient.

You can't run

And and wait but but but Python 2.6 is what are
we at now? 3.4?

3.13 or something like that?

Something like that. Okay. Yeah. See, I don't
even know. But but 2.6 is socompletely different than that.
Like, are you are you stillporting that over to the
Numeretec machines?

No. It was all rewritten for the newer
machines, but the it itbasically drove the mouse around
to click click on the MerTechinterface and then scan boards
and stuff. Nice. And then to,like, safely transfer, it had
its own local network go whereit needed to go. But, yeah, it

(36:48):
it's definitely was like I'm soglad we had we could turn that
off because it was definitely,

a club

but I think when because we had Brendan on
who's the engineering directoron the podcast and I I had to
show him how that thing workedwhen he when he started. Yeah.
The newer machines have a lothigher resolution and everything
like that. So Mhmm. Yeah.

(37:20):
That that was my extent. It waslike I did the groundwork on the
floor, and then Kyle was justlike, yeah. Just point it to
this location, and maybe it'llwork. Oh, and then we had to
make an like, a tool so we cantransfer the photos.

Yes. We have a very Well, it's it's it's very good.
Steady. No. It's not our moststeady product.
So if it goes down, product atmacofab.com if you're not
getting your board photos. But,

well, because the other tool I also wrote, but
that's in JavaScript.

Yeah. We we we wrote a lot of There's a theme
here.

Me writing code

and not

being good.

Alright. So how about this PCB file view? What
is what is new with

that? Yeah. I covered that a little bit. It is
where you can see so we say PCBfiles we just mean like the

the oh this this was the additional files right

this is the additional files yeah okay Yeah.

Yeah. And exposing it to the I guess it
was always technically exposedto the customer, but you had to
know if in the URL you could putso if you're looking at your
PCB, you could just put in slashfiles, and it would navigate you
there. There's actually a linknow, and we expose more files

(38:43):
and also allowed more files tobe uploaded.

Yeah. And you have a nice detailed view where you
can see who uploaded this file,you know, when did I upload
this, which you'd be surprisedbecause we we have, you know,
our support team comes in andhelps sometimes. So we wanna
sure that we're, like, trackingall that stuff.

Yeah. That was absolutely the genesis of of the
the view, initially. Right? Andwhy we didn't initially show it
to customers because we thoughtit was mainly useful for for our
internal support teams. But, youknow, realizing that that it
that it does provide customervalue and that we could add on
this this facility to uploadsome extra files.

Yeah. Is that Yeah. With with with Itar actually,
we're like, trying to figure outhow we could transfer files,
like you said, Steven. You know,sending encrypted keys and all
that, and we were like, wealready have a gov cloud s 3
bucket here. What if we justmade that a place where people

(39:43):
could put their files?
And that was actually, like,easier than us, you know, going
in at buy, you know, buying asubscription to secure file
transfer service or somethinglike that. So Right.

Yeah. And fully integrated with our with our
platforms Yeah. That you haveone place to go to get it all.

Exactly.

So what's next? What's we're already it's
already April. We're we're fullquarter 3 months into 2024.
What's down the horizon?

Yeah. I mean, we we've been doing a lot of work
on the the PCB screen, you know,besides, like, the the, you
know, ease of uploading files,like, we just wanna make that
UI, like, really nice and clean,both for, you know, existing
customers who are used to usingmicrofab, but also for new

(40:39):
customers who aren't really usedto, like, working with a, you
know, Centimeters or platformthat just takes their data and
imports it and, you know, a lotof them used to emailing back
and forth and and getting alittle more, or actually having
to do a lot more, like,communication and and so we're

(41:00):
trying to make that process feela little more like natural for
for both for both new users andfor existing users. So we've had
some UI improvements so far andwe've got a lot more planned, a
lot of stuff focused on youryour bill of materials. We know
we know that, You know, forsomeone who had a really clean,

(41:21):
you know, bomb with all theirparts selected, like, it's a
pretty nice experience. Youknow, if if if you're managing
that bomb and and keeping it upto date with, you know, parts
that are, you know, still beingmanufactured, for instance,
like, you get a great bombexperience.
But we've gotten like a lot of,you know, feedback that people

(41:43):
who are like still building outtheir bomb, we don't really help
them like we could for peoplewho, you know, have aren't
really wanting to, you know,make sure that all their
components are still beingmanufactured or are highly
available. We don't serve themas well as we'd like, so we're,
you know, doing a lot of workon, you know, updating our part

(42:06):
information and like, pulling injust like, as much part
information as we can get sothat we can say, you know, maybe
recommend, you know, all of yourjelly beans for you. If you can
give us, you know, the valuesyou're looking for. You know,
provide some tools to help youbuild out that bomb. Because

(42:26):
that's like, our, you know, ourexpertise is like, we have all
these parts.
We know it's available. We knowit's out there in the market.
And we want to help people,like, who are, you know, like,
selecting passives. Like,sometimes it's, like, that's not
where we want designers to spilltheir time, I don't think. We
haven't got the exact

How many times have you gone to a Mouser Digi
Key and went, I need a 0 80510 kresistor. I don't care what it
is. And you always sort by thecheapest price and if it's a
real of it or not. Yeah.

And so, like, we we wanna make that easy for because
we we get a lot of people whojust upload, I mean, everyone
knows, like, what, you know,what capacitance value or what
resistance value goes at that atthat designator but they just
don't have a part selected. Andso we're working on You know, we
wanna be able to provide thatfor our designers in a way that,
like, helps them spend time onactivities that are important

(43:19):
and not have to, like, you know,manually select part numbers for
those those materials. And thenwe wanna help people just like,
with with that information, youknow, be able to like, get get
feedback on their bombs. That'smore like proactive, So that you
don't have to think about, youknow, oh, am I picking the right

(43:41):
parts from a, you know,manufacturability perspective.
You just have to think about, isthis part have the right specs
for my board and we'll handle,you know, is it, you know, gonna
be end of life in a few years.
We'll provide recommendationsfor how to, replace that part.
Or if it's, you know, has anavailability risk, we'll provide
that insight. And so, those area few of the things, that we're

(44:05):
working on right now. And thenand then really just like our
our pricing and and lead times,like, you know, we we have I I
think we provide a pretty goodrange of things that you can
build on our platform. We have,you know, a pretty good
selection of stack ups that youcan automatically price, you

(44:26):
know, compared to what's outthere, but we wanna get get even
better at, you know,automatically quoting more a
little bit more exotic PCBs.
Whether it's, you know, properweights or, you know, layers or
stack up thicknesses. We wannabe able to give you, you know,
better options for selectingpricing and and lead times. I

(44:47):
guess, quantities and leadtimes. Hope you still have to
pick your prices. That would beinteresting.
Yeah, quantities and lead timesand quoting data and we've kind
of relied on on vendors in thepast and we're gonna keep, you
know, using like panel vendorsthat we feel are good quality

(45:11):
panel vendors, but start to, youknow, use some some data and
are, you know, whatever youwould call it, AI, or you would
just like data interpolationjust to build out a more
intelligent pricing matrix thatgives you, you know, more
automated quotes.

And Excel best fit line?

Excel best fit line. Yes. It's it's I I have
done a decent amount of the datastuff like that and yeah. It'll
be more than an Excel best fitline. It'll be But I don't want
to oversell her.
Go into, like Yeah.

I I I love the idea that there's intelligence
behind it that goes beyondsaying, hey, we've detected an
issue. Like you were mentioningend of life kind of thing.
That's Yeah. That's great whenit says, okay, here's your part.
We we say we sense that it's endof life.
I love the idea that there mayalso be, hey, it's end of life.
Here's a suggested or here's 3other suggested. Maybe you can

(46:11):
pick one of these. Just makeyour life way easier as, you
know what what was the word thatthat was always used? Stiction.
Right? Like, just make it makeit so that it's easy for people
to use your platform and byremoving the friction and adding
stiction.

Right?

That's that's another cofounder word.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

That's nice.

I've used that word before.

Yeah. Oh, yes. Also, completely randomly,
something I don't know why mybrain came up with this. Maybe
it's just ADD. It would be funone day.
You know, Digi Key and Mouser,they have, I don't know, a a
1000000 different line items. Itwould be fun to know how many of
those you have purchased. Not inquantity in terms of, like, how
much money you've spent at DigiKey, but have you purchased

(46:55):
250,000 unique parts from DigiKey or Mouser or whatnot. Yeah.
It'd be a fun statistic.

I bet you it's over that.

I bet you it's a lot. I bet you it's a done.

Well, last year alone, we built 900,000 PCBs.

Right. Right. So what what size of the catalog
have you purchased?

Yeah. I think each one I think on average,
it's 30 something line items perboard. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah.
It's crazy.

We need

to get some custom badges for that.

We'll probably know in a little bit.

Gotta go stay up really late doing some MySQL.
Steven just stepped out editor.

Should we talk about the the improvements from
from February well, from March?

Oh, yeah. The I don't

I think I don't know that we we got into the
details of of just not requiringplacements and and the
reorganization of the tabs.

Yeah. Let's go and do that.

Applications improvements. We'll talk about
that next. I think his headsetdied. Oh, dear. You guys there?
Are you back in the land of thehearing?

Yeah. That hasn't happened in

a hot minute. Editor Steven is now back. Oh,
and then I we talked about allthe releases in 23, but what
about the last 3 months?

Yeah. Yeah. I kinda mentioned the updates to the
workflow, but, editor, you cancut that out.

We're gonna keep that in.

What's up? It's okay. Yeah. So in the last few
months, we've made a lot ofchanges to the PCB screen. And
one of those, you'll you'llnotice is, like, our court in
order page, you know, now givesyou different indicators.
We wanted to split out our ourready check. Yep. What we call
ready check is basically, isyour PCB, you know, ready to

(49:06):
order? If we gave it to our, youknow, not quite ready to build
but ready for our order reviewteam to check the design. And
so, it's usually, are yourdesign files there in any good
order, is your bomb complete?
You know, can someone take alook at this and and check if
it's actually manufacturable?And and previously, we just gave
you, like, a big red aggressiveerror that was just like, you

(49:29):
can't order this board. And wefound it to be a pretty bad
experience. 1, because it didn'treally tell you why and then
also because we actuallyrequired some stuff that we
don't really need to to quoteyou on. And so, like, placement
placement data is one of thosethings.
Like, we do need placement datato, you know, go ahead and build

(49:51):
the board. But you don'tactually need to have your
placement data all sorted out.Or your Gerbers, you know, all
sorted out to, get a valid avalid quote and place that order
with a good price. We can letyou place that order and then we
can go in with our support teamand they can clean up your your
placement data and any, youknow, missing files. We've had a

(50:12):
lot of orders go through thisprocess and it's really quick
and easy.
Our support team's used to doingthis so they're like, you know,
I usually I like click on thealerts, you know, like, an hour
after they come up and they'realready resolved because our
placement or review team'salready fixed it. So, we started
just requiring less less data tobe like in that perfect state

(50:34):
for you to get a price and placethat order. And we've also just
split out those warnings,unquote, in order to like,
really more of checks. Hey,like, you have design data, you
know, do we give you a thumbs upon that or is, are you gonna
need to like get support to helpyou after you place your order?
You've got a bomb.
Do you have you know, your partsdefined? Are they MPNs that are

(50:59):
recognized by our marketdatabases? Or is there some
stuff in there that like, weneed to to work on, like, our
communication of what does thispart actually mean? And then, or
is it like, or do you have agreat bomb that's just got some
pieces of availability in there.And and, you know, and within
that like, window, oh, you'vegot availability issues like,

(51:20):
here's the 6 parts that aremissing availability.
You can designate them as, youknow, customer fringe material
right there and just You youprovide them or you can, you
know, go in your BOM and addthose alternates yourself or if,
honestly, if you like, know thatit's a part that we're just not
pulling for some reason, from asource that you know of, that

(51:42):
you know, isn't Digikey or orMouser, you can request sourcing
help and just tell us, like,hey, like, I'm trying to place
an order for a 100 PCBs. I'vegot these parts. Here's a link
to them. Like, you guys just goquote these and we'll quote them
and you know I don't know. It'sa pretty like, quick quote turn
around.
It's not a custom quote, youknow, 3 day window. It's We get

(52:03):
Slack alerts. We go in there andwe say, oh, you've got these
parts. Let's go let's go quotethese and get your order taken
care of. So we're just trying tomake it like, and then we have
that custom quote window still.
If you have some custom quotespecs, we'll tell you what's
what's kind of blocking that,you know, automatic order and
order now capability. So, we'rejust focused on, it's a pretty

(52:28):
big overhaul for our platformand that, you know, like, not
requiring placement data,requires us to do a lot of work.
We did a lot of UI work to makethat, you know, feel Try to feel
as smooth as possible. Even likewhen you start your board, like,
if you don't want to uploaddesign files, you can start from
your specs quote. And you canjust tell us, like, how wide,
you know, how wide longer boardis and and we will build your

(52:51):
quote from there and then if youwanna provide us files later,
you can.
So it it was a big, you know, UIoverhaul, but we think it gives
us, you know, especially forthose new users, like a really
nice experience of as you'redesigning your board, you can
use Macrofab. You don't have tohave it all figured out to take
advantage of our, you know,quoting platform or our part

(53:13):
services. Like, you can use theplatform to get quotes, you
know, as you're working throughthose designs rather than, like,
having to have every Gerberlayer figured out and all of
your placement data in there andand worked out. Yeah.

I'm really proud of of the the team's work on
that UI overhaul that I, as Kylementioned, the centralization of
of showing you the errors andnot making you fish around for,
oh, I have to go somewhere elsein the UI to fix this problem.
You know, centralizing it intoone space where you can kind of
see it. And also justdifferentiating things that are

(53:50):
not material to, you know, toyou getting an accurate quote
and placing an order. Thingsthat we can help you with after
the fact. Marking those clearlyas warnings that aren't that
aren't blocking you and markingthe things that do in fact block
you from getting an accuratequote as you need to fix this.
This is this is a red warning. Ifind it makes the platform a lot

(54:11):
more approachable to to userswho are not as initiated.

You know, it's really fun to hear all of this
because it seems like Macrofabhas has certainly gotten to that
level where the data can reallyhelp drive your decisions and it
sounds like there's a lot ofreally close attention to the
fine detail of what does it meanfor to at MacFab that that, you

(54:47):
know, one day MacFab would getto that point and it's just
really fun to see you guys therenow, and see you at that point
where you get to turn thoselittle knobs and see how how
that affects well, the the whatwhat is it? O e, the operation
experience? Order experience.Ordering experience. That's what
it is.

(55:07):
Oh, that's fun.

Yeah. It's a lot of fun. It's I'm a huge data nerd
SQL query guy. So I'm justanytime I can dig into our, you
know, I use it as an indicatorfor how we're doing, so it's fun
to see. I mean, sometimes it'sfrightening to see where we are
missing the mark, but it's it'sfun to have that data and to,
like, really try to attack someof those problems.

(55:31):
Yeah. And and, you know, get tosee, like, it's a a fun
experience every day on theteam.

You know, we we, we it's a fun experience every
day on the team. You know, wewe, we have a real fast
development cycle. You know, weuse agile development. We are,
you know, pushing improvementsto the platform multiple times a
day in in our microservicesarchitecture. And you know, that

(56:02):
is, those things are seamless tothe user experience and, things
just get better and better, youknow, every couple of weeks.
It's, it's, it's fun to see.It's fun to, to plan ahead and
keep these guys busy, you know,building whatever Kyle dreams
up.

Do y'all have anything else? Or you wanna wrap
up the podcast? These 2 wanna gohang out with the rest of the
team. I'm I'm actually keepingthem from, like, their their,
like, monthly hang out with therest of the developers team,
drinkathon, I guess.

Yeah. Dreaming of drinking beers while we're
sitting here drinking beers withyou.

Yes. Oh, man.

Yeah. But it's with me, not with the rest of
your team. So Well, thank you

so much for spending your evening with us.
We really appreciate it. Yeah.It's been a ton

of fun. I mean, keep uploading your designs.

Yeah. Thank you.

Use the use the little red chat. It's way
underrated. Can we check theicon? Product? Atmacafab.com.
What would you like the icon tobe, Parker? Mac. Oh wait oh Mac
the PCB guy yeah oh man we havea unofficial mascot unofficial
mascot that's clippy right thethe old Yeah. Microsoft Word.

Mac has been on a t shirt and some stickers.
Right?

About that. Yeah.

He's kind of the love child of, of Clippy and
Mickey Mouse.

Yeah. Yeah. We could make that.

That that might need to be an Easter egg just
for you.

Yeah. Oh.

I accept. I'm logged in. I like that.

Yeah. Yeah.

Unlock Mac the the the the Macafab Macafaba.

Mac the PCB guy.

Maybe a secret preference user management page.

Yeah. Well, thank you, Nick, and thank you,
Kyle, for coming on our podcastto talk about the software
releases. Probably have y'allback on next year

yeah we'll look forward

to that. See if y'all see if y'all have hit all
those marks

yeah I know

you're gonna yeah you're gonna come here with
a checklist yeah

we haven't hit those by next year. I'll be
probably not available for thepodcast.

Thank you for listening to circuit break and
mock yeah. Thank you forlistening to circuit break, a
Mac or Fab podcast. We are yourhosts,

Parker Dillmann And Steven Kraig. Later,
everyone. Take it easy.

Thank you. Yes. You are listener for downloading
our podcast. Tell your friendsand coworkers about circuit
break, the Macrofab podcast. Ifyou have a cool idea, project,
or topic, or a feature you wantus to implement, let Steven and
I and the community and Kyleknow through our forms.
It's forum.macfab.com, where wetalk about personal projects,

(59:01):
discussions about the podcast,engineering topics, and news
about MacroFab.

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