3 posts tagged with "case-study"

If you've been sourcing PCB assemblies in 2026, you've felt the squeeze. Lead times that used to be 4-6 weeks are now stretching to 16-26 weeks. Assembly house pricing has climbed 20-40% since last year, and minimum order quantities are creeping upward as shops prioritize larger clients.

The root cause is familiar: component shortages continue to ripple through the supply chain, and the assembly houses that survived the 2024-2025 crunch are now capacity-constrained. They're cherry-picking jobs, and small-batch prototyping runs are the first to get deprioritized.

For hardware startups and small teams, this creates a strategic question worth answering: is it time to bring SMT assembly in-house?

Every hardware startup faces the same question: do you buy a desktop pick-and-place or invest in an industrial machine? The answer depends on where you are now and where you're heading. Here's an honest comparison with real numbers, not marketing copy.

Welcome to the PikkoBot blog. This is where we share what we're learning about desktop pick-and-place assembly, OpenPnP, and the practical realities of building hardware in-house.