I’ve seen quite a few third party expansion card concepts in this forum, but not much in the wider market. I heard that Framework is planning to allow third party expansion cards on their Marketplace, which might open up the market a bit.
I have connections to an ISO 9000 SMT assembly house that is looking for external work, and it’d be interesting to see if it would be viable to produce some small-scale, quick turnaround runs on expansion cards. It’s located in Canada, and they can offer SMT and mechanical assembly.
Are there developers that have boards they want produced? How much of a market is there for third party expansion cards? How much of a hurdle is it to get an expansion card on the Framework Marketplace?
Currently only Framework can do so. The third-party marketplace is a goal for Framework, but it’s not available yet as its a substantial engineering effort.
How small scale is small scale in this case? I know there are some developers in the community here who are ready for production in the 10’s of units, but probably not the 100’s.
At the moment, not for me as I already have access to PnP machines, that are capable of over 36k CPH so I will be fine for a long time. As far as I know, I’m the only dev that has already sold production expansion cards.
For raw PCBs, small scale is in the realm of 10 individual units, though they could do hundreds easily. If they were to do the cases as well, they’d need some more (cumulative) orders to get the materials and equipment for it.
Hi,
I’d certainly be interested, but for some reason I am unable to private message you here. Could you please email me at jacob.eva@liberatedsystems.co.uk to discuss this?