Back in April, I blogged about WAi (Worthington Assembly Inc.), a circuit assembly company located only 15 minutes away from where I live. They’ve got great reputation in the maker community, and have helped projects such as Tessel, RGB-123 LED matrices to take off. I am glad to announce that we’ve now partnered with WAi to manufacture OpenSprinkler Pi (OSPi), and the first batch of 200 boards just came out from a late-evening production yesterday. Check out these awesome videos Chris Denney took during the production:

Full-speed version

Slow-motion version

Some static pictures (taken with an outdated phone, sorry about the quality!). Picture captions: 1) tapes loaded onto pick-and-place machine; 2) first board came out of the reflow oven; 3) first board after AOI inspection; 4) me holding a stack of 25 panels.

Compared to manufacturing in China, using a local facility has the unbeatable advantage of quick turn-around time. The cost may be higher than made in China, but for an open-source hardware business like us, it’s critical to remain agile and be quick about making changes. I’ve been there — waiting for months for an order to ship from China, which was painful and stressful. By the time the shipment arrived, I already wanted to move on to the next version. With WAi, we may have found just the perfect solution for our need, and this is supporting local manufacturing too, win-win! 🙂