 Life from New York, it's National Manufacturing Day. Hey everybody, it's me, Lady Aida. That's right, we are manufacturers and right now we are manufacturers. Why are you hearing all that noise? You're like, what's all that noise? Why aren't you in a sound studio? Why are you in a sound studio? Because we're in a factory where we do our manufacturing here in downtown Manhattan. It's also a Made in New York City week. And so we're making it a city and manufacturing, it's our day. Yeah, so let's go over this. This is a Made in New York City week. We are one of the partners, in addition to the New York City Council, Brooklyn Lightning Art, GMDC, Con Edison, WDI-8, and LISC NYC. This is Made in New York City week. Today is the first day that they're kicking it off, and it's Manufacturing Day. And I woke up today and I'm like, oh right, we're doing a virtual factory tour today. That's fine. What's funny, we used to do virtual factory tours for years, and people were like, why would you do virtual stuff? And it's like, I don't know, like why physically show up at a place when you can do it virtually? Yeah, and now it's just cool to do virtual stuff. So I thought I'd first start off with a little bit about it for the folks that are like, what do you mean you're a New York City manufacturer? What does that even mean? It was like, what part of New York City? And we're like, no, it's Manhattan. Manhattan. So this is our building. It's 150 Veric. It was a... Westinghouse radio inductor building. They used to manufacture radios and components for radios, which was a very big New York industry, and it's really cool. I wish there was a book about it, because I'd love to read the history of electronics and radio in New York. Yeah, I mean, if you know of someone who's working on or knows about the electronic history of New York City, send it to press at adifference.com. I'd love to check that out. Anyway, so this building was used for manufacturing, and then it became printing building. Yeah, and it still does some printing. Yeah, and Panavision is here. White and Kennedy, they're an advertising agency there here. And Adafruit has a few floors here, and this is our team pre-COVID, pre-COVID, pre-COVID, pre-COVID, pre-COVID. And we hope to... I mean, we could probably go outside and take a photo again, but this is right before COVID last year, and we started doing stuff, I'd say, in a bigger way once we got to this building, but Adafruit was in an apartment 10 years ago. Yeah. Actually, a little bit, maybe like six, seven years ago. And we went from an apartment, and that's where this picture came from, which is just by the way, that was your bedroom, I think. This was the living room. Yeah, and we had a little tiny pick-and-place machine, and we had a toaster oven that we did, reflow manufacturing on. Really nice toaster oven. Yeah. We have another one we still use. Yeah, and... For toast, literally. And no loans, no venture capital. You can check out our About Page if you want. In fact, I have some web page stuff here. Oh, I'm getting that. Yeah, that'll go to... Come on. And this is... Let me go to the page here. Sherry, Sherry. Yeah, so this is our About Page, Adafruit.com, slash about. And you can read a little bit about the company. You can see some of the things that we do here. More was the first lady engineer on the cover of Wired. You got a lot of stuff going on. And you can see, you know, we have this May New York City blurb here and more. And then the other thing is, it's Halloween, so we've got this little, you know, pumpkin. Yes. It's manufacturing day. And this is one of the many things we do. We try to do something every single year and more. And if you want... Oh, we have little quotes on our page. We have our thing that we just got. We're now a minority of women-owned business enterprise. That's pretty cool. You have to get, like, a piece of paper to get certified. Yeah, it has not really helped us at all, but since we're the only ones that are out there... Well, I think it's good to show, like, there are women and minorities who have manufacturing business. If you don't see it, you can't imagine it. Yes, this is the real thing. And so that's why we decided to do that. Another thing, and this is just because it's manufacturing week, or sorry, yeah, manufacturing week in May New York City Day, if you're a company and you're looking for people, we have a jobs board that the two of us will approve each job. Yes, it's a free job board. It's a great place to get a job or to hire people. We only let through, like, non-sucky jobs, nose-to-nose spam, they're all wheel. And so, like, for example, Stanley, Black and Decker, they want EEs and IoT engineers. It could be remote or whatever. If you do content, did you keep looking for somebody to create an electronics content? So I'm going to talk a little bit more about Adafruit in a second. But the other thing is, like I said, it's Manure City Week, October 1st to 9th, and today is National Manufacturing Day. And if you go to the website, it's maidennyc.org, you can see other companies in New York City that are manufacturing tomorrow. There's some physical events. And all of New York, you know, we're recovering. The city is doing, I think, better than expected. I can tell you, on the ground it is, I think, in a lot of reasons. It's Lockwood. Lockwood looks cool. Lockwood. It looks really smart. Williamsburg Manure City. And I think it's one of the reasons is all of the safety that New York City companies have been able to provide to their staff and the community. The vaccination rate is really high here, and we haven't had any cases, and our team is right now 99% vaccinated and will be 100% by October 18th. That's going to be our mandate. So I do want to let the folks know that they're watching this that are running companies. It is possible to thrive and do a good job manufacturing New York City, even in the middle of a pandemic, chip shortage, and then today we heard, you know, a chunk of the world right now is running out of power. Yeah. So some things are closed. So you can check that out there. And then also, this is just a different color one. This is the creatorswanted.org. This is the National Association of Manufacturing. We're a member of it. And they have a bunch of virtual events. This is, and more, this is our little page here, where it has this event that you're watching now. So that's a little bit about what's going on today. But I did want to talk about, like, what have we been doing, and then we'll do a little bit of a tour. So one of the things that happened in the last year is we got asked to make face shields. This was March of last year. The city called us and said, we really need face shields for doctors. Can you drop everything and do this? And we had just shut down, Adaford a little bit before the shutdowns to keep our team safe. And we decided to do it. We have all these posters around here. We wanted to help fight COVID. And then here's some of the doctors that got the face shields that we made. And then here's just a little speed-up snippet of how we were making them and how we were doing things in the mid-last year. And we were able to deliver thousands to the city. And it was because we had all this technology here for doing other things. But it turns out you can make masks as well. And so we're thankful we were able to do that. We also, with our manufacturing capabilities, were able to provide electronics for ventilators for all sorts of medical devices. And it's one of those things where it was hard to do. There was only a small team of us. We didn't make any money on any of this. It was just like, let's do whatever we can to keep everyone as safe and alive as possible during one of the scariest times. So I want to thank our team. We took some portraits during this time because we were all just trying to figure out how do we operate as an essential business and how do we do things? And stay safe. And we did. It was really, really, really, really hard. So thank you, team. And thank you, everyone here at Adafruit, who's been holding it together. And we're at a finish line right now. And like I said, it has a lot to do with. It's easier and safer to operate. Yes. So yay. So a couple of things that we're going to do in this half an hour or so that we have together is we have a live camera here at Adafruit. But we're going to... Live. Because it is a virtual tour. Oh. Yeah. So enjoy the wires. OK. So let me get... OK. This is us. We're in the background right there. You can't see us. This is us. This is us live manufacturing right now. The team knows I'm doing this too. We're like privacy freaks here. Yeah. You can tell them. I'm like, hey, we're going to be doing this. Let's see if I can zoom in a little bit. Let's do it. So there's Andy and Hector. And they're manufacturing electronics right here, live in New York City. But what I wanted to do is have LeMore, our lady here, an engineer, talk about this manufacturing floor here. Yeah. This is a pre-recorded video, but I wanted to have someone go through and show all of it to do a virtual tour. So here you go. OK. So this is the beginning of the pick-and-place lines. This is like the heart of Adafruit. This is where we actually manufacture electronics by placing components onto circuit boards. And then this long thing here is an oven that heats it up. On the right there are testers that we use to test boards. And those are completed boards that came out of the pick-and-place. They're toasted and ready to use. We also have a machine called the selective soldering machine, which actually can solder through-hole components. It's a very different process. We have storage for all of our components and testers. These are the desks where people sit, and they test each board. So every board that we manufacture is tested. This is me. I'm working. I'm waving. OK. And then you can see we have a lot of storage. We have no radio shack sign. A lot of manufacturing is inventory management, making sure you have all the parts that you think you have at the time you think you have them. A lot of our space is taken up by component storage. Parts that we use in all of our products we have to purchase. And they come on reels that we then load onto the machine. And each board we have has a different set of reels that we load on. Yeah. OK. So let's go back to us. And then the other part of the tour I thought we could do is let's take a look at our shipping and our storage. It's like a GoPro. There's a, yeah. I feel like it's one of those like bicycle things. It is. Like indoor cycling. And they're like you're bicycling around the city. Yeah. You're bicycling around Adafruit. So this is our shipping area here. Yeah. Back in the day. The Moore Wiz electronics and Kidding and I was shipping. There was just two of us. I did all the shipping. She did all the electronics. So do you want to talk about this or do you want me to? No. This is where we store all of our stuff to ship. So we have about 4,000-ish products that we ship from here. About, you know, 500 of them are manufactured on site. And then the rest are stuff like, you know, batteries or enclosures or other makers. We like to stock stuff from other people in the community. We stock stuff like Raspberry Pis and Arduinos and boards from SparkFun and boards from Seed Studio. So there's a large community of about like 20 different companies that make electronics that we sell. So, you know, we like to sell those as well. And so we have like a kind of a one-stop shop. And we sort every item with product ID. So we kind of inventory management for shipping is also really important. But what's neat is that, you know, we try to stock enough stuff that you can really build a project using everything at Adafruit. And also we stock all the things that are kind of unique and unusual. Like, we don't like to stock like individual screws because you can just buy those at a local hardware store. Instead, we try to stock all the things that are kind of unique and interesting. So a lot of my time is spent, you know, looking at what is out there in industry and then getting samples, verifying that the things work as expected. Write an example code for them. And we take really nice photos, get specification sheets and put them up on the site. So it's kind of a curation process. We do manufacturing and curation. For inventory, you know, there has been kind of our backstop. You know, we try to stock about one quarter's worth of inventory. Right now there's this massive silicon shortage, which you probably heard of a lot of car companies are having to close up or they're unable to ship cars. So we use a lot of the same components and a lot of it is due to car companies. They're a massive mover in the industry. It's kind of like that story of, you know, when McDonald's wants to have the McRib, they can only do it when the pork prices are a certain amount. Because when McDonald's buys McRibs for every McDonald's, it has a huge effect on... Yeah, like Nutella is responsible for like a third of the... Oh, palm oil. Hazelnuts on planet Earth. Right. So, you know, we're kind of a small company and it's a very large ecosystem of companies like Apple and Ford and Toyota. But, you know, we try to have a niche there where we can still get and stock components and keep them on site so that we can manufacture goods for the next three months. But it's been interesting dealing with the silicon shortage. You know, it's definitely been challenging. I've seen, you know, there's stuff I would have like to get out and publish and I couldn't because, you know, I'm ready to go but then the part isn't available and the part isn't available for like up to a year sometimes. So, I thought what we would do is... So, that's a tour and a promise delivered. We wanted to do the virtual tour. Virtual tour done. But we also wanted to show some actual things that we're making here right now. So, do you want to show the tester? Well, I thought I'd show some of, you know, I thought I'd show what a circuit board looks like. I feel like once in a while I need to like cut to the manufacturing cam. They're cleaning up the tips. Yeah, so when the reel has all the parts that are finished, there's these, you know, the plastic sleeve is left over. Yeah. So, anyways, we're making some stuff right now and you have some things that... Yeah. I want to tilt this so you can... Yeah, this is a little tilty. What is this? So, this is, these are the circuit boards. So, you know, when we, when you manufacture a product, we start with a circuit board design. So, this one is a four panel. You'll notice because there's one, two, three, four boards. Whenever we manufacture stuff, you know, you usually don't manufacture literally one at a time. You try to manufacture, you know, a bunch at a time in parallel because it speeds up the process and also, you know, you have a fixed size that the machines like. So, it's like as many as you can fit into this shape is however many you can make at once. So, this is a macro pad. So, this is a three by four keyboard with a rotary encoder and you've got like some cool space themed art. One of the things we like to do with our electronics is that you can, you have little Easter eggs or design elements that we can add because, you know, when we make a circuit board design, the thing that's like technically important is all the copper, all the gold pads and what they connect to you. And, you know, we of course do that and make sure we do a good job with that. But then there's all this leftover space. It's like, well, we could, we could add a little space man, space cat over here or like this is kind of a cool, you know, ship element, like rotating element over there. Sometimes, you know, on the final design of the board we also have a gold plated design. So, we like to play around with the process of making circuit boards. But I design a big circuit board. It goes through, you know, multiple revisions. I use CAD tool to do that. I use Eagle CAD, but there's also CAD CAD is a free and open source CAD software. The only reason I don't use CAD CAD is I can grow up with it and, you know, it's one of those like whatever you grow up with is kind of, it's like my native tongue. So, I use Eagle CAD, but there's tens of others. And then, you know, there's a lot of acronyms and like, you know, what is this like key cat thing? That doesn't really matter. Those are like tools of the trade for EEs that you solve for packages. But a couple of little other things that are interesting. So, on average, we create at least a new product about once a week. A new original product comes out once a week. At least, yeah, at least. And so, on Wednesday nights at eight o'clock we have a show called Ask an Engineer and we have a new product section. And that's when we show everything. We do live demos. We ship about 30,000 packages from here, New York City, USA. Who doesn't say it? Yeah, every month. Every month. Yeah. And we've always been profitable. And then, you know, you can look around online, I think one of the last times we were asked like, revenue $40 million in about a year. So, this is a business business. Yeah, we have 150 people almost all together and a lot of engineers on staff and developers and artists and people who do music and people who do photography. We have a puppet show and you can't see it behind me here because we've moved our cameras, but we have some puppets that we have do things with us as well. And then someone in the chat, by the way, if you want to ask any questions, you can do it on YouTube or Discord at YouTube today, probably because that's what most people are watching us on. Someone said, oh, like, is there any way to optimize our gathering and shipping because it looks like people are walking around. And the answer is we already do. So, or at least, you could always add more efficiency, but one of the things that we did is velocity storage. So, based on how frequently something is ordered or when we print out the invoices, the path for someone to take, if they walk to a place, all the things are available for them to pick up on the way there to get back. Yeah, like the order in which it appears on the invoice is the order in which you can walk. Where it is, yeah. Is that still true? Yeah. And so, all this shelf, we have shelf locations, now we have barcodes for everything. Back in the day, it was just me shipping. I have to remember everything and it was just in our living room, so not so bad. But now it's, you know, 50,000 square feet plus. And then we have about 3,000 resellers around the world. Digikey and Mauser are probably our two biggest ones if you like to order stuff from some of the larger customers. You know, you're up in Japan and Canada and the UK. Yeah, we ship worldwide except we're not allowed to or can't. And, you know, you could post some questions in the chat if you have anything, but back to the manufacturing. So what else have you been working on? So yeah, so this is the board before it's, this was the PCB, the raw PCB that we get. And then this is after it's gone through the pick and place. So that's actually the board that they're manufacturing. I just totally snagged this off of the end of the line. So you can see that whereas this has, you know, these blank gold pads, this version has components. So there's like a microcontroller here and a USB connector and a speaker, even says speaker and LEDs and sockets and, you know, other components that are placed on top on the pick and place and then heated in the oven to permanently attach them. You know, a lot of manufacturing is process management also. You know, what processes can you use and can you minimize the processes because especially with electronic manufacturing, some processes are very messy and expensive and time consuming and some are very fast and efficient. So pick and place is extremely fast and efficient. You really want to use the pick and place as much as possible. What you want to avoid is having human labor as much as possible because it's competitive and it's not as interesting and it's slow compared to this machine which can place, I think, you know, 60,000 components an hour or something. Yeah, and we have two of them. One of the things that we did was we said, well, you know, this is working out and if we can make enough money to save enough money, we can buy another machine in case one goes down or if we want to optimize our production. There's the oven. That's the thing on the right there. And then there's two pick and place machines, a board loader, a stenciler, there's Andy. He's one of the people who runs the machines here and then let me try to zoom in a little bit more to see if I want to see what I can do here. I've played with this camera in a bit. It's working. Yeah, so back in the day, we would put this whole setup on a cart and push it around, but I thought, you know what, I could probably just film it and then have something. But that's the machines right now. I think they're on break at the moment. And the next thing we have is you have a tester if you want to show it. Yeah, so the final step is after we manufacture stuff, we go through the test process. So building a test jig is also really important. You know, a lot of people when they learn welding or woodworking, they, you know, you start with thinking like, oh, I'm just going to use a saw and I'm going to like weld or use a CNC. And then you realize, actually 90% of your time is spent jigging, holding the thing into place and measuring it and getting it into the right setups that you can do the process that you want to do, whether it's lathing or milling or welding or soldering or, you know, drilling or whatever. And it's similar with electronics. You know, you spend a lot of time on the design of the product, but then you also have to design how to test it because the pick and place machines will place components, but depending on humidity and temperature and vibration, you know, we're over a subway and so there's sometimes the building shakes a little bit or just like random chance because we're dealing with small electronic components, things won't place in the right location. Sometimes humans make mistakes. We don't load the machine right. They flip something upside down. And so being able to detect errors very quickly is very, very important. I've definitely heard of people who didn't have a test procedure when they went to manufacturing because they're like, you know, what could possibly go wrong and then they get 5,000 boards back and they're all wrong. They're all upside down. And they're like, I didn't even think that that was possible. So it's really important to have a full test procedure. So this is a test jig. So this is also something I designed. This is a test holder which has test pads. It'll test points. When you look at electronics, you often have these little gold pads on them that are used to perform a test procedure. So then I clamp it down. I got this nice little clamp and then when I plug this in, so it loads a test program in and then, okay, you can clamp down properly and this is like it telling me what it's doing. So it says, okay, test all switches and then I have to test the rotary encoder. So I have to rotate this and you can see all the lights light up and it says, please push. I push this down and it says test pass and then, you know, it took 25 seconds to pass test. So a lot of my time is spent not only in the designing of the hardware, which is important, but how to perform the test procedure very quickly because the time to manufacture something is usually actually a lot less than the time it takes to test it. It takes longer to test an item than it does to manufacture an item. Not always, but for many electronic components because a human, again, a human is involved. Yes, you can automate that, but even then, it's very challenging. It's very, you know, a human has to lift a thing and move it. It's tough to automate that whereas a pick in place, you know, in an oven, those are well automated. A lot of people, they don't realize how much stuff we have is not automated. It's done by hand. Humans are really good at grasping things, moving them, pressing buttons. Looking at colors, looking at text and recognizing it. Recognizing when something is not being tested properly. It's the unknown unknowns that humans can be actually quite good at, that robots are not. And so each thing is tested by a human. So the key is, how do I make it as fast as possible to test? So, you know, in this case, it took me 25 seconds, but my goal is to make it 10 or 5 seconds or less. And then a couple questions that came in from the chat and I'll answer them. So they asked, do we have any, what do we do about e-waste? Well, we work with New York City and we deliver anything that we have that is considered e-waste. Here's one of the things. The most important thing is, if you do good designs. Yeah, we're really efficient. That have good yield, that's more important. I mean, when companies make phones like Apple and Samsung, the first ones, they throw away like 50 to 80 percent of their product. The yield is really low. The yield is quite low. You never see it and you never know about it because it's hidden. But for us, we have 99 percent yield 98 percent yield or higher. We're very, you know, it's not just, it's not just because we want to reduce e-waste but of course, we want to reduce our time, we want to reduce our effort. We don't have to, we don't want to rework stuff. So having good yield which comes from good design, good tests and good process will reduce your e-waste. That's more important. You solve the problem early. There's no real recycling in electronics. None. I mean, like there's this fantasy like no, there's no recycling. It can be disposed safely but it's not recycled. I think as efficient as you are is the goal because if you're not throwing away anything and your yield is like 99, over 99 percent, which ours is, then... Yeah, you want to keep it out of the out of the recycle bin, out of the trash bin. That's more important than some fantasy of like, oh, I can make something and then I put it in the recycle bin and it's going to be recycled. And then the follow-up that they had was now they're talking about like, oh, do you have any examples of taking apart stuff and using those parts for things? So I would check out our learn system, Adafruit, learnsystemlearn.adafruit.com. Yeah, there's makers who do that. Yeah. You would not do that for a final product. Yeah. Nobody would want that anyways. Nobody would want it used. Yeah. We wouldn't take apart a TV and then turn it into something else. That being said though, there's a lot of components that people can use. Well, we couldn't anyway. A lot of older components have lead in them and we can't use them anyways. Yeah. So one of the things that folks can do with the Adafruit system, another thing that you could do is on our show and tell a couple weeks ago, we had Randy from Instructables and it was about how to make robots from basically junk. Yeah, that was fun. And so you might want to check that out because I think that has what you're looking for and a lot. Trashbots. And then you can take some of the things that are like out of an old toy and then add some like modern components from Adafruit. So this is learn.adafruit.com and it has pretty much every possible thing you might want to build with electronics and more. I mentioned we have a subscription service called Adabox if you want to get electronics delivered to you every three months. The Halloween one's coming up and go to adabox.com and check that out. It is, there is like less than 40 openings out of the thousands we have because we will run out of things. So for learn, I thought one of the things, let me go to learn. So just to give you an idea, here's a no code IoT door alarm. You can, HID, which you're like control devices. We have guides on understanding the differences of micro SD cards and micro SD cards and just a whole bunch of stuff how to use printers how to make these glasses how to do all sorts of lighting. Here's a cosplay, costuming thing. So we have quite a bit. Yeah. And then let me see if there's anything else. We have a couple, like one more minute. Yeah, one more minute. Oh, since someone said Adabox sounds interesting I'll just go there. So if you go to Adabox.com. We have like a couple slots left too, I think. Yeah. Someone's asking if we would do like classes or anything. So there's other people that do a really good job. First Robotics, of course, it's a kind of after school program. There's tons of maker spaces and hacker spaces and there's ones in Queens, ones in Staten Island, ones in Manhattan. One of the things that we like to do is publish. So people use our guides in these things. Having people in a workshop would be a different business. We want to keep making these things. So anyways, Adabox is here. You can check out the trailer of, we try to update all the time. You can see some of the past ones and more. And so far so good. The next one is probably shipping in another week-ish. Yeah. Back here and see if there's anything else before we go out. Do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do. I think we got to everything. We did. Okay, great. So right on time. Half an hour on the dot. Right on budget. That's right. That was your made in New York City week first thing of the made in New York City agenda. A great way to check out October. So, yeah, today was the virtual tour at Adaford Industries and there's a bunch of stuff in store for the entire week. Thanks for coming by virtually. And it's a manufacturing day. Yeah. And I hope that folks see us doing this and know anything is possible. Because that is one of the things we hear a lot like, what do you mean you're manufacturing in Manhattan? Yeah. And it turns out it does make sense. It is good financially to do. Lamar can design something and make it and test it all right here in a matter of days or weeks where when you do overseas manufacturing it's every single thing you do could be up to a month. And then if you add chip shortages and then if you add power electricity shortages in China you can't get stuff off the boat or get it off a boat right now? No, it's like you can't get stuff through the train system. You can't get stuff off the boat system. It is a good time to be manufacturing in the U.S. And we hope many, many, many other people do. And there's a safe way to do it. Yeah. We also know that COVID is still happening. A lot of folks aren't even returned to the office yet. We were in essential business so we had to check out adafruit.com buy something and support a New York City company and all of the people here and their 401Ks and their salaries and all the benefits that we have and tons of benefits that we have to have this is one of the best places to work. And if you're in New York City and you are looking for a job at a place like Adafruit you can always email employeeresources at adafruit.com This is our show for tonight. Thanks everybody. Thanks for coming by half an hour of a virtual tour and chit chat. Don't forget if you have more questions come by Ask Engineer every Wednesday Eastern on YouTube in our YouTube at 8 p.m. Yeah. Wednesday 8 p.m. Eastern Adafruit YouTube Okay. That was it. Thanks so much everybody here is your moment of zener so we don't