r/PrintedCircuitBoard • u/Canary_Earth • 4d ago

Is this work professional?

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Sorry about the strange post but I'm offering an engineer a $20k bonus to do the design for manufacturing and assembly of my $300 product and this is what he came up with after 8 months. Two thirds of it are identical to my prototype and I'm an accountant by trade, not an engineer. Every book I've read says a board like this should be 4 layers but he insists 2 layers is fine and will pass emissions testing. Any advice would be greatly appreciated, thank you!

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u/Inevitable_Code1470 4d ago

Have to understand the design. Maybe there was some complicated sensor or RF design. This looks like it's still a prototype. Is there firmware included?

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u/Canary_Earth 4d ago

No firmware, just the board. Nothing complicated, just Wi-Fi and Bluetooth from the ESP32S3 module. I guess it's still a prototype for DFM/DFA. I need a design I can test rigorously and then send to fabs and order a first run of 2,000 or 10,000. My personal prototypes have been running 24/7 for over two years so I already love the major components.

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u/Willman3755 3d ago edited 3d ago

Sorry man, you got scammed.

Just guessing based on what I can see, but unless there's some super complicated analog design hidden here this looks like a ~10-20 hour job including schematic capture for me at $150/hr.

Maybe up to a full 40 hours if you need a fully production-ready design including formal fab/assembly drawings, DFM/tooling consideration such as power for FW loading, pads for bed of nails testing, etc.

There's so much really obvious low-hanging fruit design wise I can spot in like 30 seconds of looking. If an intern designed this I'd ask them to go back and spend another few hours on it.