Good electronics start long before a board is ever soldered. They start at the design bench. Good PCB design Perth businesses can rely on shouldn’t mean shipping your work interstate or overseas and hoping for the best. It should mean a local team you can call, visit and hold accountable.

That is what we do at Element Manufacturing. We make printed circuit boards here in Perth, and we sit inside a group that can take an electronics project from a rough idea all the way to tested, working hardware.

One group, the full electronics job

Element Manufacturing is the production arm of Element Engineering. We share a home in Malaga with Element Engineering, whose electronics division handles the design side of the work. Between the two, the whole job gets done under one roof.

Our team works well under a bit of load.

Andrew H, Head of Electronics

That matters more than it sounds. When the people designing a board and the people assembling it work in the same building, problems get caught early. A footprint that doesn’t match the real part. A component that’s about to go end of life. A layout that would be a nightmare to solder at volume. These are the things that quietly wreck a project when design and manufacture are strangers to each other.

PCB design Perth teams can actually talk to

Design is where it all begins. Our electronics team takes a requirement (sometimes a detailed spec, sometimes a napkin sketch and a conversation) and turns it into a schematic and a board layout that will actually work when it’s built.

We think about the whole life of the board while we’re designing it. How it will be assembled. How it will be tested. Whether the parts on it will still be available in two years. A clever design that can’t be sourced or built is not a clever design.

Our engineers never lose their cool. They’re all properly grounded, and it shows in the layouts they produce.

Andrew H, Head of Electronics

Sourcing the right components

A board is only as good as the parts on it. We source components through established supply channels, and we’re honest with clients about lead times and substitutions. If a part is scarce or the pricing has gone silly, we’ll say so and offer alternatives rather than let a project stall.

Buying local doesn’t mean we pretend the global parts market doesn’t exist. It means someone in Perth is watching your bill of materials and making sensible calls on your behalf.

Fabrication, assembly and soldering

Once the design is locked and the parts are on the way, we get the bare boards fabricated and then bring everything together. We place and solder components onto the board, from fine surface-mount work to through-hole, and we build to the standard the job needs.

Volume is not a barrier in either direction. We handle one-off prototypes for people testing an idea, and we handle production runs into the thousands for products that have found their market. The same team, the same care, whether it’s a single board or a full batch.

Testing before it leaves the building

A board that hasn’t been tested is a guess. We test the boards we build so that what you get back is known-good hardware, not a pile of parts you have to debug yourself. Faults get found here, not out in the field where they cost far more to fix.

Fixing and improving what you already have

Not every job starts from scratch. Sometimes a client comes to us with an existing board that misbehaves, or a design that works but costs too much or runs too hot. We diagnose the fault, find out what’s actually going on and propose a fix. Often we can improve the original design at the same time, whether that means a cleaner layout, cheaper sourcing or better reliability.

This is where having design, manufacture and test in one place really pays off. We can trace a problem from the symptom all the way back to the schematic without handing it between three different companies.

Why local matters for PCB work

Perth is a long way from the big electronics manufacturing hubs. That distance is exactly why a capable local team is worth having. Shorter feedback loops. No time zones to wrestle with. Someone you can meet face to face when a project gets complicated. And full control over quality, because the work never leaves our sight.

We’re not the cheapest option on the planet and we won’t pretend to be. What we offer is electronics made properly, close to home, by people who stand behind the work.

Talk to us about your board

If you’ve got a PCB design project (a new product, a prototype or a troublesome board that needs fixing) we’d like to hear about it. Get in touch with the team at Element Manufacturing and we’ll work out the best way to get it done. Request a quote or contact the team to talk it through.