
Ask HN: Would you be interested in a low-cost welding robot? - BigSolve
Hey HN,<p>Me and some pals have been putting together a spot welding robot, mainly for our own personal use, and we realized others might be interested. Originally the goal was to just get something simple that would work and not cost $50K+ as is typical on the market. That being said what we put together is more limited in scope, but due to the lowered cost maybe there&#x27;s some people that would be interested. We&#x27;re pretty far along in our design process, have the BOM mostly down, and have a good idea of the specs we can deliver.<p>http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;CgI1iuW.png<p>* What: spot welding robot with MIG welder; numerical control programming interface<p>* Price: $16K base (lowest we think we can do it to retail)<p>* Technical specs:<p><pre><code>    * Degrees of freedom: 6

    * Reach: 1250mm (1.25m base to tooltip)

    * End-effector Repeatability: 0.5mm

    * Gripper: default holding weld gun, can be changed&#x2F;swapped (modular)

    * Payload capacity: 2 kg

    * End-effector speed: 1 m&#x2F;s

    * Welder info: Lincoln MIG brand, for sheet metal thickness 1&#x2F;64&quot; to 11&#x2F;64&quot; (we can introduce higher tiers if people are interested)

</code></pre>
Is there interest for this type of robot if we successfully bring it up? If so I&#x27;d be interested to hear what your applications are, and how many you&#x27;d want to use. I want to emphasize that it&#x27;s going to be fairly bare bones, no super fancy software features (at first), just basic path-programming spot welding.<p>Questions, comments, or suggestions? As I said, we&#x27;re designing this for ourselves for basic sheet metal work, but realize that others may be interested as well, so we thought maybe we could bring something affordable to others as well =)<p>Cheers
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tlb
Why can yours be cheaper than the others?

In a mature market with several competitors, usually there's a reason for high
prices. If you add up your BOM and triple it and it gives a much lower number
than the competitors, it could be there's a cost you're not considering. For
instance, in the industrial robotics market, field support may cost more than
the BOM. Also, most users will pay a premium for reliability if a failure
takes their whole line down. It's very, very hard to compete on reliability
with mature products.

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BigSolve
Thanks for your comment.

We are going for a relatively simple build and sacrificing a fair bit of
precision. While we are sub-mm in this regard, a lot of industrial bots are
getting 0.05mm and better. This doesn't matter for us so we figured what the
hell.

Also, we calculated BOM and assembly labor costs and decided we would take a
relatively small margin on this design, hence the price point. Reliability?
Yeah, not as good, but we'll refund major failures for the first year since we
have decent confidence in being able to put together this simple system. Plus
we figure that like us there's a whole lot of people who would be interested
in making this "sacrifice", or risk-reward calculation.

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nostrademons
Don't forget sales/customer-acquisition costs! Oftentimes, things that cost
>$1000 are expensive because you need to pay an expensive salesperson to
convince the customer that they should part with thousands of dollars.

