Looks like a very neat idea
It looks neat, but IMO it should be suitable for the leds usually used in flashlights, not just for 5mm leds.
BTW, it is discussed before recently here: https://budgetlightforum.com/t/-/27255
I think we need an auto-ban wordfilter for 'kickstarter'.
led *T*ester
Why you hatin’?
Because it seems like 90% of everything on said website is people donating hundreds of thousands of dollars to scammers doing nothing but 'proposing' products that already exist and can be bought for next to nothing on the open market, but that said people have just never heard of before.
~$15USD for an assembled board with this level of complexity? Even in small quantities (<100) the components cost <$2USD per board. Depending on quality they may cost <$0.50 USD per board! The boards themselves cost… well, you know the Oshpark pricing. These boards appear to be approximately 3 square inches, so we are talking about $3 at Oshpark pricing w/ the 150sq/in min order. Less elsewhere. If we look here. we can see that the guy is using cheap stuff - cheap CR2032s & inexpensive HASL finish green PCBs, probably from one of the popular Chinese board houses who offer super-competitive prices at around 100 small boards. $70 total for 100 boards.
I think that using Seeed studio’s “Propagate” service you could actually get an entire batch of 100 fabbed, populated, and shipped to you for under $800 (so $8/unit). You wouldn’t even have to do stencils or place the 4 components per board yourself.
If you did it yourself with a stencil and manual component placement, think about it… let’s call it 2min per board at $100/hr labor rate. That’s about $3.50/unit in assembly. With the Chinese boards and cheap components we are talking about $1.20 in parts. So a total of $4.70 including his $100/hr labor. Factor in oven time and round up to $5 USD?
Maybe he’s using this Kickstarter as a way to fund buying himself a DIY pick-and-place robot & reflow oven. If we remove my made up $100/hr labor rate from the considerations he’s netting $1380 USD before shipping. I dunno what the real shipping costs are, let’s knock his net down to like $1000 USD. That’s enough to DIY a decent reflow oven (couple hundred bucks is the greatest of plenty here I understand) and get started on a DIY pick-and-place machine.
… and also why do you need one of these things? I doubt that it will be useful for testing CR2032’s, which will probably light up the LED whether they are almost dead or not (they are Lithium cells after all, so they have that knee in the discharge). SMD LED polarity is marked at the bottom/end/top/whatever. There is rarely a call to test LED function like that.
EDIT: and I do Kickstart things. Just not things like this.