Our Story
AB Electronics UK is a small, family-run engineering firm in Swanage, Dorset, founded by two brothers, Andrew and Brian Dorey, in 2012. For fourteen years, we have been designing, assembling, and posting circuit boards from the same workshop on the south coast of England. Every board that has left this building was conceived, soldered, tested, and packed by one of us.
Andrew came to electronics through repair benches and embedded development. He then trained in graphic design, which lent him a feel for type, layout, and the restraint that makes a board legible at arm's length.
Brian came in through household appliances, washing machines, kettles, electric ovens, and then through retail and IT before circling back to the soldering iron. That kind of working life leaves you patient with mechanical systems and good at knowing which ones are well-built.
Long before any of this, in 1998, we set up a web design company called Apexweb. AB Electronics UK is still its trading arm, and the two halves of the business have always informed each other. The discipline of writing software for a website turns out to be useful for writing the example code that ships with our boards, and the discipline of soldering at the bench turns out to be useful for thinking clearly about almost anything else. Through all of it, we kept building things at home: controllers for the greenhouse, loggers for the loft, the occasional contraption that did nothing useful at all. Many of those projects still sit in plain view at briandorey.com. We think it matters that the people who design your circuit boards still use circuit boards themselves.
In the years just before 2012, we began building with the Arduino, and soon after with the Raspberry Pi. The first serious project we put together around them was a monitoring system for the solar array on the workshop roof. Voltage from each string, current at the controller, temperature in the loft, all logged minute by minute, so we could see how much of our home we were actually running on our own power. The system has been running, in one form or another, ever since. A descendant of it now sits in the house, quietly counting kilowatt-hours.
We wrote up the solar logger as a blog post in early 2012. Hackaday picked it up, and the inbox filled with the same question we hadn't anticipated: Where can we buy the board you used? We did not have a board to sell. So we designed one, sent it out for fabrication, hand-soldered the first batch on the workbench, and listed it for sale. Fourteen years later, we are still in Swanage, still making the boards in small runs, still posting them out at our local post office. Most of what we sell now is a descendant of that first Hackaday post: analogue inputs, GPIO expanders, real-time clocks, and serial interfaces. The quiet, useful pieces that turn a single-board computer into something that will run unattended for a long time.
Today, our workshop produces over a dozen different board designs, each refined through multiple revisions and stocked in modest quantities. We do not chase the next Raspberry Pi accessory category. We will redesign each board several times before we are happy with the layout and functionality. Our products tend to look very similar to one another, and that is deliberate. Stackable. Recognisable. Made to be measured by.
Our customers are, in roughly equal measure, three groups: hobbyists running side projects in their kitchens and sheds; teachers and university lecturers wiring up a teaching rig; and engineers building unattended monitoring kit for greenhouses, breweries, observatories, off-grid cabins, and weather stations from Aberdeen to Adelaide. We hear from a lot of them. Most of what we know about what to build next has come from those emails.
If you have an AB Electronics board on your workbench, it was made by two people, in a small workshop in Dorset, who care a great deal about whether it does what we said it would. If you ever have cause to write to us, you will hear back from one of us.
Andrew & Brian Dorey, Swanage, Dorset