Blog

RevF Assembly Pictures

Hi Reader,

Just wanted to share some pictures of the assembly process for the RevF prototypes.

All previous revisions have been assembled by hand with either a soldering iron or a paste dispenser.  I swear by my Weller WES51 iron, but my paste dispenser tends to make a mess of all the finer pitch ICs and I just drag solder them.  Recently I met Jeff of Tempo Automation, who are building the dream of desktop pick-and-place machines (real ones, with vision systems!).  Jeff let me use their laser cutter and showed me some assembly tricks that made these boards come together much faster than the previous revisions.

I modified the solder paste layers of the RevF design for the laser cutter (this involved bringing in all the pads by about 50 microns to compensate for the laser kerf) and Jeff cut them out using his disposable stencil medium of choice – cardstock.

The cardstock actually holds good images and I was able to get good paste application through it after a few tries.  The 0.5mm parts didn’t have perfect paste dispensation, but it was good enough to continue.

Component placement was still all done by hand and was by far the slowest part of the process.  After placement and reflow the boards look like this:

If you look closely you’ll see there are some bridges between the pins of the ICs and the smaller packages.  A good once over with the iron fixes those right up.  Then I mounted all the through hole components by hand.

After that, it’s time for power up.  This is easily the single most nerve racking part of bringing up a new board.  Many design mistakes will manifest as an acrid smoke when you power up the board. But that didn’t happen here, the boards connected to the debugger and accepted firmware, no problem. All hail the blinky light.

Now to make the firmware and app modifications to support the new hardware, as well as test the stretch goal features that were added in this revision.  Thanks for reading.

3 Responses to “RevF Assembly Pictures”

  1. Amelia March 13, 2014 at 2:30 pm #

    This is fantastic, James! I would love to see a ruler in the photos just to have a sense of the scale of what you’re doing. All my best wishes

  2. Jesse Koenig March 14, 2014 at 12:53 pm #

    Great write-up for a very cool product James. We can’t wait to start doing assembly for you. As it is for you, hand assembly is a pain point for a lot of people prototyping. We are really excited to solve this.

    Jesse

  3. Angus March 19, 2014 at 8:42 pm #

    Once again, I say good job! Very clean, very nice!
    Thank you!

    Angus

Leave a Reply

This site is protected by reCaptcha and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.