If you’re in the Denver area, come meet our new assembly partner: Advanced Assembly!
They’re having an open house:
Join us for pizza, beer and tours of our newly remodeled, high-tech facility as we celebrate 14 years in business. Bring your co-workers too!
[Andrzej Laczewski] has something big in mind for small parts, specifically SMD resistors and capacitors. He’s not talking much about that project, but from the prototype 3D-printed bowl feeder he built as part of it, we can guess that it’s going to be a pretty cool automation project.
Bowl feeders are common devices in industrial automation, used to take a big pile of parts like nuts and bolts and present them to a process one at a time, often with some sort of orientation step so that all the parts are the right way around. They accomplish this with a vibratory action through two axes, which [Andrzej] accomplishes with the 3D-printed ABS link arms supporting the bowl.
via A 3D-Printed Bowl Feeder for Tiny SMD Parts — Hackaday
Dan Maloney on the Hackaday blog:
Simple Mechanism Gives Support for SMT Assembly
To fight the shakes, you can do one of two things: remove the human, or improve the human. Unable to justify a pick and place robot for the former, [Tom] opted to build a quick hand support for surface-mount work, and the results are impressive considering it’s built entirely of scrap.
It’s just a three-piece arm with standard butt hinges for joints; mounted so the hinge pins are perpendicular to the work surface and fitted with a horizontal hand rest, it constrains movement to a plane above the PCB. A hole in the hand rest for a small vacuum tip allows [Tom] to pick up a part and place it on the board — he reports that the tackiness of the solder paste is enough to remove the SMD from the tip.
From zakqwy on Hackaday.io:
cordwood + smt + jewelry + blinkies + zinc-air batteries
This project evolved from Splinter, the SMT cordwood project I did last summer/fall. The ring is powered by tiny size 10 hearing aide batteries which should give 4-6 weeks of intermittent use, once I come up with a design that doesn’t break after a few days of wear and update the firmware to put the ATtinyx5 to sleep. The first rev (labelled ‘blink-ring’) used deep red 650nm LEDs. Searching for particular component lengths gave me an excuse to use strange 0508 resistors. And somehow, this is my first Charlieplexing project. Yaay novelty soldering!
Dan Maloney writes on Hackaday about Timothy Woo’s Reflowduino:
Face it — you want a reflow oven. Even the steadiest hands and best eyes only yield “meh” results with a manual iron on SMD boards, and forget about being able to scale up to production. But what controller should you use when you build your oven, and what features should it support? Don’t worry…
Dubbed the Reflowduino for obvious reasons, Timothy Woo’s Hackaday Prize entry has everything you need in a reflow oven controller, and a few things you never knew you needed.
The Apertus° open source cinema team will be running a Surface Mount Technology (SMT) workshop at Maker Faire Berlin this weekend in their AXIOM booth #121:
In the course of attending a lot of fairs and exhibitions, we’ve noticed that our cameras and components attract the attention of people from all walks of life. We’ve found that despite our reassurances, people discovering the world of Open Hardware tend to doubt their capabilities where soldering tiny components by hand is concerned.
This is why we hold Surface Mount Technology workshops – so that with a little confidence, the right tools and some initial guidance from members of our team, anyone can have great fun learning to make their own PCBs. The workshops are very popular and we have visitors designing pendants and earrings with colour LEDs and blinking patterns – which always creates a buzzing atmosphere.
apertus has shared the boards on OSH Park:
From Ken Olsen of MakersBox on Hackaday.io:
If you like happy, easy to build projects, this is not for you. This is only for people who like to grind their teeth and pull out hair.
Be warned that trying to hand solder a 0201 package may be considered evidence of insanity and get you committed to bad places by your loved ones or arch nemesis.
Here’s a video of the board in operation:
It used to be hot air soldering gear was exotic, but not anymore. There are plenty of relatively inexpensive choices. Many of these appear to be the same despite having different brand names and model numbers. One that is common and inexpensive is the 858D. These run about $50. [Gabse] has one and decided to…
Surface mount PCBs (Part 1) If you look at a circuit board today, you’ll see a beautiful array of surface mount chips and components, including very fine 0.5mm or even 0.4mm leaded devices and BGAs. Some of these ‘exotic’ devices can contain really advanced technology such as high speed ARM microprocessors, flash and high capacity […]
via Working with Surface Mount Components and BGAs — Intelligent Toasters
OSH Park 