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by _moof
161 days ago
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If you're interested in assembling PCBs at home, but you're looking at all this expensive hardware and thinking it's impossible, I've had great success with: 1. Stencil jig: two bare boards taped to stiff cardboard (the kind stencils are shipped in)
2. Squeegee: an old debit card
3. Pick and place: ESD tweezers, a magnifying glass, and some tunes
4. Reflow: a toaster oven modified with a kit (the expensive part: https://whizoo.com/products/controleo3-reflow-oven-build-kit)
I've made tons of boards with this setup and they work great. Are there limitations? Sure. Doing pick-and-place by hand will set a lower bound on the size of components you can design with. It also forces you to keep your part count down (but you should probably be doing that anyway). For my projects, these are never even close to the biggest problems. |
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Making PCBs outside of SE Asia is not economical. You cannot afford to train labor on such a small scale, and would be foolish to manufacture more than a few of your own prototype boards.
>2. Squeegee: an old debit card
This works really well
>3. Pick and place
Even with a cheaper optical pick-&-place, you still need to examine every board thoroughly (the placements aren't optimal).
>4. Reflow: a toaster oven w/ mods
The problem with this approach is that the low thermal mass of a toaster oven results in inconsistent temperature profiles (e.g. sporadically burnt / un-soldered). I have used this setup and much prefer a larger reflow oven (with conveyer).
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A repeated problem with this in-house PCB manufacturing dream is that the EE designer the circuit board cannot work more profitably when he has to make all the PCBs himself — which he'll have to, because he also cannot afford most American training/labor to make reliable boards.
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