[coreymgilmore]

Very surprising how manual this is, unless this is just for the purpose of showing how the LEDs are made. I would have expected everything in this process to be automated since electronic component manufacturing is very high volume.

Also amazing how small the components (LED dies) are.

[joezydeco]

Everyone else has moved on to 0402-sized surface mount LEDs a long time ago. Could this manual process just be because nobody is building the old through-hole LEDs in massive quantities?

[pling]

You're probably right. However there is a big market for quality through hole LEDs in non-mass produced consumer crap (read industrial electronics and test gear for example) so some of the big guys still produce. However when someone picks out a BOM for a production run from Farnell and there's a 0.05 no brand LED and a 0.25 Kingbright through hole, the no brand wins every time.

(says me who just bought 200 for a small prod run). So that's £10 or £50 out of the budget. Thanks to cheap LED guys, I can take my family out for that extra £40 :)

[DanBC]

For people who don't know 0402 is:

> 0402 (1005 metric): 1.0 mm × 0.5 mm (0.039 in × 0.020 in).

[HeyLaughingBoy]

And they suck to do manually. I started this morning off by hand-stuffing some PC boards with (among other parts) 19x 0402 resistors per board.

There was a reason I did it before I had any coffee!

[DanBC]

The company I ised to work for would sometimes buy components from RS. They'd supply them in strips of 10, 50, or 100.

The pick and place machine needed blank strip of about ten components (just for lead-in on the cassete).

Transfering components from one tape to another was really annoying. And one of the bosses just did not understand that the fractions of a penny saved were obliterated by time wasted moving components over.

And until you've had to do something like that you can't really understand the benefit of $60 Swedish tweezers.

[madengr]

Yep #00 Swiss tweezers. Nothing like them. The feel of the #00 is just right.

[madengr]

Ha ha, try hand placing 01005. Literally specs of black pepper. Must use ceramic tweezers due to residual magnetism in even the highest quality, demagnetized stainless. I was placing them between BGA balls to solve a noise issue.

The lady I have hand building my boards can place 0201 all day. Pretty amazing.

[deelowe]

They aren't too hard with paste and an oven/hot air.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

Point I was trying to make wasn't about reflow. Picking them up and placing by hand gets tiring after the first 2 dozen or so.

[joezydeco]

Especially if your near-vision is starting to go...