New equipment to make assembly easier

[AndyC_772]

Hi all

In a few weeks' time I'll have a number of PCBs to hand assemble. They're double sided, surface mount, with a variety of components in TQFP and QFN. Total component count is ~1500, the smallest device pitch is 0.5mm, most passives are 0402.

I already have JBC soldering and hot air stations, a Quick hot plate, a stereo microscope with good lighting, and fume extraction. Together, these are everything I strictly 'need' for the job.

Nevertheless, this job is big enough to warrant a look around to see if there are any other tools out there which might just help speed up the process and/or make it easier to achieve a good result.

I don't assemble big jobs often, and I'm a bit limited for space, so I'm not inclined to buy anything bulky which will sit on the shelf 99% of the time - but anything that'll fit on a small desk is fair game.

I'm thinking some fresh tips for my JBC won't do any harm, but beyond that, I'm open to suggestions. If you had this job to do, and a reasonable budget for professional quality tools, what would you consider buying to make the job easier? Tools, consumables, favourite coffee... all fair game!

[Ice-Tea]

If I had any budget at all.. I'd send it of to a PCB stuffer. Your board will not work and you'll spend hours chasing down that one 0402 that *looks* fine, you'll chase board Gremlins untill it drives you nuts.

My 0.02$

[AndyC_772]

Not a bad suggestion, but on this specific occasion, the costs, time scale and end-use of the boards mean it makes more sense for me to assemble them.

My works-first-time rate is pretty good compared to most companies' yield on a first batch of a new design. Also, if I make a mistake and one board doesn't work, chances are a second board won't share the same problem, which isn't true for a machine assembled batch where every board will share common problems (wrong value parts etc).

[LapTop006]

I'm thinking some fresh tips for my JBC won't do any harm, but beyond that, I'm open to suggestions. If you had this job to do, and a reasonable budget for professional quality tools, what would you consider buying to make the job easier? Tools, consumables, favourite coffee... all fair game!

Mike has a couple of great videos on this topic, myself, I outsource *way* before that point, as I can afford to and am normally not on a deadline.

[OwO]

I assume you are going to be using a stencil to print solder paste to the board. The last time I did a manual PnP job of this size was 2 years ago, and back then I wrote a script that will take the BOM, xy file, rendered images of the board, and generate one output image per component value. Each image contains the highlighted positions of all components with that value overlaid on top of the board rendering. When I assemble the board I would just go through the images one by one, retrieve the correct qty of each part, and place them as shown in the image.

Nowadays I just use the JLC SMT service which solders all the passives for you, and I don't miss manual PnP a bit