Chinese New Year (aka Lunar New Year or Spring Festival) is a welcome and well-deserved break for Chinese workers. However, it is also a notoriously stressful time for the global manufacturing industry. In today's episode, we give you a manufacturer's perspective of why it is usually such a disruptive period.
We love it when PCB orders run through the assembly line smooth as butter. Inevitably, however, sometimes things do get delayed. On today's episode, we sat down with CircuitHub Production Manager, Rob OConnell, on the biggest showstoppers that cause orders to run late and some things customers can do to prevent this from happening.
The public Chinese Spring Festival (aka Chinese New Year) is quickly approaching and will begin at the end of January 2022. While the holiday is officially only a week long, its effects on the manufacturing industry are much longer. Here's what you can expect this year:
First articles, also known as batch run or first-run amongst other terms, is when a customer requests the first several finished PCBAs from a production run be delivered for inspection before the entire quantity is built.
Worthington is in the process of upgrading its pick and place machinery. In order to do that requires a long process of evaluating potential new suppliers. Chris walks us through what that journey is like, why a contract manufacturer may need to upgrade its equipment, his recent in-person visit to one of the suppliers they've narrowed down to, and more!
Here's our design suggestions for what you can do to make the pick and place go smoother for your CM, which will in turn improve yields and potentially also lower lead times and cost.
This episode is dedicated to fiducials which, for those who are unfamiliar with the term, are the small copper dots you may have seen on your bare PCB. We get into the details of what they are, where and why are they are use, and how you can use them in your design.
To celebrate reaching 10,000 downloads of the podcast, Chris and Melissa mix things up and interview each other so that you can get to know your hosts better!
We're very excited to be joined on this episode by Ben Jordan. Ben, who was previously at Altium for many years, now works at Autodesk as a Senior Product Manager for the Fusion 360 Electronics product.
As a continuation of last week's episode with CircuitHub CAM Engineer, Dave Wilcox, we discuss the basics of what happens during the PCB drilling process.
