Episode 2 of our new podcast, the Pick, Place, Podcast is now live!

On this episode, we give an overview of the pcb assembly process - everything that happens after you place an order until when your boards are shipped.

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Show outline:

• We discuss the difference between placing an order at Worthington vs CircuitHub.
• The three first steps happen in conjunction: Gerber data is submitted to begin board fab, the BOM is verified and purchased, the Gerber data and XY data is used to program the machines that will be assembling the boards.
• These first three steps typically begin within the first 24 hours of submitting an order.
• The board fab shop does a CAM process that verifies that your design is actually manufacturable.
• The fab shop will send us an array file, which has the individualized design panelized that allows us to assemble the design automatically via machines.
• The array data is used to program the stencil printer, pick and place machine, selective solder machine and AOI machine.
• The BOM is purchased only from authorized distributors and customers send us any consigned parts.
• After the parts come in they go through a kitting process.
• Once the parts, bare boards and stencil are kitted they are released to the floor to be assembled.
• The surface mount team loads the job onto the pick and place machine feeders.
• Wet, tacky solder paste is printed onto the boards using the stencil.
• The boards and parts are loaded onto the pick and place machine where the vacuum tools on the machine will suck up the parts and place them onto the machine.
• Solid solder joints are created by running the board panels through a reflow oven.
• The boards then go through AOI (automated optical inspection) which determines whether the parts are there and if they are placed correctly.
• If a board is double sided it repeats the whole process.
• Through hole parts gets inserted by hand and soldered using a selective solder machine or by hand.
• The boards are inspected by humans.
• The boards are de-panelized into individual boards.
• The boards are wrapped in ESD safe bubble wrap and ESD shielded bags and then shipped.
• We've shipped to every continent except Antarctica!
• You finally get your boards!
• What topics are listeners most interested in learning more about?
• On the next episode we'll be talking to Brett from Worthington to talk about part purchasing.

Full Transcript:

[00:00:00] Chris: [I'll mention just a little bit about the 3d AOI introduction. And like,

[00:00:06] Melissa: if you have to plan it ahead of time, is it really witty banter?

[00:00:11] Chris: That's a great point. I hope you're recording all of this.

[00:00:19] Okay. Beautiful. Well, all right, let me do the. Let me do the intro.

[00:00:34] Welcome to the Pick, Place, Podcast, the show where we talk about electronics, manufacturing and everything related to getting a circuit board into the world. This is Chris Denney with Worthington,

[00:00:44] Melissa: and this is Melissa Hough with CircuitHub.

[00:00:47] Chris: So thanks for listening to the second episode, exciting to have quite a few downloads in the first one, which was pretty cool.

[00:00:53] I honestly was only expecting my grandmother to listen, but

[00:00:56] Melissa: how did she like it?

[00:00:58] She has not listened to it yet. It turns out my cousin getting married was more important than her other grand son. Yeah. Go figure. So but yeah. And on a serious note though, we had a few dozen downloads, which is pretty cool for a first episode.

[00:01:14] And not all of them were just by employees of Worthington and CircuitHub. So that was

[00:01:18] cool. It looks like we reached Asia and Australia,

[00:01:22] Chris: no kidding. Well, Australia, I don't know what it is about Australia, but we seem to be popular down there

[00:01:26] Melissa: and New Zealand

[00:01:28] Chris: and New Zealand, I have to imagine they just don't have a ton of manufacturing there like a ton of electronics manufacturing. There's it's just a small population, you know? Yeah. Anyway Melissa, what have you been up to for the past couple of weeks?

[00:01:41] Melissa: Let's see we filmed Chris and I filmed this video for the open-source ventilator project showing the assembly process cause we built some boards for them. So I've been finishing editing that video.

[00:01:55] Chris: That should be pretty neat because we, you know, we're still in full COVID mode. So you'll see people, everybody with their masks and you'll see almost nobody in the factory.

[00:02:05] Melissa: Yeah, I was talking about the other day, how there's just a whole different vibe in the factory when there is only half the people there.

[00:02:13] Chris: Yeah, absolutely. You know, normally when it's a full place, There's this sort of like a busy kitchen feel where lots of conversations are going on, people shouting across the room to, you know, explain something, and then when it's half the staff, it's like really quiet, really subdued.

[00:02:31] And you know, it's a serious reminder that it's a scary world right now. Boy, it's, it's weird, but we're doing the best we can to keep everybody safe, splitting. So in case you're not aware our factory is splitting our shifts into two groups. So we have team marvelous and team fabulous, which are just cute, cute names we gave to the group.

[00:02:53] So basically if any one team got fully infected by the virus for any reason then the other team could potentially be unaffected because they never interact with each other. But we're overlapping shifts and we're keeping everybody at close to 40 hours. So that's, that's been working out pretty well for us, but yeah.

[00:03:11] And last week so the same day, or it might've been a couple of days after we took delivery on a new machine, a new 3d, automated optical inspection machine, which we'll get into a little bit in the show. And that's what I've been really focused on training on that working with some folks from Michigan who are the support representatives from that machine, doing everything remotely, using zoom team viewer, iMessage, FaceTime, whatever it takes to try to communicate with each other and with a team on the floor so that we can get boards loaded in it. It's it was a first for them. And as a first for us.

[00:03:45] Melissa: So normally would they do all of that type of training in person?

[00:03:50] Chris: Exactly. Exactly. So they might send, you know, like a high level apps engineer to to our factory. He'd get a hotel for four nights and, you know, we'd start Monday morning and work till Friday evening and everything in between to do training on this sort of thing.

[00:04:06] You know, it's, it would cost them normally thousands of dollars between travel and rental car and hotel and, and his time. And we're doing it all remotely. So everybody gets to be with their family and the training went great. Honestly, I was really happy with it. I hope to be able to do more of that in the future.

[00:04:25] Melissa: Do you prefer doing the remote one over the in person training?

[00:04:29] Chris: I think so. I think so.

[00:04:31] Melissa: Are there any downsides to doing it that way?

[00:04:34] Chris: The downside is, you get to, he gets to physically touch the machine. He may notice something about it that I think is normal, but he goes, no, you know, that shouldn't be that way.

[00:04:43] So you might miss out on that kind of stuff. So you might delay catching issues a little bit, but the training went great. I was able to see all the slides. We were able to watch each other, manipulate the software, using, cameras and stuff. We were able to watch people in the factory load and unload boards.

[00:05:01] And we actually had a power outage in the middle of training and we got to, yeah, well, it was kind of neat because it was like, okay, well, how are we going to recover from it? And normally you don't get to go over something like that. When you do normal training, cause you don't normally have a power outage and then three months down the road, you have a power outage.

[00:05:19] Now your machine's not running, even though the power has come back and you don't know how to recover. So the great thing about having a power outage during training is now we have it documented how we recover from it. So that was, that actually worked pretty well. So anyway, let's let's talk about,

[00:05:35] Melissa: I don't think we even said what we're talking about.

[00:05:37] Chris: Not yet. I think, I think at the end of the last episode, we might have mentioned that we just kind of want to talk about what happens after somebody places an order with either Worthington or CircuitHub and the differences between Worthington and CircuitHub, there's not a lot of differences of what happens next, but there are some significant ones and we just kind of wanted to do like a high level, like a 10,000 foot overview of what happens next.

[00:06:08] Because a lot of times, you know, the customer places, an order, and then so many weeks later boards show up. Well, what happened in between that sometimes it's a black box for people. So it might be kind of interesting for some folks to hear what happens.

[00:06:26] Melissa: Definitely.

[00:06:28] Chris: So well, let's kick it off. Let's talk about the ordering process itself.

[00:06:31] Now, this is kind of where the, this is the most significant difference between CircuitHub and Worthington. In my opinion, is, is the actual placement of an order. You know, why don't I speak to a little bit about how Worthington handles ordering and then Melissa, you can speak to yeah, that'd be, that'd be good.

[00:06:49] Okay. So since Worthington is kind of a traditional contract manufacturer, we don't have the whizzbang awesome software that CircuitHub does. We have some neat software, but not, not the same stuff that CircuitHub has. So when you want to place an order with Worthington, you have to submit to us your exported, Gerber data, your exported X, Y centroid files, your Excel or CSV bill of materials.

[00:07:18] And you're going to have fab notes about your PCB and maybe a separate text file. Maybe you'll have some assembly instructions. You're going to supply all these documents to us. And we're going to take all that. And well, first of all, we're going to get you a quote on how much it would be to build everything.

[00:07:35] And that can take a few days. It could take a few hours if we're not super busy with quoting, but sometimes it can take a few days. And then once we have all of that data, then it's, it is fairly similar to how we process an order through CircuitHub. So. I'll let Melissa, why don't you, why don't you speak to how that, how that's different for CircuitHub versus Worthington?

[00:08:02] Yeah, sure. So I guess I'd say that the biggest overall difference is that CircuitHub completely removes all that back and forth communication and takes the entire quoting process from days down to literally within minutes. We actually, unlike Worthington and most traditional contract manufacturers, we require that you upload your original EDA files rather than Gerbers because the EDA fellows really did a great job of giving this complete picture of the entire.

[00:08:39] Melissa: BOM, the entire board and assembly. So by having that, we have a bunch of really advanced software that takes in the files and processes them and gives you a quote, literally within minutes.

[00:08:55] Chris: Yeah. And, and, and to somebody like me, who's been doing this for a couple of decades. It's, it's blown me away. It blew me away years ago when I saw it.

[00:09:01] And I'm still impressed by it to this day. So once, once a customer places an order, either with Worthington or with CircuitHub, what happens next? Well, the reason we asked for all those data files and the reason CircuitHub asks for your original Altium or Eagle files or KiCAD is because we need those files in order to do our work.

[00:09:26] Those files give us all the information we need to fabricate the PCB to order the parts and to program our machines. So the Gerber files are submitted to a fab shop. Now we might send it to, it depends on, on the customer. It depends on the speed. It depends on the complexity, but there's, you know, half a dozen, maybe different fabs around the world that we use.

[00:09:53] And what they want from us is Gerber data. So that's where we send that information. Now we use the Gerbers ourselves too, because we want to measure things. We want to do overlays for our programming process and stuff like that, but really. The primary intent of Gerber files is to get the fab to get the PCBs made.

[00:10:14] And then from there, we're going to take your bill of materials and we're going to, you know, verify that we can get all the parts, see what parts we may have in stock. And so what happens after that? So there's, these things are kind of happening in parallel. The boards are being fabricated and the parts are being ordered.

[00:10:33] And at the same time, there's a third step that could, that happens in parallel is sort of the engineering work. So we're taking your Gerber data and we're taking your X, Y sometimes called centroid files and we're programming all of our machines.

[00:10:48] Melissa: Could you explain what exactly the centroid files are?

[00:10:52] Chris: Sure. Yeah. So this is great. I love it. I can go as deep as you want, but I hope I don't put our listeners to sleep. So centroid file is the literal like X, Y if you were to plot it on a graph, And if you were to take a graph and you have X in the horizontal and you have Y in the vertical, And you were to, you know, maybe zeros in the bottom left-hand corner and you were to place dots all over that graph.

[00:11:18] Well, that is your X and Y centroid of the dot. So if you, if you placed a dot one millimeter to the right and one millimeter up, then the X, Y centroid of that dot is one by one. And so when you're doing a board layout, you are assigning a location. Whether or not, you realize it an X, Y centroid location of that component on your board.

[00:11:43] The software is going to export that as a text file. Literally just a text file. Oftentimes it's an, a common delimited format so that we can break up the location, the X, the Y, and the rotation. Which is really key to be able to identify where it is and what orientation it should be rotated in.

[00:12:03] Now, the crazy thing is about that, oh, I don't want to go in super deep about it, but, nobody has the same orientation so we have to manipulate that quite a bit often. But so, but those are the three things that are sort of happening in parallel. Boards are getting fabbed parts are getting, and machines are getting programmed. We can't program everything until we get data back from the fab, but we can program a significant amount.

[00:12:26] Typically those three steps usually happened probably within the first 24 hours of when someone actually orders.

[00:12:34] Yeah. Usually within 24 hours, the PCB fab has already started to cut material. They've already started to drill and cut material. I mean, you have to do that because oftentimes the board is your limiting factor to how quickly you can deliver something.

[00:12:52] And if they don't get started within 24 hours, then you,

[00:12:55] Melissa: everything is going to be late,

[00:12:56] Chris: everything's going to be late. Okay. So, so the fab, the fab is also going to do something called a CAM process. And ultimately what it means is that they are going to. Verify that they can actually fabricate the board, make sure that everything you've drawn.

[00:13:14] Okay. Manufacturable because, you know, you can draw the most fancy thing in the world. It doesn't mean you can necessarily make it, they're going to do copper expansion because they know how much the etching process etches away the edges of the copper. There's odd. It's, it's a fascinating, fascinating process.

[00:13:31] I feel like I know almost nothing about it. So yeah. So cam is getting done. And what they're going to do is when they're finished doing their cam work, they're going to send us. A, what we call a panelized file or an array file, or sometimes called working files. There's all kinds of different names for it.

[00:13:49] Basically what that package means is it has your individual PCBs in an array, maybe like a two by two. Array. So you have four PCBs and one panel, and that panel is what we actually do the assembly on. We don't, we don't build on your individual PCBs that that's almost impossible because we have to do everything automatic.

[00:14:12] We have to use automate. And our cam, the cam engineers at our fabs, they do a lot of work to make it, meet our specifications so that we can handle it with our automated machines and importantly, add something called fiducials. I could go on. I could go on for hours about fiducials. Don't get me started on fiducials, but like fiducials are so important.

[00:14:40] And I remember the first time I heard the term, I was probably, I don't know, I'm not even sure I was driving yet. I might've only been 16. The first time I heard the term fiducials used and I laughed and I, and I just like did a little quip. I'm like, oh, is that an industry term? And the guy looked at me.

[00:14:56] Well maybe, I don't know. Yeah, we use it and I didn't, I thought it was a made up word. I thought he was like pulling my leg. But let's go on. So, okay. So we've got that. We've got that those working files back from the. We're going to finish programming our machines. We're going to tell it how that array looks for the machine.

[00:15:12] We're going to identify where the fiducials are. So we're going to program our stencil printer. We're going to program our pick and place and that will get us a big headstart and programming our other machines. Oh, we'll also use that data. I forgot. We'll also use that data for programming. The selective solder.

[00:15:30] Which is pretty cool. That's, that's a new addition that we just started doing. And the AOI AOI will also use that data, but to a lesser extent, we'll mostly just use it for measurements to figure out the pitch of things and, and but yeah, we can. We it's, it's useful for so many different things, so many different things.

[00:15:50] And also if you put, if you put deliberate copper bridges between your leads, and then we see like a big solder bridge between leads and we go, oh man, we made this huge mistake. Well, we can look at those panel files or we can look at your individual ones, but either way we can see, oh no, no, no, no. The customer wanted it that way.

[00:16:07] Okay. So because when we see solder bridging, we think we've done something wrong, you know? Okay. So at the same time, as all those machines are getting programmed and the boards are getting fabbed, parts are getting ordered and parts aren't ordered just all from Digi-Key or all from Mouser, all from Aero, they're going to get ordered from, you know, sometimes a dozen different places.

[00:16:30] Let's hope not. Let's hope we don't have to source from a dozen different places, but. There's all kinds of suppliers out there that we buy parts from. We're only going to buy from authorized resellers. And if for some reason we can't find those parts, but there is, you know, Chris Denny's electronic shop that says he has some well we'd reach out to you.

[00:16:49] And we'd, you know, we'd have the conversation about whether or not you felt comfortable with us sourcing the parts from them or waiting until more get, you know, available from an authorized reseller. Cause that happens sometimes. So there's a lot that goes on there. So in addition to ordering parts, we're also waiting for customers to send their parts.

[00:17:07] Cause sometimes they'll have some specialty parts, maybe some prototype parts that they got direct from Texas instruments or something like that. And once all the parts come in now, you can't just take those parts and put them on the floor. I remember being so confused by this. When I first started in this industry, I thought, well, Yeah, just open the box and load the machine.

[00:17:31] What do you know? You, you got to make sure, first of all, that the parts were actually sent. Yeah, no, I mean, I mean, this may sound crazy, but if, if you asked to send you a hundred different part numbers, sometimes only 99 show up, you know, so you may set up your whole machine and go, Hey, where's that a hundredth part?

[00:17:54] And it was just it was just a mistake, you know, manual suppliers make mistakes and they forget to send a part sometimes. Yeah.

[00:18:01] Melissa: I kind of have a funny story about that. So it was during one, I think probably my first year at CircuitHub. And so our manufacturing platform as it is now, it doesn't even exist.

[00:18:11] And so I actually had to do the whole kitting process for a project we were building. And yeah, that was just an experience, especially, cause I think Digi-Key sent us the wrong part and it was the day before that they were supposed to go to the contract manufacturer to get assembled. So I ended up having to go to the.

[00:18:34] A little shop down the road or, yeah, just sort through the boxes.

[00:18:37] Chris: Chris Denny's electronic shop that's wild. So you, you know, the pain then, you know, the pain, the pain. Yeah. And I mean, that happened to us, actually. Melissa, you mentioned at the top of the show the open-source ventilators as we were, as we were kidding, the open-source ventilators, we found a wrong part that did Digi-Key.

[00:18:58] Now don't get me wrong. I feel like I'm throwing Digi-Key under the bus. Digi-Key paid for all of these parts? They a hundred percent and the shipping, they, they donated all these parts of the open-source ventilators. So I love them. I love them. I love them. I will forever praise Digi-Key. I'm so happy with them as a supplier.

[00:19:17] I genuinely genuinely. But you know, mistakes happen. I mean, I think Worthington assembly is a fantastic manufacturer, but we make mistakes too. It just happens.

[00:19:29] Melissa: It's not just Digi-Key. It can be other suppliers do the same thing.

[00:19:32] Chris: Everybody, every single supplier has made these same mistakes. So, and so anyways, so we got the wrong part.

[00:19:40] And we ended up finding that we did have some of the parts in stock that we needed and we were, we were able to get them built. So, so that was pretty good. So, so a kitting process has to happen. They're going to, they're going to open each box, say, so say they have a box of Digi-Key. They have a boxer Mouser and they have your consigned parts box.

[00:19:58] Well, they're gonna open up. You know, in a very deliberate way, they're going to verify that all the parts are there, that all the correct quantities are there, and they're going to put them all into one box that they released to the floor. That way they're the folks on the floor only have to deal with one box.

[00:20:13] They don't have to deal with a Digi-Key box in a Mouser box in a consigned parts box. I mean, if the job is really huge, then might have to deal with four boxes just because there's so much material, but we have a process for that, you know, box one of four to a four, so on and so forth. Okay. So now that.

[00:20:31] Is released to the floor and we mark our schedule that it's ready to be built, that the kit is complete. All the parts are in, in the box and you can get started. The PCBs have shown up. That's also part of the kitting process is the PCBs are showing up and the stencil, sorry, almost overlooked that the stencil has shown up.

[00:20:46] So all these things have to be verified before we can get started. Now the the first people to see that kit is our SMT team. This is the surface Mount team and. What they're going to do is they're going to take a look at the kit and some custom software we've written to identify how much time and how many feeders they're going to need to load that job.

[00:21:12] And they're going to verify that we have enough feeders. So we have feeders for tape. We have feeders for too. And we have feeders for trays, and those are sort of the three ways that a a pick and place machine gets loaded. Those are the three primary ways. There's, there's ways of loading things manually.

[00:21:31] And, but that's, that's mostly how it gets done. So the SMT folks have finished setting up all of the feeders and now we have to get paste on the circuit board. Solder paste, and we're going to use a fully automated stencil printer to do that. And then we're going to load that frame into the stencil printer. Now that frame here's where fiducials come in.

[00:21:54] It's going to have a it's going to have a little burn mark. And those, those reference marks, those fiducial marks on the stencil get automatically lined up with the fiducial marks on the PCB and the two of them come together and solder paste gets printed over that stencil enough. You've never seen a stencil before.

[00:22:14] You know, Google it it's, it's pretty neat. It's, it's all the copper that where you need to be soldered is exposed and then you draw a squeegee over it and you've got. You've got solder paste all over that board. And if you're not familiar with solder paste is it's basically like a slurry of flux and powdered solder, literally powdered that that's how it's made.

[00:22:37] They, they powderize it. They, they take molten solder and they drip it onto a bar that's vibrating at ultrasonic speeds. And it acts that that drip explodes. Thousands or millions of pieces. And then they filter it down through various screens to create a powder. It's really, really, really neat. But then they

[00:22:59] have you, do you have any videos online that looks through that?

[00:23:01] Well,

[00:23:02] I would love to find a video. I've never actually looked for one, but I've, I've seen it done because I used to sell solder paste and, and yeah, it was, it was pretty neat. I mean, it's all contained. Like you can't see it. There's no glass on it, but you know, I've seen. This the process of making solder paste.

[00:23:18] But then they're going to blend it with acids and all kinds of different materials, which, which is flux. And it becomes kind of a paste material, almost like Play-Doh

[00:23:28] Melissa: you don't want to eat it.

[00:23:29] Chris: You don't want to eat it. It's way heavier than Play-Doh. If you're eating Play-Doh, you're probably still a toddler, hopefully.

[00:23:34] But it's about that consistency. And then there's a squeegee blade that gets drawn across that stencil at a very specific speed, very specific pressure. And then the, the stencil separated from the PCB and it's injected all on conveyors and now we have solder everywhere we need it. The cool thing about that solder paste is it's tacky.

[00:23:54] It's literally like a little sticky, almost like tape is kind of sticky. Almost like, like tree sap, very similar to the stickiness of tree sap. Maybe not quite that sticky because it has the powdered metal in it, but very, very similar and a true fact, a lot of flux to this day still includes some tree sap in the in the chemical makeup of the flux. Yeah. Yeah, no joke. So that's why some of it smells really good. If you ever saw her with it, it kind of smells like a pine tree. It's kind of neat, but also don't eat it, but also don't eat it. Definitely don't eat it.

[00:24:28] So now, now that board with the solder paste on it is going to be put into the pick and place machine. Those feeders are going to be loaded on that pick and place machine. And the vacuum tools on that pick and place machine are going to suck up the parts onto the vacuum tools that they're going to be passed over a camera, which analyzes where those parts are sitting on the vacuum tools.

[00:24:49] And then small minute adjustments are going to be made to the motion of the pick and place machine to place those exactly where they belong. And we're talking, you know, tens of microns and sometimes, you know, like, like single microns worth of adjustment and, and hundreds of degrees of angles to place these really, really precisely pick and place machines are really expensive.

[00:25:13] Really really expensive, even, even like for, for a professional environment, there's low costs, you know, you can get bench top pick and place machines for, for a few thousand bucks. But for the kinds of machines we're using, we're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars per. So very highly complicated, very technical very, very fast and very, very accurate machines.

[00:25:32] So once all of these parts are placed into the solder paste now we have to create solder joints and we do that all at once using a reflow oven and each, each panel gets a, well, I should say each order gets its own unique. Reflow profile. So what that means is your a tiny little bird tracking circuit board.

[00:25:59] You know, that you, you know, that thing's gonna weigh grams. You know, it's going to be tiny, tiny, tiny, maybe tenths of a gram versus your big, huge industrial power supply. It might weight might weigh kilograms. So you need to tune your oven. To the various size products that you're running. And that's what profiling is.

[00:26:23] Yeah. Could you

[00:26:23] explain like a little bit more, what exactly is the profile and the differences between different profiles?

[00:26:31] Yeah, they're they're each the end product is. Almost identical from board to board to board. You want the same ramp rate of heat into the circuit board. You want the same amount of soak time.

[00:26:45] You want the same peak temperatures you know, all, all of the critical details of heating up a board to the point where you can melt all of that solder paste, activate all of that flux and melt all of that solder paste. It's pretty similar for most surface Mount components because anybody making us an electronic device, that's going to get soldered in a reflow oven.

[00:27:09] They're going to want to, they're going to want to make their device the same as everybody else's when it comes to how much heat it gets. So they're all pretty similar, but the difference is how much energy do you need to get that profile into a big power supply versus, you know, a bird tracker, which, which weighs almost nothing.

[00:27:29] And it's going to take away less heat and it's going to take way less time or excuse me, it's going to take away less energy, not heat. There is a difference. There's going to take way less energy in way less time to get that bird tracker on the same profile curve as a big, heavy power supply. So you, you, you sometimes need to make those calculations and sometimes it's so difficult that you actually have to hook up thermocouples and read it.

[00:27:53] Okay. This is the actual ramp rate. This is the actual curve that we're seeing in this, in the, in the oven, as it goes through the oven. And oftentimes that requires a sacrificial board. Sorry.

[00:28:03] Melissa: So I guess it's it, it kinda, so I like to bake, so it kind of seems similar. Say you're making muffins and you're out, but you also want to make a bread, but you're using the same ingredients. And you want the same output. You want the same consistency at the end. So you have to use different, you have to bake it a different amount of time or at different temperatures in our to achieve that. Is that kind of similar?

[00:28:27] Chris: It's exactly the same. It's exactly the same. Yeah, totally. Because you have that bread pan is going to be way more dense than, than your muffins.

[00:28:35] Your muffins are going to be what, like, you know, two inches tall and three inches wide or something like that versus your, your bread. Could be six, eight inches tall and you know, 12 inches long. And, and you're not going to heat the center of that, of that loaf of bread, this, this at the same time as you're going to heat the center of the muffin ver it's.

[00:29:00] So it's exactly the same principles. You, you hit the nail on the head and I love the analogy. I'm going to remember that one. So yeah, so that's the goal of profiling a circuit board. Okay. So now your parts are all soldered to the board. The they come out of the reflow oven, cooled, not cold, not room temperature, but cool.

[00:29:17] And now they're, they're still very hot. They'd be a little uncomfortable to handle by hand and they come out onto a conveyor belt. And then from there they're going to go into, what's called an AOI automated optical inspection. And this is a machine with some, you know, motion system, some lighting and some cameras and some special software that takes images of the board and analyzes those images against images that we've programmed to look for and determines whether or not is it first of all, did it actually get placed? Is it in the right position? Is it in the right rotation, which is really critical obviously. Is it the right side up? Because sometimes, you know, when that vacuum pick process, you can actually, you know, kind of flip the part over. So we're going to make sure that all the parts of the right side up some parts are acceptable to be upside down resistors and things like that.

[00:30:06] It's, it's not ideal, but it is acceptable. We're going to check the part number and make sure the correct part number is printed on there. We're going to, you know, if it's a resistor, we're gonna actually read the value. So if the resistor is written 1 0 3, we're actually gonna read that 1 0 3 so that we know that it's a 10 K resistor and there's sort of two schools of AOI at the moment.

[00:30:28] AOI is a rapidly accelerating technology, but our, our existing equipment has all been to dimensional inspection. Now we've just recently introduced, and that's what I was talking about at the top of the show, with 3d AOI. So now we're actually going to take height measurements which is pretty cool.

[00:30:44] And when you have height measurements, you can do all kinds of awesome inspections that you can't do with 2d, including importantly, what we're excited about being able to do a full solder inspection with the machine. Full solder inspection. Yeah. Well, today solder is mostly inspected by humans. So you have, and really highly talented qualified people with lots of training and lots of experience looking at all your solder joints to make sure that they're acceptable.

[00:31:12] Now, we should be able to do this with a machine. We should be able to measure the volume of the solder joints. We should be able to measure the slope of the solder joints. You know, we should be able to detect cold solder joints. Non-wetting all kinds of potential defects. We should finally be able to detect with that.

[00:31:28] So that's pretty exciting. That's still to be determined. I have a great deal of confidence. We'll be able to do it because we're not the first company with these machines obviously. The automotive industry has been using these for years and years and years. And you know, we don't, we don't have Toyota money, so we're, we're still we're, you know, we're, we're recently introducing this technology.

[00:31:49] That should be pretty exciting. I'm, I'm really excited to get, you know, really sink my teeth into it. I'll probably be spending a significant amount of my personal time you know, at work on that machine for many, many months to come. So I'm pretty excited about it.

[00:32:03] Melissa: I know that's one of your favorite things is whenever Worthington gets a new machine.

[00:32:06] Chris: And who isn't. I mean, it's like a new toy, right? It's fantastic. So

[00:32:10] Melissa: Whenever anyone is where's Chris, "oh he[s with the new machine"

[00:32:15] Chris: well, you know, you've just spent a hundred thousand dollars on something or more. You want to, you want to start making money with it, you know? So okay. So now if you have a double-sided.

[00:32:26] Shocker of shockers. It just goes through the exact same process of everything we've just talked about for the last 30 minutes. It just, you flip it over and you run it back through, but this time it gets populated and soldered for the secondary side. And the re reflow profile gets redone for the secondary side, because now you have more weight, you've added more weight to it.

[00:32:46] It's pretty rare that that actually affects the profile, but we do it just as insurance, just in case. So But then once all of the surface mount is done and all the AOI has done. And if there's any repair that needs to be done on the surface Mount, now we get into through-hole and now really the two disciplines are completely different surface Mount soldering.

[00:33:06] And through hole soldering, they may as well be two factories. They're so different. Through whole, largely still gets populated by hand. It's still, you know, there's still somebody pulling that part out of a bag or out of a tray and inserting it into a board by hand. Now there is some automation, you know, depending on the volume you can, that we have some semi-automated equipment we can use.

[00:33:28] There's in some larger shops they have fully automated equipment, but the volume has to be sufficient cause to set up those fully automated machines is pretty significant. And a lot of times it's only for very specific parts. It's only for like certain resistors and capacitors. It's, you're not going to do you know, your big transformers and your ICS and big connectors.

[00:33:48] Those are still done by hand. When you get into serious volume, like, like maybe hundreds of thousands, if not millions, then you then you've come up with a fully custom automation. And that's, that's custom designed by an automated automation design. Right. Where they're gonna, you know, design tools specifically to handle specific parts, one part, you know, but that's, you're talking.

[00:34:14] No, but you're, you're talking like your, your, your GE refrigerators, they, you know, if they're going to make a, if they're going to make a motherboard for their whole line of refrigerators and they're going to be making a million of them, They're going to fully automate it either that, or they're going to go to a very low cost region of hand assembly, which oftentimes does happen.

[00:34:32] But if it's being done in the United States or Canada, a lot of times it's fully automated which, you know, they may spend. You know, potentially millions of dollars designing fully automated tools. Anyway, we don't do that. We, we do it all by hand and then the soldering, the soldering could be done one of two ways.

[00:34:50] It can be done by hand. And oftentimes there are certain parts you can really only solder by hand. There's no way to do certain parts using a machine. But as much as possible, we try to solder parts using machines and. We use machines called selective soldering machine picture. If you can for a selective soldering machine, it's imagine a little, a pot, like a pot that you would put on your stove.

[00:35:16] Okay. Full of solder, liquid solder, and then a pump is submerged into that liquid solder and is pumping a tiny fountain of. That that's what a selective soldering machine is. It's really wild to see. We have some videos on our website

[00:35:36] Melissa: and it's really pretty to actually,

[00:35:38] Chris: it is fascinating to watch it's I often say it's like it's like, you know, when you're around a campfire, you can't help, but look at the fire.

[00:35:46] You know, it's just, it's like endlessly fascinating to just watch it. This is very similar. It has that sort of hypnotic effect that you just kind of want to watch at work. It's really neat. But there's, there's no money to be made in watching machines work. So we try not to do that. It's, it's really neat to watch.

[00:36:02] It's a complicated process. Again, it takes a lot of, it takes a skilled operator. To identify what's going on and you know, to keep that thing and keep the process nice and tight, it's a difficult process, but we got great people working on it. So that's through hole and if it's double-sided again, you just flip it over, populate the other side, side of the other side on custom program.

[00:36:22] And now we're getting towards the end. Now we're going to do it. And we're going to make sure that all of the through hole parts are where they belong. All the through hole, solder joints are where they should be. Today we're still doing the surface Mount solder inspection and you know, until we can qualify our new 3d AOI, we'll probably continue to do so for awhile.

[00:36:39] But the goal is to augment those inspectors by not forcing them to look at solder joints all day. But to be able to look at things that machines are really bad at looking at, you know, and you know, catch, catch the oddball stuff. And then finally it's going to get a depanelized. So remember when we started this whole discussion, everything was a panel.

[00:37:00] And everything was going to be built that way, but you don't want to receive boards in a panel. You want your individual boards. So we're going to depend analyze that using what we affectionately call a pizza slicer. It has a sharp, long blade on the bottom, and then it has a round. You know, it looks like a pizza slicer blade on the top.

[00:37:21] And when we draw that across the PCB, over the grooves that are put in place by our fab shop, it'll, it'll separate the PCBs from each other. So that's one way we can do it, but also oftentimes you can just break it by hand, you know, just, just twist it and they break apart. And then they're going to get packaged.

[00:37:37] They're going to get wrapped in ESD, safe bubble, electrostatic, discharge, safe bubble. And then they're going to get put into ESD shielded bags, and there is a difference between like static, safe or static dissipative and static shielded. And, and a lot of people don't understand the difference briefly variable.

[00:38:00] A static, safe or a static dissipative product only means that the product itself will not cause damage will not cause ESD damage to the circuit board, but it will not prevent damage from anything else. So if you take that your ESD bubble bag and your circuit boards inside of it. And you know, you go pet your cat with it.

[00:38:24] I don't want you to do that, but cats generate lots of ESD. You're going to damage your circuit board. It's not going to protect it versus static shielded. Those are the silver bags that everything ships in those shielded bags. Go ahead, pet your cat all day with a static shielded bag. And that's going to protect that product that's inside of it.

[00:38:42] It's going to create literally a Faraday cage. And to create a Faraday cage around that product and prevent static electricity from penetrating through the bag and causing damage to the product. So very important that you understand the difference between those two. Cause if you ever ship us boards or you ship us parts, you gotta make sure they're in a Faraday cage, be in a bag, a Faraday, cage box, something like that.

[00:39:06] Otherwise they could potentially be damaged and we'll let you know. If you sent it to us and we feel it was sent to us in an unsafe way, we'll respond and say, Hey, full disclosure here. You sure you want us to use these parts because they could have been damaged in transit. So yeah, we'll try to break that down to you.

[00:39:23] Melissa: So you only use shielded bags.

[00:39:24] Chris: We will only ship product in shielded bags, gotta ship it in shielded bags. Otherwise you're going to damage the product. And then it's going to get shipped. It's going to get put into a brown box and a label is going to put it on it and ups is going to come pick it up and hopefully deliver it to you.

[00:39:41] Shipping shipping within the United States is a piece of cake. It's very, very easy shipping outside of the United States is not, it is very, very complicated and very, very difficult. And thankfully we've done enough of it, you know, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds, probably thousands of orders at this point shipped to international customers in Europe, Australia, as we mentioned Asia, as we mentioned Brazil I mean we used to do you still keep a map with pins of everywhere we're shipping.

[00:40:06] I, it actually fell down the other day, but yeah, so that needs to go back up, but definitely. Yeah. Yeah. I think let's see what continents aren't we on? Well, obviously

[00:40:21] Antarctic . Yeah. We've shipped to Africa. We shipped to south America. We've shipped to every continent. No question. It's, it's pretty, but it's pretty complicated.

[00:40:29] And our folks are pretty good at figuring out and That's where you come back into the picture. That's where the customer comes back into the picture. And voila finished board show up and all those things that we just talked about happened. So you've got all that, Melissa. You understand how everything's done now?

[00:40:45] Yeah. I, what I was thinking though, is w we got into the weeds on a few of these things, but I was thinking you know, we were talking before the show, it might be fun to kind of break down some of these things individually and really, really get into the details of what's what happens on some of these things.

[00:41:01] Melissa: Yeah I think we could go really deep into some of these things,

[00:41:05] Chris: which I th I, I don't know. I, I think, I think the audience might eat it up because I feel like we're, we're talking to some engineers and engineers like to dig deep on, on specifics. Right. So hopefully our audience would find that interesting. If you're listening to this and you want to hear, you know, more deep subjects, please.

[00:41:27] Send us an email. Melissa, do you have our, our new email up yet?

[00:41:30] You know what it is?

[00:41:31] Melissa: It's contact@pickplacepodcast.com.

[00:41:34] Chris: Are there any Oxford commas between pickplacepodcast.com?

[00:41:39] Melissa: Are you allowed to have commas in an email?

[00:41:41] Chris: God, no. I hope not

[00:41:45] Melissa: You were about to make me question everything.

[00:41:47] Chris: Well inside joke about Oxford commas, but we yeah.

[00:41:51] Is it contact or contacts, contact, contact at pickplacepodcast.com and yeah, send us a note. Let us know if you like the show, let us know if you want to hear anything specific. But I think next week if all goes, according to plan, we may actually interview a couple of our folks who purchasing and what their job is like and what they have to do to actually, you know, everything.

[00:42:17] We talked about ordering parts and dealing with suppliers and authorized resellers and, and all that kind of stuff. I don't know. I think it will be pretty interesting. You let us know if you don't and you don't want to hear that.

[00:42:28] Melissa: And then we'll we'll change it up.

[00:42:30] Chris: Yeah. Well, we'll talk about like muscle cars and whatever, you know, people are listening to these days, but

[00:42:36] Melissa: But if all goes according to plans, we'll talk about parts.

[00:42:39] Chris: Yeah, that'd be cool. So we got we've got Brett and Magnus. Hopefully there'll be able to join us. They're part of our team and they. They do the part purchasing for all of your orders. And it's a tough job sometimes, but they're pretty good at it. And they're, they're great guys. It'd be really fun to hear from them.

[00:42:56] All right. So I guess we can I guess we can wrap it up and we just want to we just want to say thanks for listening to the pick place podcast. If you like, what you heard consider subscribing and your favorite podcast app, and please review our show wherever you get your podcasts. We'll be at apple podcast and now we're on Spotify, Google podcast, wherever you're listening to this from.

[00:43:19] We really appreciate a review and a rating as the helps us grow a little bit and it gets us more listeners and hopefully convinces our losses that we should keep doing the show.

[00:43:30] Melissa: Thanks for listening guys. We'll talk to you later.

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