Hi I'm here at Ram Zonic I'm getting my Uh Pcbs assembled by microcurrent panels that you saw in the Design for Manufacturing tutorial. So I'll take you through step by step. The audio is not going to be that great. sorry.

it's pretty noisy here in uh a pick and place Factory environment. but uh, we'll see the steps and a few of the issues that goes into making a assembling a Uh Sur typical surface mount panel. Let's go and as for the machines we've actually got here, this is an E A Ra. This is our solder paste uh dispenser and you can see my uh solder paste stencil in there for my microcurrent boards and that um is a big squidy that goes across and applies the solder paste and it's got its own uh control system up here or software control and over here we've got a Samsung uh board feeder and that uh, you slide the board in here and it's a conveyor belt system.

it's all linked and that will automatically Slide the board into the uh solder paste dispenser and we've got another Samsung board feeder here and that uh takes the output of the solder paste dispenser and feeds it into the pick and place machine which is a uh Samsung, SM, 42 or 421 sorry and it's got its own control system. We've uh finished our 20 boards there and we've got another Samsung board feeder. When it comes out of the Uh pick and place machine, it goes into the Reflow oven and the Reflow oven is a Samsung I Not sure of the model number but Uh it's a Samsung and it's got the Uh thermal temperature profile and fume extraction here of course because this is a soldering process and this is quite a big beast. and then it comes out the end here and that's that's it.

That's the entire pick and place. Well, that's a basic pick and place manufacturing line. They can get uh more extensive than that in terms of Um, they can automatically go into Uh Visual ID inspection systems and things like that, but this is basically what you will require uh to uh, automate Uh board assembly. And the first step is my panel goes into the solder paste automated solder paste display ensor and it pops up.

It lifts up. There's a hydraulic mechanism there and there's my sold paste stencil down in there and it will. A squidy comes across and will apply the solder pce. You can see it dripping down in there.

There it is, it's come out, it's it's, got the the solder paste on it All right. let it rip and it's now. uh, sucking the so8 IC out of the tube there and placing it onto the board and you'll notice that uh, the way it does that is that these tubes are bent upwards like like this and they're um, and they actually uh I are vibrated out of the tubes using this vibration feeder controller here and that's how they actually suck the devices out of the tubes. They just vibrate the tube and they slide down the tube and pop out the end and the pick and place nozzle is able to grab that.

So there we go. We're doing our battery holder now and you'll notice it placing the there's some sort of visual alignment uh device over there which lights up red and well our board is gone. It's finished before I had enough time to film it, it's done, it's popped out and it's over here. So we've got a problem here with the it's because this reel is actually Reed is that correct and the tap and sticky and they yep, just didn't We're getting no end of issues here because uh, it's only a partial reel so that's something to remember.

Remember if you're getting these, if you're getting your board's uh, surface mount assembl those partial reels that you get from Digi key and places like that they they can be uh Troublesome You'll notice that one's uh, the second board is gone in there like that and the other one has just popped out here. So it's fully automated on this conveyor belt. uh system. Here it goes along and it'll automatically go into the Uh Reflow oven.

So there's our assembled board and there it goes. Bam and that will uh go through various stages and it will preheat and uh do all sorts of things and it will have a thermal profile on it and uh, it's as you can see, it's traveling fairly slow because it's got to go all the way through this massive machine. Here, it's quite long and it will have a thermal temperature profile set for this particular board. This one looks like it's got nine different uh zones and the temperature is is uh, set up for each one of those zones and you can see the board traveling through.

I presume that little green uh symbol. There is our little board and it's flowing through and there should. It looks like there's another board still in the process there so you can actually see how many boards are in there, see them tracking and it should pop out the other end. Fully solded Magic and we've just fed another one in there.

You can see the Uh Green Dot over here in and one's about to pop out the other end. so let's go down and check it out. It's not terribly fast and you can see a little bit of warpage on there on the board. Perhaps that's probably due to the Uh due to the panelization of the board, but there we go.

it is popped out and it is magically solded. Infrared Reflow Solded. Not a problem. Tada Beautiful.

and that's our finished board. Let's uh, take it off here and it's uh, reasonably hot. So yeah, you don't want to, uh, hold on to the don't want to grab that uh with both hands. You might be in for a shock.

and the boards can actually stay hot for quite some time. If you've got like, a, uh, multi-layer board that's got internal ground planes and things like that, Uh, these boards can stay very warm cuz the copper inside, the heat gets trapped on the internal, um, power planes. and uh, yeah, they can stay warm for quite some time. But there's our complet board.

Beautiful. and you'll notice there that, uh, the solder um, stencil hasn't applied any Pace to these, uh, large pads. Here you can actually decide if you want, uh, the paste or not. we uh, didn't add the paste to those cuz they're going to be uh, hand solded later.

But uh, that is the completed board and it looks really nice. The joints look, uh, excellent as you'd expect for a Reflow um board like this and I don't see any Tombstone uh, components or anything missed or anything like that. looks quite nice and you notice that the uh switches aren't installed yet. They need to be hand assembled later and there's another one.

This is happening really quick. these are we're only talking. You know, a few minutes between boards. Really? just enough time for me to shoot that last clip and uh, this one has just popped out.

Oh yeah, Hot Hot Hot hot. But this is a very quick board. It's only taking a few minutes to fully assemble my microcurrent board cuz really, there's not many uh Parts on it. It is a fairly simplistic board, and this is, uh, quite a relatively uh, you know, a mid to highend range machine and it is pretty darn quick.

And as you can see the number of feeders here, this can take 60 different feed feeders on each side. There's actually two sides to this machine, so we're only using like a dozen feeders here, but it can actually fit 60 along here. So that's a a massive number of Um components. and if we go around the backside the machine around here, we'll find that it will take another 60 uh uh, reels going along here as well.

There we go. They're all numbered 1 through to 60 and it looks like they've got, uh, some Ic's set up on a tray in there. Let's have a look at that. This is where the Uh trade components go in there.

If you buy your components on trays, they just sit on this tray holder in there and the pick and place machine is able to come down and suck those devices off. They aren't mine, so they're obviously still set up for another job. and uh, there's a tray there for dodgy parts, excess parts that it couldn't uh place or something like that. It will actually dump them into there and that uh Black Box you see in the middle there will actually light up red.

That's a camera uh system. It allows it to identify uh components when they're on the nozzle. So there's a rear side view of my microcurrent board being assembled and it is relatively quick. It's a a very large um uh XY z um well XY um Axis system.

It does travel very quickly indeed, not as fast as some machines I've uh seen go. Maybe they're actually limiting the uh rate? Oh, and there's that visual alignment device down there. It decided need oh it lit up red. It needed to come over here and it's doing that.

For there we go. It's doing that for the Um. Cr23. uh CR uh 25 battery holder and this boards all almost done.

I Think it's probably about shoot out. Yeah. Two more sockets left. Uh, two more battery holders left and bang.

There We go. our boards. you missed. didn't have the camera at the right angle, but that board just shot out and it's starting and you can see my stainless steel stencil here.

It's got the uh, there it is. The microcurrent. this is. this costs a couple hundred.

You can actually get, uh, cheaper ones. but uh, really, if you're manufacturing high volume stainless steel is, uh, the thing that works and that's the um, that's based on your um, uh, paste, uh overlay file that's uh, generated from your CAD system. and you'll note that we haven't done the external connectors, it's just the uh. You can see the large holes.

there are the uh. battery holder and the small. You can see the So8 there plus a few passives. and that's um, it'll only apply paste through those holes and this, um, stain a steel uh stencil.

very uh, durable so they can last for, you know, many, many thousands, or tens of thousands of boards or something like that. but they will actually eventually, uh, wear out if you're You know, if you're manufacturing millions of boards, you might have to go through a few uh soer paste stencils. Let's have a look at our solder paste stencil in here. This is inside the machine and you can see the uh squidy there and some excess uh solder paste which is already uh already on there.

and uh, there it is. There's my microcurrent panel rev 3 that uh got I don't know who actually manufactured that, the uh, the assembler takes care of that. They've got a a particular um stencil manufacturer which they use so there's not a huge amount inside a solder paste stencil machine, but it has got a hydraulic uh RAM on the bottom which actually lifts the board up and actually um, it. It presses the board against the uh stencil there.

but uh yeah, it'll align the board with a fiducial camera and it will, uh, lift it up hydraulically and actually uh, it'll compress the board against the solder paste stencil and then it will, uh, the squidy will come across and just wipe the solder paste across the board. And this is a lead free board. So this is a lead free solder paste. And there we go.

We just press the button and we dumped a whole bunch of uh, solder paste onto that and what do we do? We've just got it in it. We put it back you. You can actually reuse this stuff. Yep, yeah, in two, three day time, two, two or three days worth.

And then right. But but that's about the shelf life. 2 or 3 days. Brand new paste.

M Yum. There we go. That's the solder paste that we're actually uh, using comes from chem tools. You'll see those chips actually sliding down the tube.

There, that was the uh, that was the vibration feeder based on the angle of the uh, the angle of the tube. And once again, we're really churning through these boards. now. they're uh, going through a ra of knots and it's placed in our battery holder again.

I Love watching the battery holder cuz you can actually see the parts uh, being assembled where a little, you know, 0603 or a little passive component, you can't actually see what it's actually doing there. Oh, there we go. This is actually a dual head machine I Thought it was doing it a bit quick. There you go.

It's actually got uh, two parts. It's actually clearly got two nozzles and it can pick up two components at once So that because a lot of your time will be wasted in your XY return. So if you've got a dual nozzle head machine, then uh, you can pick up both components at once and then you don't have to go and waste time doing that. XY Axis Again, you can just uh Place those two components at almost the same well.

You can't place them at the same time, but at least it doesn't have to return back to the position again. This uh machine I Stand corrected. It's got six nozzles. you may be able to see the multiple.

It's hard to get a shot in here. sorry about that, but it does actually have six nozzles and it can actually pick up. It's only picking up two of my uh oh, there we go. It's only picking up two of my uh battery holder, but it's a capable of picking up six components at once.

so that's how it can. really, um, churn out these boards if you're picking up six passive components at one time and placing them. That's a real time advantage. And if you're curious to know how long a a full uh microcurrent panel takes I Just timed it and it was a mid in under 1 minute and 40 seconds from when the board uh slid under the uh uh, pick and place uh head until it spattered out the other side.

So that's uh, pretty quick for assembling 10 boards like that. It's mean build time for these Uh boards is 119.4 seconds per board. Brilliant. And you'll notice it's going through the final stage of doing the doing the pick and place connector there and it's showing.

it's 99% complete for this board. There we go. banged and uh, we start again. So what we're doing is just we're counting how many left on that.

Uh yeah, because that's the last because it's the last reel. It's it's the end of the Reel is it? So we have to be careful. Yeah y These machines always need tweaking. Rarely do they run continuously for like you're or you'll get a a stuck feeder or uh, something like that and you've always got to constantly attend these machines.

There we go. We've just put a few more chips manually down into that tube down there and just doing a few little tweaks. And that's our dead component tray. Only one for you.

And there's comp. There's our tray of not your comp, Only that. Oh, only that one. So so we only lost the one component.

that's the pit. Oh right. Oh okay, yeah, we lost a couple, of, uh, lost a couple of battery holders. but uh, apart from that, why is that? Why would we losing the suction cup? The suction.

When you the machine, you need to pick up a couple of component. Yep to teach the machine how to do it right? Okay, visually see the pins of the component. to see the heights of the component, the color of the components. That's why you need to pick up.

Couple right? Okay, so more in the beginning, but once you Stitch it it's finished. Next time when you do them, it's and that's all saved in the software right? How how long would it take you to set up this machine for this board? here depends for this one. this of hour. Maybe couple of hours.

Seven hours, 6 Seven hours. It takes a whole day. Almost a whole day to set up. Wow.

And and and this is a simple board too. Yeah right. Yeah, When you go a biger board, take two three days to set board, two or 3 days to set up a big board. Wow.

But you only have to do that once. y so y So you would document where you've placed these reels. It would the software tell you where these reels need to go? So when you load the job back up, it would y okay. And the uh, excess waste on these battery holders is getting quite quite large, but we still got a lot left on our reel there.

Check out our reel I Think that was five? Uh no. uh, was it 500 on a reel or something like that? So just tweaking the vibrator there, applying some percussive maintenance. That is the technical technical term of uh, giving it a little little bit of a bang there, to get the chip down. And if you're interested to have a look inside one of these, there's the uh, there's the Worm Drive for that side there.

And if I can zoom in on the zoom in on the stepper motor over here, look at that huge worm shaft on that. and there's the actuator. Sorry, it's a bit dark in here. you may not actually be able to see it, but there's the six um, uh, SU ction nozzle.

So you can see the actuators and the vacuum. and there's the uh. trailing cable there. Here's another drive down in here.

another stepper motor with a huge Drive rod and uh, that's why these things cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. And there we go. You can actually see the uh, see the head there? That's the head itself with the six, uh, vacuum nozzles on it. And how many different nozzle heads would this machine have? It depends.

which component. Oh, which component. So you would set up the nozzle heads in there based on okay, yeah, there you go. That's a six.

That's a six nozzle pick and place head. Very complicated bit of Kit and uh, that's obviously the I Believe that's the camera. possibly fiducial camera? That's the fiducial camera. Yep, so it uh, aligns the fiducial marks on the board and I'll show you those on my PCB And there you go.

There's the fiducial marks uh on my panel. There, they're in that corner H sorry that one up there and they're in three locations like that, so it knows how to align those Bo align the boards, you'll program it in. Oh look, we've got a uh, we got a bottleneck here. We got a bottleneck.

It's churning out these boards so fast we don't know what to do. Wow. and I think we're done. I think we've done all our 20 panels.

That's it. That's complete and this didn't take long at all. I've only been here for like an an hour or something like that and uh, uh, that's how long it took to assemble my 20 Uh panels or my 200 microcurrent boards. And that includes uh, fixing the uh problems with the machine and that sort of stuff and around with it.

So um, that was pretty Dar quick and now it'll be on to Um. after some uh visual inspection, of course it'll be onto some hand solder in for the Uh switches. I've got uh, two switches here and we'll go on to the connectors as well. And of course, to satisfy all the different jobs you need.

This many feeders. and of course, they cost a couple of thousand bucks a pop. So they're uh, very expensive things to actually have and they'll come in different widths and different types for all the different Uh components. There's some vibration feeders down in there.

there, they are. They've actually got the Uh, the Uh vibration controller actually attached to them and there's a tray over there for tray based components and you've got to have. See, The reels are already in here for all various Uh jobs that they've got in line of course. So these are all ready to go and they've finished my boards and uh, they're ready to go on another job.

I Guess you got all of that arranged here to to to be able to assemble any different component on the market Mhm. Even even new component in the market and new engineered component should be all be done here because we got all different tooling here for that. Y and you've got very wide ones here as well. Again, that's all very big component.

Yep, like could be for example a socket Saf socket. So we do that with special Cust Medical, right? and we needed a wide one for ours Because we have. We needed a fairly wide feeder for the Uh surface mount CR 2032 battery holder. the C engineer that because I designed on yeah exactly without thinking about.

uh yeah, right but I but some there are some machines who that may not have these small reels though. So yeah you are right. Also, we have to actually have to modify the machine special capacitor. It's a sort of a capacitor electri capacitor surface mount Very difficult to get.

We have to modify the whole machine to handle the height of the capacitor because 2 mm has on the standard right modify the machine for that. So how much did all these machines cost? Ramy H Really? If I start talking about I'm going to get high blood pressure again. High blood pressure? Yeah, but you're talking about a lot of money here that a half million the machine at least the machine on its own about 200k. but every feet about $2,000 $22,000 a feet at least.

Wow. Okay, if you get it on the machine a bit cheaper, but but individually you p a lot more. And here's my uh, partial reel of my Uh 1K 0.1% uh resistors there and it wasn't a full reel I didn't buy it cuz these are you know they're they're not .01 cents each cuz they're a Precision 0.1% resistor. So I bought them.

um based on that uh, reeling surf? uh um, service I actually uh, purchased 210 of them. There they are and uh Digi key uh reeled those for me and unfortunately, these Re Reed components do actually cause an issue. So uh, just something to watch out for. But once we got the machine set up and tweaked and everything like that, uh, it seemed to work fairly well and that's what a typical feeder mechanism looks like.

And they've got a second machine over here which is just a Samsung It's a standalone one and uh, it can be used as a secondary machine to do uh, second jobs if, uh, the main machine's fully occupied and uh, this one they don't Actually, um, have the feeders to do like 0402 and uh, those smaller components. So if they really want to do those, they're going to put it on the main assembly line here. Okay, what we're going to do is, we're going to load another board here and we'll see that it should actually change the width of the uh, Conver Veyor belt system. There we go.

It's changing the width of the board all the way out through a 300 mm, uh, height board. There a 300 mm width board. so uh, you don't actually have to go in and manually change that, but these ones you have to actually change manually. You see now it's actually not actually line there so that one will get tweaked manually and the oven, the thermal oven there.

We just start manually control the conveyor VT width like that to match our one out. there. There you go, and there you can actually see the camera on the fiducial mark itself. That's actually a view from the from the camera on that particular board.

and uh, set in the center position of the fiducial. There we go. we're actually manually aligning the fiducial at the moment there and set the center bang. So you program in the three fiducials, doing a manual tweak again, and you'd only have to do this once, of course, to set up your boards.

And this is how fast it's actually capable of of going. We've uh, set it up for a dummy run here, and uh, it's really. it's really screaming along and it's uh, just actually pretending to pick up those components. So it's it's really capable of phenomenal speeding if you know that it's picking up six components at once.

Obviously, it'll be a bit slower if it has to actually pick up. the components, actually suck them up with the vacuum, and then, uh, place them down. but, uh, that's physically how fast it's this machine is capable of moving. and, uh, that speed is is really, uh, determined by the particular type of component you have.

Like, if we've got our surface mount, uh, battery holder here, you can't just, uh, fly that across and pick it up at maximum speed and just fly it across the machine cuz it'll just start fall off. the vacuum won't be able to hold it. so that's all programmed in the software up here. When you actually program your board, you'll program in the uh, Not only the velocity of the uh, pickup, the individual component pickup like, uh, these, um, 0603, uh, caps and resistors? they'll be.

You know you can pick those up reasonably quickly and fly them across the board, but a high mass component like a a connector or this battery holder. um, or say leads or something like that. Leads have to be picked up very delicately because you don't want to damage them. So uh, really, that's all totally dependent upon each component and each board and each job.

And you'll see here that the Uh tape is actually pull back. These are how these feeders actually work. So only the last component there is actually exposed for the pick and place machine. but the Uh So they peel back all of the uh, all of the Uh tape here for these particular ones and the last components down in there are exposed so the machine can actually pick and place, head can get in there, and, uh, pick them up and place them.

and when you finish with it with this um, type of battery uh holder Here, with this type of Uh reel, you're you're losing one component so there'll be one that uh, battery holder we saw in there. Bingo, it's wasted. And with these smaller components over here, you're going to waste six of them. Uh, with the pealing the tape back.

So if they're very expensive Uh components, well, you're going to waste some of them. And that's what you have to factor in when you get these machines. When you get your board machine assembled as opposed to hand assembl.