Hi! As you know, my little microcurrent project has been very popular lately and uh I need to get some more manufactured because uh, you know there's been a pretty big demand for them and I've been uh selling this for quite a few years now and I've only got them made in small batches I never originally designed this for high volume manufacturer at all. So I've just been making you know 50 was my first batch and then well, I made another 50. another 50 little small batches of of 50 or thereabouts. but I wanted I thought ah no, it's just not the right way to do it.

I'm now actually selling quite a few of these things so I thought might as well do it properly and rejig this thing for a bit more. uh, friendly for high volume manufacturer now I've done a whole uh video on this. It's uh, Dfm, what's called design for Manufacturing and there's a link up here, so click on this if you haven't seen the previous video. it's a long one.

Goes into all detail about how to panelize stuff for production and things like that, but um, that's all it was. talk I didn't actually um, give you a real world design example. So I thought I'd do just that I'm going to rejig this thing for production or make it more friendly for machine uh, assembly. and I thought I'd just actually show you what goes into that.

It's not that hard, but should be interesting, so stick around. So here's the microcurrent has a bareboards a fully assembled PCB when I get it back from the manufacturer, this is what it looks like and this is the finished Uh product tested and ready to ship. Now let's take a look at uh, what's involved with actually, um, penalizing this as opposed to a loose version. Now as you can see, the Uh PCB is designed into fit into this uh Jiffy box here and it's designed uh as a front panel.

So so the appearance of these uh, outside edges here is actually uh, quite important in this particular product. So you have to put a bit of thought into how you actually, uh, panelize this actual design because um, currently I get it manufactured like this I get it manufactured from a company in China called PCB Cart. but uh, I'm going to drop them I'm going to try and get it um, locally, uh, manufactured or manufactured somewhere over than China. So I'm going to give that a go.

Um, just to locally Source it now. Uh, this is when you lay out the board in your uh CAD software As you'll see later, it's just an individual board like this or what's called a loose board from the manufacturer. When you, uh, send your Gerber files away to be manufactured, you specify them either you want them panelized or you want them loose supplied loose like this And the way they do it is, they will route these edges. They will.

They will actually panelize this on a large board, but then they will actually uh, rout it out with a drill and you'll get a beautifully finished board with a nice smooth routed Edge beautifully sharp corners on it and it just looks really nice for a front panel and that's great. but it's not very suitable for high volume manufacturer because if you've just got a single PCB like this, then uh, when you stick it in a pick and place machine especially one this small then you're not F fully utilizing uh, the available, uh, the available time on that pick and place machine cuz it can only pick and place one individual board and then it's got to move through. So that moves through the conveyor belt like this. under the pick and place machine, pick and place machine's loaded, it loads all the components for one board and boom off it goes.

And really, that is no good if you're just assembling one of these at a time because uh, you've got uh, it comes in and and places all the parts and goes to the Reflow oven and then it's just got to Reflow that one individual board and uh, this board doesn't have any uh, outside, uh, tooling uh strips around the outside of the board as we'll see later so that it can, um automatically, uh, get inserted and moved along the conveyor belt. Typically, if you get a loose board like this, they might have to design a like a custom jig for it where the board just sits in. it could be made of wood or uh, you know, a s or something else, but it's like a carrier board that sits in there and takes the board along so you're not using your pick and place machine very efficiently if you're just getting one board made at a time. So what we want is to get multiple boards made at a time.

Let's say, 10 at a time and then you're really utilizing the time available on that pick and place machine Because during, uh, high volume assembly, what you'll pay for is you'll pay for the setup of the machine, you'll pay a fixed setup cost typically, and then you'll pay for the machine, uh, time itself or how long that machine takes to assemble your particular board. That's in general. Uh, it. It varies by the Uh assembler, but generally that's how it's going to work.

So if you can do 10 boards at once instead of one, you're going to go through that machine much quicker and your assembly cost is going to be cheaper per board. Now here's an example of a typical Uh PCB manufacturing panel. It's exactly the same board, but it's duplicated in this time. In this case are three uh, three, uh, vertical by four horizontal 12 boards total.

So in the one manufacturing pass, you can do 12 boards at once. it's roughly an A4 uh size sheet, which is any, uh good assembler machine should be able to handle that. If you want to go much larger than that, talk to your assembler first because you don't want to goof it up. manufacture this huge panel trying to fit 100 boards on there and oops, it doesn't fit into their Automated machine.

so just check first. But A4 size like this? Generally pretty good. So we want to get say uh, multiple versions of this microcurrent on a panel like this. so we should be able to fit say five across by two like that.

So 10 boards? that will be our aim. Nice round number I Like it. Now the other thing you have to consider is how you actually attach the board to the panel. You can of course just copy and paste your Gerber on there and get it manufactured as one big solid board.

but that's pretty useless cuz then you'd have to have access to some sort of uh routing machine that could cut the board out after it's assembled and that's a pain in the butt. So what you want to do is, uh, when you panelize a board like this, you want to add some uh, routing paths like this and some little tab attachments in there to put the board in. Or you want to do what's called uh, VG groving which in this case say this, uh, particular panel here. There's these score marks down the side and you can just snap the boards off.

And of course you can actually do do a combination of routing like this or a VG Groving like as an example on this board here, it's got uh, one routing bit along here, one routing path along there. to get the reason you put in a routing path instead of a VG groving is to get a nice smooth edge like I talked about. You want a nice smooth edge if you want a nice smooth edge, say on this side for some particular reason because it's visible inside your product then you would route it out like that. but if you don't care about the other edges, then you just put specify V grov in which puts a score Mark in there and then you can come along later and then just snap this board out.

Now of course if I did the microcurrent board like this with these little tabs in there that you have to cut out with a s pair of side Cutters afterwards and it typically leaves a really ugly looking dag on on the corner like that. or you can put them in the middle like here if you want, but that's even uglier cuz you got to put in a little sort of bit of cutout in there and I won't go into details, but when you cut it out, it looks ugly and that's okay if your board's inside your product and people aren't going to see it But when it's actually a front panel like this, then the edges can actually be quite important. The're visible edges like that. So um, ideally we want as M as these edges routed as much as possible.

So for this micro current I figure that these longer edges here are, you know, quite, uh, prominent invisible. So I would prefer to have those edges down there fully routed so they're nice and smooth and then just say VG Grove the top like that because I don't want daggy edges in there with the tabs. So I think I'll rule out tabs completely and I'll go with just a routing path down the side of the board like this, the long side and then the top side I will do VG groving like that just like on this particular board here. I've done VG grooving uh sorry, uh, routing down the side.

Just imagine this is my microcurrent board I want to do routing down the side like that? so I get nice smooth edges and then that V Grove that scored V Grove Mark along the top like that and as I've explained in the previous video, I'll just mention it again. There's a bit of an art to choosing. Uh, you know how to strengthen these particular tabs and things like that cuz when the pick and place machine comes along and then pushes down your P it down onto the board, the board can warp. Uh, particularly if you've got um, very, uh, thin PCB this is standard 1.6 mm that I'm using here, but you might use A8 mm board or even thinner like that and they're very, very flexible.

So um, there's a bit of an art which goes into that, but if you just do VG groving VG Groving is, you know, usually you know is really strong enough for almost, uh, anything. They've the PCB manufacturers have got the VG Groving downt art where you know it just works. You can easily snap it out, but it's more than strong enough. There's more than enough fibers inside that V grooving there to actually, uh, hold the board in place.

No problems at all with a lot of force. And the other thing we're going to want are tooling strips top and bottom of our board like this. So that, um, these, and you've got tooling holes like that typically 3.2 mm in diameter would be a typical tooling hole and you want these fiducial marks as well. A fiducial Mark will be a typical 1 mm diameter uh, Circle or thereabouts with the solder mask removed around it.

So that's a vision identification alignment point for the pick and place machine and you want to put those on the outside of the board and you'll see that the entire panel like this has typically four tooling holes in the corners like that and it will have usually three um, uh, fiducial marks like that top and bottom, so you want them on the bottom side as well. and especially for this microcurrent. Considering there's no point having fiducial marks on the top side of the board because all my components are mounted on the bottom. So when they put this machine through, when they put this board through the pick and place machine, it's going to be facing up this way.

So, and your camera? your fiducial camera is going to be typically on the top here. So if your fiducial marks on the bottom, that's no good to you. So you want to make sure your fiducial markers on the side of the board that your components are don't get confused. Now, as you can see, there really aren't a lot of components on this board, so you can argue that Well, you know I could.

If I'm only making you 50 or 100, or maybe even 200, you could actually hand assemble these. and I do actually currently get these hand assembled by a guy in Melbourne uh, his name's Uh Vut Tronics So um, and he just hand assembles these individual boards And that's okay for a run of 50 because when you're uh, doing machine pick and place assembly, you're going to pay quite a large uh setup cost to actually tool up for that. And as we'll talk about in a minute, you've got to buy real of components instead of individual ones. So if you're only going to get 50 of some board manufactured, it's really not worth penalizing them.

But now I think I'm going to go to the trouble to do it cuz that's professional. It's a proper way to do it and if I sell more of these in the future, it's going to be better. Might be a bit of uh, upfront uh cost. Now to get it set up and panelized I can loose the components in terms of um, like a have to buy 500 to one component even though I'm going to make 100 or 200 boards.

But in the end, uh, hopefully if I sell enough, I should recoup the cost and it should be lower costs to get this machine assembled instead of hand assembled. And of course, the other thing to watch out for is how many different types of components you got on the board. Thankfully, this is only a very simple board. As you can see, there's only three Ic's.

There's 12, you know, dozen resistors or so, three caps, you know, couple of Ic's and this, uh, surface mount battery battery connector. and that's about it. So uh, really, I'm not going to even if these all the resistors were all different values. I'm not going to exceed the maximum number of reels available on the machine because um I don't want my board to have to go through the pick and place machine twice.

Let's say, the pick and place machine at your particular assembler only supports 20 different reels of components. That means, well, you're limited to having a maximum of 20 different types components, not 20 components total, but different types on your particular design. So um, if you've got more than that, when you're assembl is capable of, you may have to rejig your design and consolidate some of your components. like, uh, you might go around and consolidate some of your resistor values or something like that so that you can, actually, um, get this board in a single run through the pick and place machine because that will be cheaper.

So what happens at the moment? Well, I order 50 loose Pcbs like this from Uh PCB Cart in China They're very cheap I get 50 of these. Then I order 50 of all my required components from Digi Key and they come all loose like this and you know these. There's the battery connector. It comes in a non-machine friendly uh, you know thing like this holder like this and really, you can't put this into an automated pick and place machine and and place it down.

Things are only good for hand soldering and each individual component comes in the individual little bags like that they're cut off from The Reel As you can see, they're just chopped off like that and that. that's only good for hand solder. So my assembler Vu Tronics he's got to sit there and take them all out of their individual things and place them down with tweezers and solder them and does a pretty good job and does it really quick, which is excellent, but that's really only good for low volume stuff. If when you start talking 100 or 200 or more like th boards perhaps not that.

I'm going to make a thousand, but a couple of hundred of these things then you really want to look into. uh, pick and place actually buying your components that are machine friendly if you went to a machine assembler, even if you've got your lovely panelized board like this, you send them. your lovely. You know you've done all the work to panelize the thing, and you send them a bunch of parts like this.

They're going to laugh at you, well, secretly laugh at you behind their back, because then they're going to have to take all these out and then individually. um, uh, individually. Uh, wind these onto their own reels and they'll charge you a fortune for that. An absolute Fortune So what we want to do is, we don't want to buy them loose like this.

Forget that, that's hopeless. So we want to ditch all that rubbish and we only want things on reels or in, uh, tubes of components. Usually the manufacturers prefer reels like this. they don't.

Uh, in particular, like uh, tubes anymore. They're not as good or trays of components. So really say these? um, surface mount battery holders. You can actually get them in uh trays.

and they Supply them as one big tray like that. and they can sort of load those into some pick and place machines and pick them from trays. but not nearly as good as buying them on a reel. So you can actually buy these on a reel like this.

It's a really thick reel like that. it's going to be about that thick and it might have say 500 of these on the one particular reel. and they can load those in to their pick and place machine. On their reels like this, it might hold 20, 30 or 50 reels of components.

and bingo, the tape goes into the machine like this and it actually uh assembles those really quickly and really efficiently with the minimum amount of handling. So every single component I've got to go through my bill materials I've got to go back to Digi Key and I've got to look at buying each part on a reel. Now if you're buying a capacitor or a resistor, they're you know, 0.1 cents each. They're really cheap.

You buy a reel like this, it's only 10 15 20 bucks. Not a problem. Even if you only want to make a couple hundred boards you can waste. You can afford to waste a couple of thousand uh components because each reel might have four or 5,000 resistors or four or 5,000 capacitors on it.

That's not a problem, but some of the Icc's um, uh could be quite expensive. So uh, companies like uh D key and Mousa they offer a reing service. So instead of buying a full reel, let's say I've got to buy the Uh the max um IC on here. Very.

You know it's the most expensive part on the board. It's like a doar or $150 or something like that. You don't want to buy a couple of thousand of them on a reel like this. A full reel.

What's called a full reel If you only want to make a couple of hundred boards so you can actually, um, this isn't this is a reasonable example of what you'll get. It's actually a mini reel. Um, it's a brand name I Think this is a funel one, but the digi key one or this comes from the manufacturer actually. but Digi Key: They'll offer a reeling service where they take all of these components off a larger reel and they put it onto a smaller reel.

So if you only want 200, they'll take 200 off this reel like this and they'll rewind it onto a smaller reel and you only have to pay for those 200 Parts Plus Like you might pay $8 or $10 for a a reing fee, but that's okay. Then you don't get a huge amount of wastage. but once you got these, you can ship those to your Uh PCB assembler and they'll be happy as Larry that you've given them all the components perfectly on reels like this and they'll love you and they won't charge you a premium. Now The other thing is, uh, you will will lose some of the components of these reels, so don't go giving your manufacturer exactly the right amount of components that they need.

If you're getting 200 boards manufactured, do Not go and give them exactly 200 devices on this reel. Make sure you have some extra because they will actually lose some components and they have to add some leader tape on there as well. So they they will, actually, um, add some tape on top of that some extra length so that it can actually be fed into their machine, wound on first before it gets to the components. But if your components start right here, they can't just stick that into their machine cuz it's going to get wound through and you're going to waste the first.

You know 50 components or something like that. so it's very common so you have to have some uh, overrun on your reels. Just make sure you order, you know 10% more or you know 50 components more for resistors or capacitors or something like that. Don't do an exact number.

And of course unfortunately the microcurrent board isn't all surface mount. It's got a couple of through hole switches on the top here plus these binding posts and these 4 mm banana plugs here and they still have to be hand soldered. So um, really, you know there's they could actually selectively wave solder these switches. but I doubt they would actually go to the effort to really do that.

So considering they have to hand solder other stuff, they' hand solder those switches as well. So uh, you got to factor that into the cost you'll pay. um, you know, a fair bit extra for that individual, uh, handhold process. but hopefully we should be able to save, um, quite a bit of cost.

Even even if we manufacture a couple hundred of these boards should be able to save enough cost to, uh, compensate for the fact that we're um, going to have to hand holder a few extras. But I think we can save some money. Maybe the you know the price uh benefit might start at maybe 100 boards or 200, but but uh, after that, it would really kick in to play and save you a big cost. And also, uh, with machine assembly of the components, there's less chance of it going wrong and your soldering quality is going to be more consistent as well.

Not that my Uh hand solder of Vut Tronics does a bad job, does an excellent job in fact. And of course, the other thing that the Uh manufacturer is going to charge you for unless you supply it yourself I wouldn't recommend you supply it yourself. usually you leave it up to the manufacturer is the solder paste stencil and that will, um, be usually a stainless steel one for high volume manufacturer with all the cutouts of all the pads so that they can apply the solder paste on there and um, that might be absorbed into the um uh setup fee or something like that. or they could even charge you extra for that.

But once again, that's only a one-off cost for that stainless steel stencil and they do wear out. so if you're manufacturing a million boards or something, you know they're eventually going to wear out. But but when you're you know, assembling the sort of quantities I'm after the hundreds or even the thousands, you know it's really not going to be a problem. So just leave it up to the manufacturer.

All right. So let's actually take a look at how we do this in the PCB package. Now before anyone asks, this is Altium designer. Okay, don't ask how to do it in any other package because well, that's up to you to figure out.

Okay, this is just how I'm going to do it in Alum Designer Now this is my existing microcurrent board and uh, I've actually um, tweaked the I've taken the opportunity to tweak the uh uh silk screen on the front here I've increased the size of the microcurrent font added EV blog there because this uh design was from before I was um, actually started the EV blog so I didn't put it on there. but I thought I'd just uh, take the opportunity seeing as that I am actually paying for a retooling of this PCB because I used to get it supplied in in this individual thing like this, so you have to. Which means if I want to panelize it I'm going to have to pay a new Uh tool in charge, so you may as well add in any other changes. There's no circuit changes, so I'm happy with that.

I'm just going to change this silk screen on the front. So this is how I supplied the board. uh, previously is just the Gerbers for this one individual file and if we actually go in there and we can actually generate the Uh Gerbers for those now, let's actually do that as a I won't go into inches and millimeters and all that sort of stuff. let's just generate the Gerbers Shall we and uh, have a look at Bang There it is.

There's the Gerbers and if we take a look here, we can actually see the individual uh, gerat layers like that? that's the bottom layer. hence GBL that's the bottom overlay. like that bottom solder mask the bottom mechanical layer as you can see I defined the outline of my board. Actually, don't worry about the switches, that was just part of a model for that component.

but I Define the outline of my board based on a separate mechanical layer. So when the manufacturer Imports all of these uh layers, they will all match up and overlay and they know exactly because they're based on the same origin down in the uh, bottom corner. down here, they will know that, uh, that is the dimensions of my board that I want. and because I haven't specified any panel information or anything else.

just going to supply that board loose. like, um, just uh, like we talked about. So there's the overlay. so let's actually look at getting this thing penalized.

So in my project here over the left hand side, what I've got is my schematic of course. and then I've got my individual PCB here I've generated this. It's exactly the same as before, but then I've created a new uh PCB inside this um PCB thing and this is inside my PCB project and there is my completed panel I've already done it of course he's one I prepared earlier and I'll go through the steps and explain exactly what I've done here. Okay, so the first thing you want going to want to do is just create a blank panel size that's big enough for the amount of boards that you want.

Uh, in the case of the microcurrent, it's 79 mm High by 50 mm wide. That's the individual board. so uh, I can calculate, um, simple math how big my panel needs to be, but you can tweak it later. You can drag the corners in and uh, tweak the sizes.

but uh, you create a blank panel like that and then you start laying down your individual Pcbs into the panel board. Now, of course, the old school way to do this is just to cut and paste your entire board. So you go into your individual board and then you actually, uh, make sure all of the layers you want are actually selected, that they're all there. You can go used, all on or whatever.

So all your layers are there and you can just highlight everything or select. uh, all. and then you just copy it. Make sure you choose the bottom uh Corner down here for example.

and then bang I've copied that and I go into my panel and I can then paste in my individual board and you can see the actual size of it there. And Bang! you can paste there, rebuild the polygons. you typically do not want to rebuild your polygons and then you can paste individual boards. You can actually go in there and make sure set your default grid and things like that just to make sure that you actually get it.

Um, accurate like that. But that's really. Um, that's really the old school way to do it. And you've got to be.

uh, careful that. um, it doesn't uh, duplicate. Uh, for example, doesn't duplicate your silk screen designators and things like that some packages will automatically see it has AUM designer If we go in here, see that? Uh, it's back to front Mirror Image there. But if we go in, see, it's actually relabeled those silk screens.

That's just the individual component designators. It's relabeled those. so that's a bit of a trap for young players. When you're doing it manual like this.

there isn't option somewhere in AUM Designer to disable that sort of thing. it's increment designators on paste or something like that. But uh um. So some packages without a panelization feature, you are going to have to do it manually like that.

But thankfully Alum Designer has a panelization feature so we're going to use that instead. So let's use this panelization feature. So let's go into uh place and then embedded board array panelize like this and you can set up your uh individual distances between boards. Now I Know my board is uh, you know I can actually tweak these uh figures later but it's 55 mm um in the X direction to the next board and then 90 mm vertical to the board after that and then you can specify which uh PCB file you want want? In this case, we've only got got one.

which is the microcurrent, the the column count, the row count, and bingo If we do that, look what we've got. We've instantly got our panel there which we can place on our board and what that does, is it actually it? It? Really. It doesn't actually place the individual tracks. Um, on that board.

Is that a bug there? That's some sort of bugging out him designer? What a load of crap. Anyway, Um, it doesn't actually place down the actual tracks and the silk screen and everything else. It just Place places down the information placement information for them so that when you generate the Gerber files later, it will actually generate the full panel. Which is really quite a neat way to do it.

I Like it, but there you go. That's how easy it was. Okay, so what we've got now. we've actually placed our individual board array like this and I've set the Uh Dimensions the distance between one board and the next to be precisely um.

2.4 mm wider than Um than the board itself. So that width in there is 2.4 mm. Why I've done that is because 2.4 mm is a standard routing. uh, bit width.

So what the manufacturer can do is just route out. bang that. Um, they can route out that slot straight up there with one pass of the routing bit. They can route any size you want.

Um, but they you know it's just nicer if they can do it just in one routing path like that. So that's what I'm going to do. so we'll have to specify the routing paths later. But basically, as you can see, I've um, I've created my panel there.

Now let's take a look at that in the 3D mode like this and bang there it is. There's my actual board and if we, uh, we can actually, uh, play around with that and uh, there we go. That's what our board is actually going to look like. Well, our final panel is going to look like as opposed to our individual board.

And as you can see, there's no um because it's not easy to show the routed uh slots on here, you have to use your imagination a bit. um, but uh, what we've done there is, we've created one big panel with 10 individual microcurrent boards. Now you know how I said there were no circuit changes. Well I kind of lied there because uh, there actually are and uh, what they are is, let me go down to the bottom layer here.

Now in the previous version of the board, I won't uh, bother opening it. but this, uh, blue Trace up here was actually much closer to the edge of the board up here and that's usually not a problem if you're actually cleanly routing those boards. but because we want to VG Grove the top uh Edge and the bottom edge of the board and was the same, uh, down the bottom here as well. this uh Trace was actually down near the bottom of the board down there.

So um, what we've had to do is uh, peel that back a bit, move that Trace down a bit so it's so there is some clearance. A decent amount of clearance between the top of the board there and I've left about 1 and2 mm I Think by the looks of that and uh, that should be enough for the VG Grove to go along because what the V Grove or V scoring does is it gets a little drill bit and it goes and it routes a um a a groove or a V Grove Funny that routes a V Grove right along there. So you actually cut into to some of this board here so you're also going to cut in to some of the solder mask and if you have traces near the edge of the board, it's going to cut into them and it's going to ruin your day. So um, anywhere you're doing VC scoring like that, just make sure you peel back the Uh Copper from the edges, especially if you're doing uh, copper fills and stuff like that like I've done on the top layer here has the copper uh pore on there or the polygon pore.

It's a millimeter back from the edge, which should be more than enough for the uh vcor in. So um, that's just something that you need to watch out for when you're paneling boards like this. And what we want On the bottom of the board here is a tooling strip top and bottom. It needs to be wide enough.

uh to handle. You know, handle uh. the sliders on the Um Automated machine and I've made it 20 mm uh thick here and that should be more than enough. and I As you can see, I've added a 3.2 mm tooling hole there I've added four of those in the Corners like that and I've added my fiducial here which will be a two-sided fiducial and there's no hole of course and it's a 1 mm uh sized pad there with solder mask expansion on it.

So if we go to 3D mode there and we actually zoom in on that, you can see that we've got the gold which is the copper like that and the solder mask expanded. It expanded around like that and that will actually be the same on the bottom side as oh on the bottom side as well. There you go because all my components are mounted on the bottom. These fiducials really only need to be on the bottom but I put on the top as well.

So now we have to add in uh, some panelization information. that's um, one of the common Uh terms used to specify that we want VG groving and where we want our routing. So I've uh, prepared that earlier and here it is. it's just on the mechanical layer.

so if I only show you um, the mechanical layer sorry I can't get rid of the uh hide the uh panel at the moment. But as you can see, I've added in uh these this routing path here I've actually done the outline of the routing path. it's 2.4 mm wide and I've just specified it to go like that and I've U specified there it is Route out. So I'm telling the manufacturer giving them specific information to Route out that particular path there and I've added in a little pointer here which says VG grooving to which means if it matches up with the one on the other side, it means VG Grove or Vcore that board all the way along like that.

So the top edge of the board likewise the bottom edge of the board and that one and that one down there. So that's all the information that I need to provide on that panel and the manufacturer will will interpret that they the bare board PCB manufacturer will interpret that and they will know to actually route out the path between the boards and Vcore top and bottom. and if they have any uh questions then they'll ask you about things like this. but they will actually handle the fine details of then programming those route passs and the VC scoring into their Um into their PCB manufacturing machines in this software to actually do that so you don't have to worry about what software they're using or what system they're using to actually do that.

They will manually take the information you provide on your mechanical layer here. and and they they're They're knowledgeable and smart enough to know exactly what you mean by VG groving and routing. and maybe just to be on the safe side here, we might actually drag out this individual uh thing past a bit past the end of the board like that, just so you end so that you do actually genuinely get a nice sharp uh corner. So what we're going to do is we're going to uh, just Place some lines in there like that and just extend it past there so that they know to actually go so that they will tell their drill to actually go all the way past the edge of the board and you just guarantee that nice clean, sharp edge down in there And there you go.

That's our completed Uh panel and that's really all there is to it. It's not that hard at all. it's not, uh, much work even if you have to use, even if your package requires you to do individual cut and uh, Pace instead of having some automated panel function like this, it's It's no drama at all. So once we're finished with that and we're happy with it, we just generate our Uh Gerber file.

So that's uh, fabrication outputs. Let's generate our Gerber files. We're happy. we want those layers yard, yada, yada but we're going to have to include look the paste layer.

Okay because we GTP here the top paste layer and well actually we don't need the top paste layer but we'll do it anyway. But the bottom paste layer is important cuz that's where all of our components are and I've never had to generate or Supply that before when I was getting them hand assembled because there is no solder paste stainless steel uh, stencil that's uh, used by uh, the machines to actually put the paast down onto the individual pads. But because we're getting this machine assembled designed for manufacturer, we have to supply that bottom and top paste overlay or in this case, really only the bottom past paste overlay because we've only got components on the bottom. but that's what we want to generate.

So let's actually uh, go into that and uh, generate our Gerbers for that and it'll take a bit longer than usual because it's got a larger panel. but Bang There it is. There's our. and if we go into the individual generated files down here, here they are: microcurrent panel Rev 2 bottom layer.

There it is. There's the Gerber information for the entire penalized thing, the bottom overlay. It's zoomed in there. So, but there it is.

There's the bottom overlay the bottom paste. So there's our paste layer that might be hard to see, it's in a hard to see color there, but that's the paste mask um, that they'll use to generate the stainless steel. uh, stencil for the paste and the solder paste will only go into those particular areas on the pad. So um, and there won't be any solder anywhere else on the board.

So that's um, how they get the Reflow soldering Pro process. They'll put the they'll use the stencil, apply the paste which applies solder paste to the pads. They'll then pick and place the components and it goes into the Reflow oven and the solder melts and Bingo! Magic happens and you get your board. and there's our solder mask and there's our mechanical layer with all of our uh rou in and uh, tooling information.

There it is. we've got our VG Grove we've got our rou in PS and the manufacturer should know that we want that size board, the outer size board manufactured, and the VG groving and the routing and it's all there for them. And then we've got the top layer of course. and uh, top overlay.

Let's have a look at that that's got lots of information. Takes a while to load because it renders because Gerbers actually render um, all these things as um, individual uh, tracks. So it's you know they don't actually render uh, fonts so that's how Gerbers actually work and top paste layer. As you can see, I've got no components there so there is no top paste layer, it, just it generated it but it's blank and that's uh, what we have to send to our um PCB manufacturer.

Actually, we don't have to send the paste layer to the manufacturer. The manufact Bebo PCB manufacturer doesn't care about the solder Pce, they'll just ignore it. Um, but our assembler will need that file to generate the stencil and we're not done yet. We have to generate our uh, pick and place files and our NC drill files.

So we going in do our NC drill file. So our Bebo manufacturer knows that where to uh, drill the holes and what size. and bingo there's our whole information and you if you actually Zoom right in there, there's all the individual holes, but it will generate a text file. Uh, basically that has all that drill information so you going to want to supply that to the Bbard manufacturer.

If you want to know what those drill files actually look like, here they are. It's the microcurrent panel rev 2 Uh, it's generated. Alm's generated two files, one for round holes and one for slots. and there is all the Uh Gerber um, sorry the NC drill information that they need.

It specifies the Um, the drill uh sizes and the Um and the actual Uh locations of where to drw the holes and same for the slots. I've got some slots in the board and they will know exactly where to do that. And there's my drill report file with the Uh different tools they call them uh tools for each uh particular drill that's required and the whole sizes. uh requ, the drill sizes actually required and then uh, the NC drill files just use that tool information to tell them where to actually put and uh, Npth is non-plated through and the other ones are plated through holes.

And of course, all this uh Gerber and NC drill stuff is exactly the same. regardless of where we. whether we get an individual board manufactured or a panel, there is no difference. The be board manufacturer doesn't care.

Um, actually, you don't have to do this panelization step. You can't actually get your Uh Bebo manufacturer to do the panelization and add all the tooling stuff and the routing and things for you. but by the time you specify exactly what you want, you're better off doing it yourself. Really, you're better off specifying and laying out your own panel just so there is no confusion.

You know exactly what you're going to get. Um, that's going to go to your assembler. Otherwise, there's too much toing and throwing between you and the Uh Bebo manufacturer. It's just not worth it.

Just do the panelization yourself. As you see, it's very simple, takes no time at all. And one more step which we're going to need for our PCB assembler are the pick and place files. So we want to go into assembly outputs, generate pick and place files and uh, you can do that as a text or a CSV format or both.

Then we'll do that and bang. And there are various Uh file formats available for this, but uh, they should be able. All all the Uh assemblers should be able to accept a basic uh CSV uh file like this and here you go. it's you know, C1 there and it tells you exactly where to place that component and what orientation to place that component on the board.

Usually it's the center of the component, but um, in general, the Uh assembler will have to do a lot of tweaking to this file to you know, tidy it up and make it suitable for their particular Uh assembly machine and their assembly pick and place uh software because they're all not the same from different manufacturers and they have different internal methods to do stuff. but that will be all part of your Uh tool in charge that you'll pay for um, uh, doing, um to actually set up, uh, the Assembly of your board. but that's usually only a oneoff fee so you pay it once and then you can run a million boards through and that's all there is to the PCB side of it. I've completely panelized my microcurrent design now should have done it right back at the start, but I thought I was only going to make a tiny batch of them.

It was just easier to do it Loose as a one-off board and get it hand assembled. But anyway, I've done the little bit of extra effort. Now it's panelized I pay another tooling charge uh to get this board done instead of paying no tooling charge just to reorder the loose board. but the tool in charge isn't huge and uh, Bingo! I've now got 10 boards and I don't actually have to get this machine assembled if I don't want.

If I want to continue with my hand assembly, you can do that on the panel as well. In fact, it could be nicer. the Um: if somebody's hand assembling this for you, they may actually prefer on a large panel like this. it just makes handling and things like that easier and it can speed things up cuz they can do uh 10 boards at a time.

they can place the one component component Bang Bang Bang Bang on all the different boards depending on their preferred method. So even if you AR going to use pick and place penalizing like this is not a bad way to go. So now we go on to our next step in the Uh design for manufacturer step and this one can take a hell of a lot of work a lot more than just penalizing your board. I've said it before, you can spend 80 or 90% of your time actually doing the stuff we're going to do now.

So what we have to do is go through our Um in our bill of Mater materal for the microcurrent part by part every single one of them. And if you've got a board that's got 500 Parts on it, then you'll have to do this 500 times. But I'll show you one. So let's go for the max 4239.

go to a good website like Digi Key and let's Max 4239 and uh, let's or 3 38 sorry Max 4238 and let's take a look at what we've got here. We've got the different packages. The one we need is the uh S so8 uh package down here. there it is the max 4238 ASA plus and uh the plus indicates it's uh, lead free here and if we scroll across if we take a look at this it is Bang! It tells us it's an it's an S so um eight pin soic which is exactly what we need but it's in a tube now.

Um, some of the assemblers prefer not to have Tu uh tubes. they can be a bit uh Troublesome but Dig Key do have 1,5 57 of those in stock. Uh, they're available one off. but we would buy them in tube uh, quantities so we would.

So if we click on that and we'll go into there and have a look at the individual part now it doesn't. Uh, if you scroll down here it should tell you how many are in a tube, tube, quantity, and standard package. There it is 100 up there. so there's 100 that.

that standard package means that there's 100 of these devices per tube. So if we wanted to buy, if we wanted to assemble 200 of these for example, then we would buy two tubes worth. Um, otherwise they're going to give you a partial Uh tube and that might not be so bad, but other times it it you know it might be an issue. they may Supply the extra chips outside of the tube? You don't know, they may actually repackage them.

So let's actually if we can avoid Uh Tube. we probably uh, would like to. Um, because most manufactur assemblers these days will prefer the tape and reel. So let's go down to the bottom here and look at this one down here.

The max: 4238 ASA Plus it's exactly the same, but it's got a t on the end of it which uh to me indicates tape and or tape and real. And if we scroll scroll across here it is 8 pinli I in tape and real packaging. but uh, unfortunately. um, it's a non-stock item so they don't actually have it in stock.

we'd have to get it in. it's 2500 minimum. so if you actually click on that, then they're only going to you. You have to buy 2,500 of them.

But and it gives you an alternative. So really, that's ruled out I mean I'm not going to buy 2 and a half thousand of them and uh, not get them in stock and have to wait forever to get them buger that? So it actually gives you alternative packages down here And it tells us well. The tube. Duh.

we've already looked at that. Okay, but at least it's there. It tells you what alternatives are available, so it looks like at least from Digi key. Um, we have no option but to do uh, the tube.

but um, an equivalent part is actually the max 4239. so let's have a look at that. They're exactly the same chip except they have a different minimum uh, gain and a slightly different bandwidth. But we can actually use either in this design.

As it turns out, now here it is the max 4239 ASA Plus with the tape in the tape and reel bang. no stock either and it looks like the 4239 they've in the tube. they've only got 41 stock. Anyway, that's useless.

We'll use the 4238 and it looks like we're stuck with the tubes. at least for this device. I Hope the assembler doesn't mind I'm sure they won't. All right, Let's go on to our next part.

the Uh battery holder the Surface Mount 20 32 battery holder The part number is 1060 K So let's type that into Digi key and away we go. And here it is. Battery Holders I've been there before clearly and there's two types available. Aha, once again, it's got the 1060 TR that stands for tape and real and the regular 1060 which I've been buying up until now.

Oh look both of them, they got a huge amount in stock. 11,000 12,000 No worries man. I'd be over the moon if I sold that many microcurrents. That' be awesome.

Now as you can see the minimum quantity for the uh, nont and real part, the individual is one. I can just buy one of those for $183 thank you very much. Digi Key That's awesome. But I'm chying to design for manufacturer here.

So um I've I've bought these ones before, but uh, they have. You know they actually provide them in a tray and that's really no good for pick and place. It's not a proper uh, pick and place tray, it's just a a storage and shipment tray. So it's not really designed for pick and place.

So we're really going to have to go for the Uh tape and reel option here. And as it turns out, I'm going to have to buy 500 minimum because if you scroll down the standard package, there is 500 so we have to buy a reel of 500 of these things at A125 each. But that's the price you got to pay. and if you, uh, want to only assemble 200 of these, well, they don't give you the digy Reel option The Reeling option which we'll see later like they do for some other part.

So really, you are stuck with buying those 500 items. if you want them on a tape and reel. at least from Digi Key, you might have to go somewhere else if that. You know, if you only want to make 100 or 200 boards and you can't justify spending, you can't absorb that extra uh cost of those 300 um Parts which you may not use so you know you've got to weigh up these and you've got to weigh this up for each individual component in your design.

It can get crazy. So now let's go and look at another part our Texas Instruments voltage monitor here and let's see what we get. There's quite a few of them here and uh, what we want is to scroll over we want uh cut tape which is how I normally buy them. Cut tape means that you like the minimum of one so you know the person at the digi key Factory The OA loers there will just cut off your one little so 23 chip and put it in a little baggie for you and send it to you if you want and it'll cost you a whopping uh dollar for that one part and they got 3,000 in stock.

Not a problem, but it tells you. alternative package is available and it's available in tape and reel and it's available in a Digi reel. Awesome! Now the difference is as you can see, the Uh tape and reel here is uh, that is a very low minimum quantity of 250 for the tape and reel. I Was expecting that like minimum to be like well up the top here 3,000 There it is.

there's a tape and reel option. Looks like there's two tapes and real options for this one the one at the top here. Take a look at this minimum quantity of 3,000 and you pay 28 cents each cuz they're in volume and it's tape and real. uh but it looks like the minimum is 3,000 on that one reel.

So this one tape and reel down here is rather interesting in that you can get 200 200, 50 of them for 53 I I don't know what's going on there and they offer you the digi key re the digi reel as well which is The Reeling service and this is incredibly flexible. So they giving you like four different options here to purchase your products and this is. this is the advantages of buying through. uh, someone like Digi key you're going to pay.

You know you might pay for more for it, but you can really kit up easily for your projects doing this. Now as you can see it's uh, all these alternate packages here are available and the minimum uh quantities and it looks like the standard package is 250 and it says tape and real. So I guess that probably comes from the manufacturer TI themselves on a little mini reel. but uh, let's say you needed a thousand of them.

Um, you could buy multiple mini reels. You could buy multiple four of these reels. or you could go for the Uh Digi reel. Where was it? Let's have a look at the digi reel.

Let's go back and there it is. Here's the digi re one and let's take a look at this cuz this is interesting. They give you an extra let's say we wanted our Th. They give you an extra box and you can calculate the price uh for the thing and they tell you a $7 reeling fee will be applied to each real ordered.

so um, and they're non- returnable of course cuz they've done something custom for you and then you can calculate the price for a th000 and they'll then put a th000 of these devices on a reel just for you. So that's a tradeoff between buying the full reel from the manufacturer of 3,000 and four of those smaller reels. Because then the manufacturer, uh, the PCB assembler. If you've only got the little reel of 250, you want to put 1,000 boards through in one run, then they're going to have to stop the machine and change it.

Change that reel at 250 and that stops the line and cost you more time and they're going to charge you more for that. So if you know you're going to manufacture 1,000 boards, it's better to actually get a th000 of these on the real. But remember as I said, uh, earlier, you, there might be some loss in this. So you know if you were going to manufacture 1,000 boards, you might want say 1,00 or something like that.

And if they're real expensive devices and you can't afford to lose any, you better tell the menu, the assembler that there are really expensive parts and try not to waste them, please. And they'll handle them more carefully. And they'll put extended tapes on and uh, things like that to ensure, um, that there's less loss or zero loss. But generally they throw comp these components away like they're jelly beans.

So uh, just be prepared for some wastage in there. It is Quantity ,100 35 each $386 If you wanted to manufacture a th000 boards, that's what you'd get. Awesome and I would do exactly the same step for every item in my bomb. But thankfully the microcurrent doesn't have many parts in the bomb, so it shouldn't take me too long to do this.

But I've got to go through and order all these things on reels or uh, tubes if that's good enough. preferably uh, reels for everything. Every one of these items I might have to buy more than what I need. So I've got to try and absorb that cost.

hopefully sell enough um, uh, units in the end to actually um You Know cover that extra cost which I've paid for possibly extra components which I'm not going to use. So that's the tradeoff. with um, machine assembling, pick and place, uh, assembling um, your boards like this. whereas previously I'd order 50 Parts 50 boards.

there'd be practically Zero wastage from my hand assembler Vu Tronics and um, you know, everything was easy and sweet. Now it's a bit more of a gamble. you got to put more effort into it, but uh, hopefully um, the uh quality should be. uh, really, you know, 100 uh% ENT Very repeatable and uh, it should in the long run be cheaper.

But there you go. That's the design for manufacturing just a basic product. uh, like this microcar. There's a fair bit of work into it, but it's uh, it's worthwhile in the end.

And if you're designing a really high volume product, this sort of stuff is absolutely essential. So I'll uh, keep you updated on where the uh micro current is and I'll show you the board when I get it back, the finished panel and things like that and uh yeah, if you want to, uh, sign up for one, then uh, there's a form on the Uh website you can sign up and register your interest for one so that I um actually know how many uh people want one and how many I've got to get manufactured. So I hope you enjoyed that. Catch you next time.