Just a very quick video showing you testing of my new production. uh, microcurrent? PCB panels because it's actually quite important up until now. I've been testing these myself, but I'm going to manufacture another 1,800 of these and while testing them all myself. not that great even though it's very quick as you'll see here, no doubt.

So um, I'm going to test uh, five panels here today. 50 boards total to get a a A reasonably, you know accurate average time of how long it uh takes to test each board like this. These are uh, here's my new production uh panel assembled by a company called Soul Tronico Um, up the coast here from Sydney they're a couple hours up the uh Coast so they are local. um and they've been assembling my boards for me, doing a good job.

but I'm also going to get them to do the testing as well cuz that's very common in the industry. I'm not going to test 18800 myself I promised I'd test a couple of hundred and that's what I've done. but uh, these on ones? Um, yeah, I'm going to get them to do the production testing. so uh, that's very common in the industry to actually get your assembler to do that.

It just makes sense. and almost all assemblers will. uh, do you know, production testing? They might even do a whole what's called a turnkey thing where they order all your parts, they do your assembly, they do your testing, they do your packing. everything else.

In fact, they're doing more than the testing. They will be doing the packing as well. Um, you know, wrapping them up and putting them in the uh things and all I've got to do is slap on the uh labels and ship them. So Beauty now uh, what this entails is that I need to uh, write some testing documentation which I haven't done yet? Um, what I'm going to do today is test these five panels to get an average time.

and that's important cuz I have to know because an assembler will typically charge you, you know, per hour of assembly time. So if it if I can test all five of these in an hour, well, you know it's only going to cost me. you know, a few tens of dollars. Um to get these all tested so you're going to pay by the hour.

Um, so I just want an accurate indication and I'll show you some of my uh test jigs I've got very quickly I might go into more uh detail on this, but uh. anyway, let's give it a go. Now there are of course many different ways to skin this testing cat and it depends on you know, how much effort you want to put into it, how many you're manufacturing, which assembler you're using, or you know, all sorts of uh, stuff, and well, you know. look, I'm not manufacturing tens of, or hundreds of thousands of these I'm only manufacturing.

you know, 1,800 or just a couple of thousand really so it doesn't warrant full big Bed of nails tested. If I was doing this for a company, I might automate it more than this. For example, like you would do a big uh bed of nails with little Pogo pins which come down contact with some of the pads and power up the boards and things like that. and that's one of the things with this it actually takes.

you want to minimize every operation possible when you're doing produ uction testing like this. For example, if I have to insert a battery a coin cell battery into every one of these, that takes time and then because I'm not allowed to ship the coin cell batteries I've just got to take those back out anyway. So it makes sense to actually have a test jig which Powers these up now I've done a video on this before I've actually added power routing traces around the outside of my panel coming to this test connector on the side and well, this allows me to pair up all the boards at once with a little battery box like this. There's three AAA batteries in here and that just Powers up there you go leads are all coming on so all these ones actually work.

um and I can switch individual ones off of course and stuff like that. Um, but there you go that that you know saves a whole ton of time and once I and I'll test them in the panel like this. and once I've done that, then all I got to do is chop them out and bang, wrap them up and they're ready to go or my assembl is going to do that anyway. And uh, to do this testing as I said could have done a B of nails tester some automated jig I did allow for.

um I did bring the outputs of all of these out to this card Edge connector but in the end I decided really essentially wasn't worth it because I had to plug in the test current anyway I didn't bring out, didn't have enough room to Route out the test current. uh well, the input current traces on each board as well. Um, so yeah, that would have had to have been done with a big bed of nails thing and it would have had to have Auto at switch in because they're all ground reference. I've mentioned this before, the outputs are all ground reference I'd need isolated current generators for each one.

gets really really messy. and yeah, if I was working at a company as I've done, I've produced countless number of these uh, production test Jigs and things like that. and yeah, I might go to more town, you know I might go to town on it cuz I might have you know a month to set up a test system or something like that. So yeah, here, it doesn't really warrant it.

So all I'm going to do is power them all up and I figure that well. I had to plug them in anyway. I had to plug in the current source so why not do the monitoring as well? So instead of using this, I've now got myself a little uh, microcurrent uh test jig board with basically there's there's a power lead on there and there's a offset uh thing to measure. the output offset voltage is within speec and then there's an inspec lead there with the Uh with a window.

uh, comparator on that. So it just, uh and this is, uh, very accurate. It's all trimmed and ready to go. So I can plug that into here like this and then I can plug my current Source into here and bang I can just go around.

boom boom boom boom boom like that. It's literally that easy. It might take you know, 10 or 20 seconds, you know? Oh, 20 seconds, maybe 30 seconds to go around and test all boards. Certainly less than a minute.

So all I have to do is plug in my battery box in the top there. sorry I've got it on this orientation so that you'll be able to uh, actually see the leads on this light up I've got my Precision in this case it's the 1 mamp Uh current Source going into there so it feeds the Precision 1 milliamps into there and I've got this all powered up and all I've got to do is it. We ensure that the switches are all set to the Uh to the microamp position because I'm getting one volt out. so I feeding 1 milliamp I get 1 volt out of here and my window detector is designed to detect that 1 vol plusus the .05 spec.

So I simply plug it in there and bang There It Is my green light comes on and I just go along and test them like that. That is how quick it is. Awesome! And of course, depending on which Uh turns out to be the most efficient way to do it usually batch uh is. so if you had five panels like this, I would go along I'd set all these switches to one position on all of them and then go along and then swap the panel and do the next one with with the same current.

Source Like this and then so do them all on the Nano amp range, do them all on the microamp range, and then go along and do them all on the milliamps range as well, but it depends I Can have you know build multiple versions of these so I can just do the one panel like this, go along 10 times, Test get the next one plug. uh, change all the switches, get the next one. Boom Boom Boom! But as you can see, it's going to be really, really quick. There's no test leads or anything else mucking around required now.

unfortunately I haven't actually built up my Uh 1 amp uh Precision current Source yet. So I'm going to have to use uh, external, calibrated external Uh power supply. So there you go. That was just under 15 minutes to test all three rangers on every board on all five panels for all 50 boards.

So that's only calculates out to about 17.4 seconds per PCB tested. And that includes you know, switching the Rangers plugging the things on around, maybe doing the odd M manual, uh, check and things like that. That's very impressive. Round it up to, you know, 20 or 25 seconds or something like that and you know that's Bingo You've got your average time taken to test each board.

and yes, there were a couple of fires. this one, uh, for example I marked them um up here. This one just failed on the amps range I checked it, it was getting no output. so uh, let's have a look at that and see if we can.

uh, troubl, shoot that one. Now let's take a look at the board here. and uh, because it only failed on the Amps range but past the other ranges. That tells me that basically there's likely something wrong with the current shunt down here because if the other ranges pass, that means the two amplifiers in here are working, the gains of those are spot on.

My Uh splits Supply generator for the Uh power supply for the battery is working. You know everything's just fine. so it's got to be that sucker down there. Let me see if I can get a let's see if we can, uh, get close into there.

hello, hello, let me get a better angle on that and there you go Bingo Look at that. there's our culprit. It hasn't reflowed one of them slightly. un, you know, slightly under temperature.

just cuz this is a fairly large, you know, largish. Mass uh thermal component, especially compared to the other ones with a big large Trace coming off here, it just didn't reach enough. Reflow Temple The flux didn't clean the Uh joint. the flux that's embedded in the Solar Pace didn't clean the joint properly or something like that, you know? So there you go, Too easy.

I can touch that up and it'll work a treat. And then likewise I've got another panel Within instead of the amps instead. Uh, well, the milliamps. It's actually the microamps range, but I mark it as the 1 milliamp.

uh, test current. So let's uh, take a look at that. Once again, it passed on the other ranges. So we go down and we have a look at the culprits down in here.

Likely to be no, that looks all right. There's the uh, there's the shunt for that one that looks just fine to me, so it's not that, so that's rather strange. Let me double check that No, that's actually okay. so I don't know what's going on there.

The only other thing it could be is a Dicky connection. Oh hello. yeah. okay, not sure if you can see that, but yeah, look, so yeah, the assembler hasn't screwed down that screw tight enough on that.

Jack there you go. One of them was loose. So yeah, Murphy's Law there that just intermittently made uh, contact there and just happened to fail on the Milliamps range. Oops, These sort of things happen when you start introducing that human process of actually assembling these things.

I Mean, you know, surface mount boards as far as Reflow soldering goes. Once you got your thermal profile down right and you're soldering all your parts on and stuff like that, you know you can get near, you know, almost 100% yield. Fantastic. But you know, hey, the operator's not paying attention.

they don't screw up that one tight enough. Me: So there you have it. That was, uh, quite an eye opener. You know, because I I Knew it was fairly quick, but you know, sub 20 seconds per board for all three ranges and around and plugging things and moving panels around and swapping them.

Very impressive. 15 minutes for 50? That's like, you know, 200, 200 better than 200 units an hour? Fantastic. And if you divide the you know, hourly uh cost of one of the uh assembly line workers, which is what they typically uh, charge at plus some. you know, some overhead on that, then really, you know it doesn't add much cost at all, but it's important to get your uh production test down to a suitable level.

And yeah, I could make this one even quicker with some sort of automated B of nails thing. but uh, you know, really, it's it's a matter of uh, return on your time and money investment there. and really, it's not uh, worth it. I'm more than happy at the testing time for these things and it's probably going to take the same amount of time again to actually cut.

uh, you know, each individual board out. You know it might be another 10 seconds or something to go around and and trim these things out, uh, by hand. Yeah, you could probably automate that uh process as well. and you would if you manufacturing hundreds of, uh, thousands of these things.

or you'd figure out a better way to do it or something like that. But yeah, as I said, there's more than one way to skin a cat and then you got to wrap the thing. So really, you know a lot of people put time and effort into try and you know, automate their bed of nails uh, test set up for their board when that could be might be swamped by some other manual process of actually packing and things like that. So really, it's not all about the testing I've Got to Now cut these out and I've got to wrap them up in their antistatic bubble wrap and uh, and then uh, whack them in the padded envelopes and all that stuff is going to take more time than what it took to actually test these things.

So there you go I Hope you enjoyed that little quick look at these production. Uh, test panels. And if you like the video, please give it a big thumbs up. And as always, the Eev blog forum is the place to discuss it.

It's LinkedIn somewhere down below. Catch you next time. Yep, it actually took longer to, uh, cut up the bubble wrap and wrap the boards than it did to test them. Go figure.

And yep, you guessed it, packing takes even longer Again.