Curtis,
As a SMT certified technician who does this type of work in
an R&D lab for embedded products used in the gaming/lottery
industry, the "nice job" comes more from the care you exhibit in
doing the work, than from other things, such as solder mask,
silk screen, etc. Proto boards may or may not have all
the niceties, depending on the budget.
--- In Curtis Monroe <> wrote:
>
> I was looking at the TS-7300 picture. Your technician does a nice
job.
>
> Out of curiosity, did he use a solder mask for this board? or
solder paste
> directly?
>
> Was the board reflowed? or did he use a soldering iron, or hotair
rework
> station?
>
When an entire board is populated by hand, each chip is hand-
soldered, normally I use liquid solder flux, which not only allows
the solder to flow beautifully, but also gives it the bright finish
that removes all doubt that the solder connection to the pad has
a good connection. I use hot air to remove smt parts, and solder
iron to replace/reflow parts.
> Cause it looks like a production job?
>
> -Curtis.
>
A technician can always beat a production job in appearance,
if he/she removes the flux residue after the board has been finished.
The norm for production jobs, at least on large boards, is a
grayness to the solder, and when an engineer tells you his/her
circuit is not working properly, a technician knows that a nice hand-
reflow job many times is all that is needed to "make it work".
Production houses always say their gray solder is normal,
technicians say otherwise, and want only bright pad connections.
Also if a lack of solder on pads is the problem, it is usually
on the finest pitch parts, the parts with wider pitch will be
okay, save time and go directly to fine pitch parts first.
Solder shorts also gravitate to the finer pitch components.
Adding wire connections to fine pitch parts or fixing the "oops"
that an engineer tells you about, like "all of my data lines are
backwards and power pins on one side of a chip", is where a tech
really shows his/her skill level.
//tech77man
>
> On March 2, 2006 02:09 pm, Jesse Off wrote:
> > All the pictures of our boards on our website are of prototype
units
> > that were hand built before we had full production set up
(including
> > the TS-7300 at
http://www.embeddedarm.com/images/7300stcllw.jpg). Our
> > technician down here is legendary in our
> > office for his skill with a soldering iron. If you mention that
you
> > need some jumper wires soldered to the EP9302 JTAG pins when you
order
> > the board, I'm sure we could rework the board for a small fee.
> >
> > //Jesse Off
> >
> > > There is a posting in this news group where a skilled engineer
> > brought out the
> > > JTAG by soldering directly the the EP9302 pins on the
controller.
> > (It seems
> > > pretty incredible this guy managed to solder these, seeing as
the
> > pins are
> > > only ~0.20mm wide and ~0.30mm apart).
> > >
> > >
> > > -Curtis.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > Yahoo! Groups Links
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
>
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