Author: Jan

70 down, 87 to go

I want a pick & place machine! That 50A Driver is 157 components. It is my largest and most complex design so far, but 157 components is a lot to assemble by hand – just so I can blow it up later 🙂

Worn out Pick & Miss Machine

I decided to use the IR Heater for this board, so in the process of manually applying paste and placing components. Got the large components on, but still miss the 0603 o-fun. This is much harder work than it looks sitting there trying to get components you hardly can see placed. Actually have to rest…

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CHM-T48VB

Reading up on these machines I find a lot of praises about this series. I really like this machine with 58 feeders, but it will cost me close to 6000.- USD before I have it in Norway. The reviews are all good. The main comment is on camera lighting. It can detect 0603 components, but…

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Ground Plane Broken

Bugger – checking ground plane integrity I realize that it is broken. The green areas have component grounding, but the 3D showed that it was connected – the real PCB is however not connected. I should have forced a track here to ensure that this was connected, but I will solder a wire on the…

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Ground Plane

I did the PCB for this motor controller before I moved on to do a lot of other Hat’s and added it to a batch as I ordered PCB’s later. I obviously did not spend much time looking over the design. Looking at the capacitors I realized that ground plane was broken between capacitors and…

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Adding PCB Spacers

This shows the actual board with an extra long (11mm) PCB extender. This works fine, so I think I will just stick to this solution. I still have to test with heat-sink’s added thought.

Out of connector space

It’s fun to assemble a Hat as complicated as a 4-channel Motor Driver the first time, but you need to be prepared for a few surprices. I spaced out 4 connectors to be able to test each channel better and the intention was to add JST Micro connectors. But, as I only used 1.27 headers…

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To tall components

I am quite pleased with the 1000uF and supercap design, but they are to tall for the 8mm spacer between boards. I will have problems stacking other board on top as they risk shorting the boards. I can just about get one of the smaller super-caps, but no chance for the 1000uF capacitors. The easiest…

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