exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

exxos wrote: 17 Oct 2023 11:35 Some good packing from JLC here.. but why so big when its the Falcon RTC boards ?!
:pullhair: So now I have to break apart 100 boards FFS! Why does everything have to be maximum effort all the time :headbang:

How annoying :headbang:

Ouch and I bet with all that waste it bumped up the shipping costs due to the weight. You just can't win.

Icky wrote: 17 Oct 2023 11:40 Ouch and I bet with all that waste it bumped up the shipping costs due to the weight. You just can't win.

Exactly!

My WIP solder printer is "off" my desk. Just have higher priorities now. So the Voltera is back!

Now to see how long I spend messing about with blocked nozzles, dried up paste, calibration chaos etc etc..


EDIT:

Yep all my paste expired 1-2 years ago and it had been in the fridge as well. Oddly some ChipQuik paste expired in 2021 but still seems wet. So will try printing with that and see if it sticks to the PCB!

exxos wrote: 17 Oct 2023 11:35 :pullhair: So now I have to break apart 100 boards FFS! Why does everything have to be maximum effort all the time :headbang:

What on earth has happened here? Some minimum board size for SMD assembly or has someone just done something daft at the boardhouse?

BW

Badwolf wrote: 17 Oct 2023 14:16 What on earth has happened here? Some minimum board size for SMD assembly or has someone just done something daft at the boardhouse?

Think they can't do smaller than 2cm square without putting it on a panel. But even so, they could have put several boards on a panel :roll:

Getting there ! :D





This video has a fully "cycle" from paste to melt!

Did several boards now the Voltera has "died" :roll: Onto tech-support it is then.. They normally pretty good.

Voltera tech-support I think went home half way though the conversation :roll: I managed to get it working though in the end.


Sure is a lot of these plastic things lay around afterwards. What a colossal waste of plastic!


Managed to speed up to the point that it took pretty much one minute to print the paste on each board and it took four minutes to "cook" the PCBs. So managed to pretty much do them for at a time.


So now I have 100 RTC chips soldered on, hopefully! :lol: I guess it took somewhere around 4-5 hours in total.


Pretty busy for the next two days probably won't have chance to do anything until Friday now. Will have to start the daunting task of soldering the pins manually because I just don't have time to work on my soldering printer. After that I need to solder the battery holders on and test all the things are is going to keep me busy for a while!

exxos wrote: 17 Oct 2023 21:23 Sure is a lot of these plastic things lay around afterwards. What a colossal waste of plastic!

You could stick them on the inside of your roof and get some decent free insulation out of those boys! ;)

BW