9 ms·

Unboxing Our New Desktop Pick and Place Machine

262 points by zbik 9y ago

zdw 9y ago
Interesting that for such an inexpensive but specialized hardware device it still has a "phone home on boot" feature. Given what this device does compared to a 3d printer (xyz axis movement, suction head, part reel incrementer, webcam + identification software), it seems like a sufficiently motivated hobbyist could come up with something passably similar in the same price ballpark.
- manicdee 9y ago
  How many of them have turned it into a viable product with after market support and a commitment to ongoing development?
- vvanders 9y ago
  > it seems like a sufficiently motivated hobbyist could come up with something passably similar in the same price ballpark. This is one of those things that sounds trivial but has tons of hidden gotcha's. EEVBlog usually breaks it down pretty well but I can't find any of the recent ones he's reviewed.
  - princeb 9y ago
    > This is one of those things that sounds trivial but has tons of hidden gotcha's. to support your point, from 2 weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16184255 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16184255
- gh02t 9y ago
  PnP doesn't make sense for a hobbyist though, that's the problem. A PnP is a tool for someone making a hundred or more of the exact same design, not something you usually do unless you're selling something. It's not worth the considerable time required to set up feed reels and all the other stuff required for a PnP if you're only making a few boards. There are open source PnP designs though: https://hackaday.io/project/9319-diy-pick-and-place https://hackaday.io/project/9319-diy-pick-and-place it's really just that not many hobbyists need or even want one.
  - hoopladler 9y ago
    As a hobbyist, I'd like one. You could do projects using hundreds or thousands of devices that are -at the moment- out of reach not for reasons of price, but rather because it would take too long to assemble the devices in question. For instance, tagging and tracking wild animals, or getting really granular local climate data. Electronics just gets more interesting the more it moves away from the monolithic device approach, for me.
    - HeyLaughingBoy 9y ago
      Hundreds or thousands of something is typically not a hobbyist venture. Also remember that placing parts is only one step of the process. If you're going to automate assembly by purchasing a P&P, you should also be ready to do high-volume stenciling and have a fast oven. In any case, the time spent aligning the machine and setting up reels can be a significant fraction of the time to just place parts manually. In some cases, you could have placed parts for your entire run by hand before you finished setting up the machine! Depending on how complex your board is, building, say, 100 units by hand isn't time consuming. I've soldered literally thousands of through-hole boards and SMT is much faster and easier to do by hand.
      - marshray 9y ago
        > Hundreds or thousands of something is typically not a hobbyist venture. But isn't this just begging the question? If hobbyists can make use of it, then by definition it's a hobbyist venture. Bringing down size, cost, and complexity is exactly the path by which so much has become available to hobbyists these days. Wasn't that long ago that a laser cutter, heaven forbid a 3d printer, was for pro shops only.
        gh02t 9y ago
        Yeah but I think there is a fundamental difference here. A 3D printer enables you to do things you can't do otherwise (fabricate custom mechanical parts). A pick-and-place enables you to do stuff you can already do with tweezers except in the most extreme cases. And likely do it faster than with a pick-and-place, because they require quite a lot of work to configure. Edit: a good analogy is a homebrewer putting caps on beer bottles. You can do it by hand with a simple tool pretty easily - even capping 100 bottles at once is no sweat, really. It just doesn't make sense to have an automated bottle capping machine even if it was cheap, because it takes up space and ends up taking more effort to set up for a small run than it saves you. Pardon the pun, but the bottleneck lies elsewhere.
- HeyLaughingBoy 9y ago
  Yes, but if you can buy it for the same price it would cost to build, why bother building? Time has its own costs too.
  - jstanley 9y ago
    Because you don't want it to phone home on every boot.
    - HeyLaughingBoy 9y ago
      I can't thing of any (realistic) reason for a P&P machine to be connected to the internet.
      - jstanley 9y ago
        Exactly. OP said: > Interesting that for such an inexpensive but specialized hardware device it still has a "phone home on boot" feature.
- vonnieda 9y ago
  I'm the founder/author of OpenPnP, which exists to do exactly this. I've been working on the project for about 6 years now and I'm happy to say that lots of hobbyists, small companies, maker spaces, etc. have built and are running OpenPnP based pick and place machines. It's a harder problem than it seems, as I've found out over the past 6 years. While the basics are quite similar to a 3D printer, PnP has some unique challenges. 3D printing can be relatively inaccurate but still produce a good output since you are working with a pretty "oozy" substance to begin with. PnP has to be pretty accurate across it's entire work surface, though. If the machine is 0.1mm off at any point in it's travel that creates a likelihood that a part will be placed incorrectly. Feeders are also, mechanically, a lot more difficult to get right than it seems like they would be. In any case, we're having good luck and a lot of success, so if you are interested in DIY / Open Source / Hobby pick and place, please come check it out! http://openpnp.org http://openpnp.org
  - eggsome 9y ago
    For those interested, here is a video/demo of OpenPnP from LCA2016: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9BGVYnaOs8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9BGVYnaOs8 (great project by the way!)
    - stryk 9y ago
      No way is that the same Aussie chap from SuperHouse? (he used to [?] do excellent video guides on DIY hacking those cheap Sonoff wi-fi enabled electrical relays)
  - jacquesm 9y ago
    That's a super project and I'm really surprised this is the first time I hear about it if you've been working on this for 6 years.
  - jcoffland 9y ago
    OpenPnP is awesome! I enjoyed seeing you guys at the Bay Area Maker Faire last summer. We were about four booths down.
  - 9y ago
- leggomylibro 9y ago
  Maybe that "feature" is because of the 'inexpensive + specialized' thing. PnP seems like a hard problem. I thought the same thing as you awhile ago, looked at some efforts that others were putting together, and was surprised at how many opted for complex things like computer vision to verify part positioning. And it did not take long for me to decide that, like most problems I take a cursory look at, there was no flippin' way I'd be able to make anything workable on my own in a reasonable cost/time-box. If I had an affordable plug-and-play design, I might take steps to protect it. Personally I'd think twice about a 'phone home' solution because I hate that shit as a consumer - or just open source it outright - but I can understand the stance.
utopcell 9y ago
There are definitely somewhat mature DIY alternatives such as LitePlacer [1] and there is ongoing effort towards an open-source software stack for PnP machines [2], but for this area to really pick up, sub-$500 kits are probably necessary. One could argue that hobby-level 3D printing would have gone nowhere if 3D printers were at a ~$3,000 level. [1] https://www.liteplacer.com/ https://www.liteplacer.com/ [2] http://openpnp.org/ http://openpnp.org/
- Animats 9y ago
  Has anyone seen a Liteplacer in action? All the info I can find on it is from the seller. LitePlacer is designed for one-off jobs. It gets its parts from cut tape, not reels. It uses its vision system to line up on the parts tapes, so the tapes don't have to be precisely positioned. It's quite slow for a pick and place machine, but far faster than doing it by hand. Doesn't put down solder paste, though. There are a lot of low-end pick and place machines, but few critical evaluations of them.
  - Kliment 9y ago
    I've seen it in action - it works but you have to be quite careful when building it. There's a bunch of gotchas and it changes over time so you have to be very very sure you're looking at the instructions for your actual kit. Also it isn't self-contained - you need a computer attached to it the entire time you run it. Still, the price point is amazing and it does what it says on the tin. (I don't own one but I've seen it in use).
abetusk 9y ago
To me, here are the most relevant bits of why they chose the CHMT36VA over others: Let me say that the needs or SparkX are slightly odd. We need to build 10-50 of a design and see how it sells. As it sells we may need to build 100-500pcs. If a design needs more than 500 pieces then it immediately gets moved over to our proper SMD production lines with much more capable machines. SparkX needed something small and quick to setup. After evaluating all the various vendors we decided on the CHMT36VA. It seemed to be the best fit of low-cost and most flexible while being able to get the job done. Right before it: ... the nail in the coffin for the Neodyn 4 in my eyes ... he says the feeders aren’t that great, they are challenging to load, and machine makes mispicks quite often. Why spend ~$10k on a machine when I can have a cheaper machine with less hassle? The CHMT36VA is far from perfect but I can work around the problems. It's not that the CHMT36VA (the $2.8k PnP machine in question) is great or competes with "industrial" pick and place machines, it's that it's optimized for small to medium runs. To me, this is very much in line with "fail fast" or "lean startup" philosophy but for electronics. SparkFun can make a small experiment with minimal risk.
- ChuckMcM 9y ago
  I am waiting for the emergence of nano factories. Basically vertically integrated businesses like Sparkfun that can design and manufacture a very wide range of products on site, sufficient to capture the value at the exploratory front end of product design and development.
  - jotux 9y ago
    Macrofab(macrofab.com) is pretty close to this, as is SeeedStudio (SeeedStudio.io).
    - TaylorAlexander 9y ago
      Seeed is wonderful. I’ve run over $80k of boards through them and while I have experienced one big error in a build they worked with me to fix it and in general they have wonderful service considering I’m one person working out of my apartment. Bigger shops charge way more or don’t work with me, and smaller shops don’t do as much as Seeed does.
peter_retief 9y ago
would love to have it but could justify that cost. my birthday is in september if anyone is curious...
aetherspawn 9y ago
Can someone clarify, does this do paste? Or would I still need to cut stencils
- gh02t 9y ago
  No, you have to cut a stencil and apply paste before you put it in the pick-and-place.
catherd 9y ago
I'll be interested to see if they are using it a year from now. Everyone I know who got the previous generation of similarly priced machines (like the Neodyn TM220/240A) no longer use them. Mostly due to the accuracy being not good enough for 0603 or similar sizes. Computer vision really is the answer, but from reading the article it sounds like the CV on the CHMT36VA isn't great for parts that aren't 0603 and it's not open/easily hackable to be better.
jwr 9y ago
Buying your own pick&place is quite similar to buying an FDM 3D printer. It doesn't make any sense at low scale, unless you want to spend endless time tinkering with the machine proper. Pick&place, as well as 3D printing, begins to make sense at industrial scale, with huge expensive machines. Sparkfun might be a borderline case, but I suspect even they won't use these cheap pnp machines in the longer term. If you are a hobbyist or a low-scale manufacturing operation, you are much better off using MacroFab, PCBNG, Small Batch Assembly or AISLER.net for electronics production, and Shapeways for 3D printing (SLS). Alternatively, for quantities of ~10 of electronics devices, it makes sense to order your boards and stencils from OSHpark or AISLER, place components yourself using tweezers, and either use a modified oven or a hot air soldering iron for reflow. This is speaking from experience (as a hobbyist/maker, electronics design engineer designing proof-of-concept and small-scale production devices, and https://PartsBox.io/ https://PartsBox.io/ founder).
- lgbr 9y ago
  > It doesn't make any sense at low scale, unless you want to spend endless time tinkering with the machine proper. For 3D printing this is becoming less true every day. 3D Printers are now extremely cheap, where sub-$300 printers make sense at low scale usage. A typical print from an outsourced printer like Shapeways might cost you about $20, and once you factor in the cost of the material when you print yourself, it only takes about 20 prints for the printer to pay for itself, and you have the added benefit of having your print in an hour rather than a week.
  - donkeyd 9y ago
    Exacly! I have an FDM printer (~$300) and it's great to have it at home. When I design something, I can do a partial print at low quality to check for clearances within an hour. Then I can modify the design and print an optimized version. It makes for a really short feedback loop and if I mess something up, I don't need to pay the base fee again. And I'm a true hobbyist, I don't do anything hardware or CAD related professionally. Also, it's just lots of fun to work with the printer.
    - 9y ago
jmrobles 9y ago
Do these machines solder the component? Or is it then necessary to put the PCBs in the oven? thnks!
- BillinghamJ 9y ago
  No - they are extremely fast, way faster than they could be if they were soldering. You put the PCB in a reflow oven afterwards.
- rkangel 9y ago
  The process for industrial assembly is: Put solder on the pads. This can be done with a solder mask - a thin sheet of metal with holes cut where the pads are. Solder paste is scraped over it and then the mask is lifted off, leaving solder on the pads. Place components. This can be done manually or with the pick and place machines described here. The solder paste is sticky so there is something to hold the components in place once placed. Reflow. This is done by putting the now populated board into a special oven. This oven will put the board through a particular temperature curve ('profile') which melts the solder then lets it cool. The surface tension of the solder on the pads helps here - it pulls components that are a fraction off into perfect position (assuming the pick and place got it close enough and that solder is on pads where it is meant to be).
  - stephen_g 9y ago
    Just a note - the solder mask is actually part of the PCB, in the past often green but now all sorts of colours. It covers up the tracks and copper fills etc. that you don’t want solder on. What you’re referring to in the first paragraph is just called a stencil.
SlowBro 9y ago
I worry about phoning home if the company goes offline. When phoning home, sniff the packets. I wonder if mother China is sending exactly the same authorization packets back to the device every time? If so it should not be terribly difficult to spoof the DNS on your own network and set up a small server to provide the necessary answer to turn on the machine.

262 points by zbik 9y ago

zdw 9y ago

Interesting that for such an inexpensive but specialized hardware device it still has a "phone home on boot" feature. Given what this device does compared to a 3d printer (xyz axis movement, suction head, part reel incrementer, webcam + identification software), it seems like a sufficiently motivated hobbyist could come up with something passably similar in the same price ballpark.

manicdee 9y ago
How many of them have turned it into a viable product with after market support and a commitment to ongoing development?
vvanders 9y ago
> it seems like a sufficiently motivated hobbyist could come up with something passably similar in the same price ballpark. This is one of those things that sounds trivial but has tons of hidden gotcha's. EEVBlog usually breaks it down pretty well but I can't find any of the recent ones he's reviewed.
- princeb 9y ago
  > This is one of those things that sounds trivial but has tons of hidden gotcha's. to support your point, from 2 weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16184255 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16184255
gh02t 9y ago
PnP doesn't make sense for a hobbyist though, that's the problem. A PnP is a tool for someone making a hundred or more of the exact same design, not something you usually do unless you're selling something. It's not worth the considerable time required to set up feed reels and all the other stuff required for a PnP if you're only making a few boards. There are open source PnP designs though: https://hackaday.io/project/9319-diy-pick-and-place https://hackaday.io/project/9319-diy-pick-and-place it's really just that not many hobbyists need or even want one.
- hoopladler 9y ago
  As a hobbyist, I'd like one. You could do projects using hundreds or thousands of devices that are -at the moment- out of reach not for reasons of price, but rather because it would take too long to assemble the devices in question. For instance, tagging and tracking wild animals, or getting really granular local climate data. Electronics just gets more interesting the more it moves away from the monolithic device approach, for me.
  - HeyLaughingBoy 9y ago
    Hundreds or thousands of something is typically not a hobbyist venture. Also remember that placing parts is only one step of the process. If you're going to automate assembly by purchasing a P&P, you should also be ready to do high-volume stenciling and have a fast oven. In any case, the time spent aligning the machine and setting up reels can be a significant fraction of the time to just place parts manually. In some cases, you could have placed parts for your entire run by hand before you finished setting up the machine! Depending on how complex your board is, building, say, 100 units by hand isn't time consuming. I've soldered literally thousands of through-hole boards and SMT is much faster and easier to do by hand.
    - marshray 9y ago
      > Hundreds or thousands of something is typically not a hobbyist venture. But isn't this just begging the question? If hobbyists can make use of it, then by definition it's a hobbyist venture. Bringing down size, cost, and complexity is exactly the path by which so much has become available to hobbyists these days. Wasn't that long ago that a laser cutter, heaven forbid a 3d printer, was for pro shops only.
      - gh02t 9y ago
        Yeah but I think there is a fundamental difference here. A 3D printer enables you to do things you can't do otherwise (fabricate custom mechanical parts). A pick-and-place enables you to do stuff you can already do with tweezers except in the most extreme cases. And likely do it faster than with a pick-and-place, because they require quite a lot of work to configure. Edit: a good analogy is a homebrewer putting caps on beer bottles. You can do it by hand with a simple tool pretty easily - even capping 100 bottles at once is no sweat, really. It just doesn't make sense to have an automated bottle capping machine even if it was cheap, because it takes up space and ends up taking more effort to set up for a small run than it saves you. Pardon the pun, but the bottleneck lies elsewhere.
HeyLaughingBoy 9y ago
Yes, but if you can buy it for the same price it would cost to build, why bother building? Time has its own costs too.
- jstanley 9y ago
  Because you don't want it to phone home on every boot.
  - HeyLaughingBoy 9y ago
    I can't thing of any (realistic) reason for a P&P machine to be connected to the internet.
    - jstanley 9y ago
      Exactly. OP said: > Interesting that for such an inexpensive but specialized hardware device it still has a "phone home on boot" feature.
vonnieda 9y ago
I'm the founder/author of OpenPnP, which exists to do exactly this. I've been working on the project for about 6 years now and I'm happy to say that lots of hobbyists, small companies, maker spaces, etc. have built and are running OpenPnP based pick and place machines. It's a harder problem than it seems, as I've found out over the past 6 years. While the basics are quite similar to a 3D printer, PnP has some unique challenges. 3D printing can be relatively inaccurate but still produce a good output since you are working with a pretty "oozy" substance to begin with. PnP has to be pretty accurate across it's entire work surface, though. If the machine is 0.1mm off at any point in it's travel that creates a likelihood that a part will be placed incorrectly. Feeders are also, mechanically, a lot more difficult to get right than it seems like they would be. In any case, we're having good luck and a lot of success, so if you are interested in DIY / Open Source / Hobby pick and place, please come check it out! http://openpnp.org http://openpnp.org
- eggsome 9y ago
  For those interested, here is a video/demo of OpenPnP from LCA2016: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9BGVYnaOs8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9BGVYnaOs8 (great project by the way!)
  - stryk 9y ago
    No way is that the same Aussie chap from SuperHouse? (he used to [?] do excellent video guides on DIY hacking those cheap Sonoff wi-fi enabled electrical relays)
- jacquesm 9y ago
  That's a super project and I'm really surprised this is the first time I hear about it if you've been working on this for 6 years.
- jcoffland 9y ago
  OpenPnP is awesome! I enjoyed seeing you guys at the Bay Area Maker Faire last summer. We were about four booths down.
- 9y ago
leggomylibro 9y ago
Maybe that "feature" is because of the 'inexpensive + specialized' thing. PnP seems like a hard problem. I thought the same thing as you awhile ago, looked at some efforts that others were putting together, and was surprised at how many opted for complex things like computer vision to verify part positioning. And it did not take long for me to decide that, like most problems I take a cursory look at, there was no flippin' way I'd be able to make anything workable on my own in a reasonable cost/time-box. If I had an affordable plug-and-play design, I might take steps to protect it. Personally I'd think twice about a 'phone home' solution because I hate that shit as a consumer - or just open source it outright - but I can understand the stance.

utopcell 9y ago

There are definitely somewhat mature DIY alternatives such as LitePlacer [1] and there is ongoing effort towards an open-source software stack for PnP machines [2], but for this area to really pick up, sub-$500 kits are probably necessary. One could argue that hobby-level 3D printing would have gone nowhere if 3D printers were at a ~$3,000 level. [1] https://www.liteplacer.com/ https://www.liteplacer.com/ [2] http://openpnp.org/ http://openpnp.org/

Animats 9y ago
Has anyone seen a Liteplacer in action? All the info I can find on it is from the seller. LitePlacer is designed for one-off jobs. It gets its parts from cut tape, not reels. It uses its vision system to line up on the parts tapes, so the tapes don't have to be precisely positioned. It's quite slow for a pick and place machine, but far faster than doing it by hand. Doesn't put down solder paste, though. There are a lot of low-end pick and place machines, but few critical evaluations of them.
- Kliment 9y ago
  I've seen it in action - it works but you have to be quite careful when building it. There's a bunch of gotchas and it changes over time so you have to be very very sure you're looking at the instructions for your actual kit. Also it isn't self-contained - you need a computer attached to it the entire time you run it. Still, the price point is amazing and it does what it says on the tin. (I don't own one but I've seen it in use).

abetusk 9y ago

To me, here are the most relevant bits of why they chose the CHMT36VA over others: Let me say that the needs or SparkX are slightly odd. We need to build 10-50 of a design and see how it sells. As it sells we may need to build 100-500pcs. If a design needs more than 500 pieces then it immediately gets moved over to our proper SMD production lines with much more capable machines. SparkX needed something small and quick to setup. After evaluating all the various vendors we decided on the CHMT36VA. It seemed to be the best fit of low-cost and most flexible while being able to get the job done. Right before it: ... the nail in the coffin for the Neodyn 4 in my eyes ... he says the feeders aren’t that great, they are challenging to load, and machine makes mispicks quite often. Why spend ~$10k on a machine when I can have a cheaper machine with less hassle? The CHMT36VA is far from perfect but I can work around the problems. It's not that the CHMT36VA (the $2.8k PnP machine in question) is great or competes with "industrial" pick and place machines, it's that it's optimized for small to medium runs. To me, this is very much in line with "fail fast" or "lean startup" philosophy but for electronics. SparkFun can make a small experiment with minimal risk.

ChuckMcM 9y ago
I am waiting for the emergence of nano factories. Basically vertically integrated businesses like Sparkfun that can design and manufacture a very wide range of products on site, sufficient to capture the value at the exploratory front end of product design and development.
- jotux 9y ago
  Macrofab(macrofab.com) is pretty close to this, as is SeeedStudio (SeeedStudio.io).
  - TaylorAlexander 9y ago
    Seeed is wonderful. I’ve run over $80k of boards through them and while I have experienced one big error in a build they worked with me to fix it and in general they have wonderful service considering I’m one person working out of my apartment. Bigger shops charge way more or don’t work with me, and smaller shops don’t do as much as Seeed does.

peter_retief 9y ago

would love to have it but could justify that cost. my birthday is in september if anyone is curious...

aetherspawn 9y ago

Can someone clarify, does this do paste? Or would I still need to cut stencils

gh02t 9y ago
No, you have to cut a stencil and apply paste before you put it in the pick-and-place.

catherd 9y ago

I'll be interested to see if they are using it a year from now. Everyone I know who got the previous generation of similarly priced machines (like the Neodyn TM220/240A) no longer use them. Mostly due to the accuracy being not good enough for 0603 or similar sizes. Computer vision really is the answer, but from reading the article it sounds like the CV on the CHMT36VA isn't great for parts that aren't 0603 and it's not open/easily hackable to be better.

jwr 9y ago

Buying your own pick&place is quite similar to buying an FDM 3D printer. It doesn't make any sense at low scale, unless you want to spend endless time tinkering with the machine proper. Pick&place, as well as 3D printing, begins to make sense at industrial scale, with huge expensive machines. Sparkfun might be a borderline case, but I suspect even they won't use these cheap pnp machines in the longer term. If you are a hobbyist or a low-scale manufacturing operation, you are much better off using MacroFab, PCBNG, Small Batch Assembly or AISLER.net for electronics production, and Shapeways for 3D printing (SLS). Alternatively, for quantities of ~10 of electronics devices, it makes sense to order your boards and stencils from OSHpark or AISLER, place components yourself using tweezers, and either use a modified oven or a hot air soldering iron for reflow. This is speaking from experience (as a hobbyist/maker, electronics design engineer designing proof-of-concept and small-scale production devices, and https://PartsBox.io/ https://PartsBox.io/ founder).

lgbr 9y ago
> It doesn't make any sense at low scale, unless you want to spend endless time tinkering with the machine proper. For 3D printing this is becoming less true every day. 3D Printers are now extremely cheap, where sub-$300 printers make sense at low scale usage. A typical print from an outsourced printer like Shapeways might cost you about $20, and once you factor in the cost of the material when you print yourself, it only takes about 20 prints for the printer to pay for itself, and you have the added benefit of having your print in an hour rather than a week.
- donkeyd 9y ago
  Exacly! I have an FDM printer (~$300) and it's great to have it at home. When I design something, I can do a partial print at low quality to check for clearances within an hour. Then I can modify the design and print an optimized version. It makes for a really short feedback loop and if I mess something up, I don't need to pay the base fee again. And I'm a true hobbyist, I don't do anything hardware or CAD related professionally. Also, it's just lots of fun to work with the printer.
  - 9y ago

jmrobles 9y ago

Do these machines solder the component? Or is it then necessary to put the PCBs in the oven? thnks!

BillinghamJ 9y ago
No - they are extremely fast, way faster than they could be if they were soldering. You put the PCB in a reflow oven afterwards.
rkangel 9y ago
The process for industrial assembly is: Put solder on the pads. This can be done with a solder mask - a thin sheet of metal with holes cut where the pads are. Solder paste is scraped over it and then the mask is lifted off, leaving solder on the pads. Place components. This can be done manually or with the pick and place machines described here. The solder paste is sticky so there is something to hold the components in place once placed. Reflow. This is done by putting the now populated board into a special oven. This oven will put the board through a particular temperature curve ('profile') which melts the solder then lets it cool. The surface tension of the solder on the pads helps here - it pulls components that are a fraction off into perfect position (assuming the pick and place got it close enough and that solder is on pads where it is meant to be).
- stephen_g 9y ago
  Just a note - the solder mask is actually part of the PCB, in the past often green but now all sorts of colours. It covers up the tracks and copper fills etc. that you don’t want solder on. What you’re referring to in the first paragraph is just called a stencil.

SlowBro 9y ago

I worry about phoning home if the company goes offline. When phoning home, sniff the packets. I wonder if mother China is sending exactly the same authorization packets back to the device every time? If so it should not be terribly difficult to spoof the DNS on your own network and set up a small server to provide the necessary answer to turn on the machine.