WEBVTT
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[I'll mention just a little bit about the 3d AOI introduction.
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And like,
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if you have to plan it ahead of time, is it really witty banter?
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That's a great point.
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I hope you're recording all of this.
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Okay.
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Beautiful.
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Well, all right, let me do the.
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Let me do the intro.
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Welcome to the Pick, Place, Podcast, the show where we talk about electronics, This is Chris Denney with Worthington,
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and this is Melissa Hough with CircuitHub.
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So thanks for listening to the second episode, exciting to I honestly was only expecting my grandmother to listen, but
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how did she like it?
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She has not listened to it yet.
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It turns out my cousin getting married was more important than her other grand son.
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Yeah.
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Go figure.
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So but yeah.
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And on a serious note though, we had a few dozen downloads, which And not all of them were just by employees of Worthington and CircuitHub.
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So that was cool.
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It looks like we reached Asia and Australia,
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no kidding.
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Well, Australia, I don't know what it is about Australia, but
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and New Zealand
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and New Zealand, I have to imagine they just don't have a There's it's just a small population, you know?
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Yeah.
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Anyway Melissa, what have you been up to for the past couple of weeks?
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Let's see we filmed Chris and I filmed this video for the showing the assembly process cause we built some boards for them.
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So I've been finishing editing that video.
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That should be pretty neat because we, you know, So you'll see people, everybody with their masks and you'll
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Yeah, I was talking about the other day, how there's just a whole
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Yeah, absolutely.
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You know, normally when it's a full place, There's this sort of like a busy room to, you know, explain something, and then when it's half the staff, And you know, it's a serious reminder that it's a scary world right now.
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Boy, it's, it's weird, but we're doing the best we can to So in case you're not aware our factory is splitting our shifts into two groups.
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So we have team marvelous and team fabulous, which are just cute, So basically if any one team got fully infected by the virus for any potentially be unaffected because they never interact with each other.
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But we're overlapping shifts and we're keeping everybody at close to 40 hours.
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So that's, that's been working out pretty well for us, but yeah.
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And last week so the same day, or it might've been a couple of days machine, a new 3d, automated optical inspection machine, which we'll And that's what I've been really focused on training on that working with some representatives from that machine, doing everything remotely, using zoom team it takes to try to communicate with each other and with a team on the floor so It's it was a first for them.
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And as a first for us.
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So normally would they do all of that type of training in person?
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Exactly.
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Exactly.
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So they might send, you know, like a high level apps engineer to to our factory.
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He'd get a hotel for four nights and, you know, we'd start Monday and everything in between to do training on this sort of thing.
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You know, it's, it would cost them normally thousands of dollars And we're doing it all remotely.
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So everybody gets to be with their family and the training went great.
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Honestly, I was really happy with it.
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I hope to be able to do more of that in the future.
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Do you prefer doing the remote one over the in person training?
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I think so.
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I think so.
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Are there any downsides to doing it that way?
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The downside is, you get to, he gets to physically touch the machine.
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He may notice something about it that I think is normal, but he goes, no, So you might miss out on that kind of stuff.
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So you might delay catching issues a little bit, but the training went great.
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I was able to see all the slides.
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We were able to watch each other, manipulate the software, We were able to watch people in the factory load and unload boards.
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And we actually had a power outage in the middle of training and we got because it was like, okay, well, how are we going to recover from it?
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And normally you don't get to go over something like that.
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When you do normal training, cause you don't normally have a power Now your machine's not running, even though the power has come back So the great thing about having a power outage during training is now we have So that was, that actually worked pretty well.
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So anyway, let's let's talk about,
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I don't think we even said what we're talking about.
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Not yet.
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I think, I think at the end of the last episode, we might have mentioned an order with either Worthington or CircuitHub and the differences between next, but there are some significant ones and we just kind of wanted to Because a lot of times, you know, the customer places, an order, and then Well, what happened in between that sometimes it's a black box for people.
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So it might be kind of interesting for some folks to hear what happens.
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Definitely.
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So well, let's kick it off.
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Let's talk about the ordering process itself.
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Now, this is kind of where the, this is the most significant difference In my opinion, is, is the actual placement of an order.
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You know, why don't I speak to a little bit about how Worthington handles Okay.
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So since Worthington is kind of a traditional contract manufacturer, We have some neat software, but not, not the same stuff that CircuitHub has.
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So when you want to place an order with Worthington, you have to submit your exported X, Y centroid files, your Excel or CSV bill of materials.
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And you're going to have fab notes about your PCB and maybe a separate text file.
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Maybe you'll have some assembly instructions.
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You're going to supply all these documents to us.
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And we're going to take all that.
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And well, first of all, we're going to get you a quote on how much And that can take a few days.
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It could take a few hours if we're not super busy with quoting, but And then once we have all of that data, then it's, it is fairly similar to how So.
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I'll let Melissa, why don't you, why don't you speak to how Yeah, sure.
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So I guess I'd say that the biggest overall difference is that CircuitHub and forth communication and takes the entire quoting process from days We actually, unlike Worthington and most traditional contract manufacturers, we files rather than Gerbers because the EDA fellows really did a great job of giving
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BOM, the entire board and assembly.
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So by having that, we have a bunch of really advanced software that takes in
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Yeah.
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And, and, and to somebody like me, who's been doing this for a couple of decades.
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It's, it's blown me away.
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It blew me away years ago when I saw it.
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And I'm still impressed by it to this day.
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So once, once a customer places an order, either with Worthington or Well, the reason we asked for all those data files and the reason CircuitHub files or KiCAD is because we need those files in order to do our work.
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Those files give us all the information we need to fabricate the PCB to order So the Gerber files are submitted to a fab shop.
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Now we might send it to, it depends on, on the customer.
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It depends on the speed.
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It depends on the complexity, but there's, you know, half a dozen, maybe different And what they want from us is Gerber data.
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So that's where we send that information.
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Now we use the Gerbers ourselves too, because we want to measure things.
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We want to do overlays for our programming process and stuff like that, but really.
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The primary intent of Gerber files is to get the fab to get the PCBs made.
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And then from there, we're going to take your bill of materials and that we can get all the parts, see what parts we may have in stock.
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And so what happens after that?
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So there's, these things are kind of happening in parallel.
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The boards are being fabricated and the parts are being ordered.
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And at the same time, there's a third step that could, that happens in So we're taking your Gerber data and we're taking your X, Y sometimes
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Could you explain what exactly the centroid files are?
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Sure.
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Yeah.
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So this is great.
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I love it.
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I can go as deep as you want, but I hope I don't put our listeners to sleep.
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So centroid file is the literal like X, Y if you were to plot it on a graph, have Y in the vertical, And you were to, you know, maybe zeros in the Well, that is your X and Y centroid of the dot.
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So if you, if you placed a dot one millimeter to the right and And so when you're doing a board layout, you are assigning a location.
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Whether or not, you realize it an X, Y centroid location of The software is going to export that as a text file.
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Literally just a text file.
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Oftentimes it's an, a common delimited format so that we can break up the Which is really key to be able to identify where it is and what Now, the crazy thing is about that, oh, I don't want to go in super the same orientation so we have to manipulate that quite a bit often.
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But so, but those are the three things that are sort of happening in parallel.
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Boards are getting fabbed parts are getting, and machines We can't program everything until we get data back from the fab, but Typically those three steps usually happened probably within the first 24 Yeah.
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Usually within 24 hours, the PCB fab has already started to cut material.
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They've already started to drill and cut material.
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I mean, you have to do that because oftentimes the board And if they don't get started within 24 hours, then you,
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everything is going to be late,
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everything's going to be late.
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Okay.
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So, so the fab, the fab is also going to do something called a CAM process.
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And ultimately what it means is that they are going to.
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Verify that they can actually fabricate the board, make sure Okay.
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Manufacturable because, you know, you can draw the most fancy thing in the world.
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It doesn't mean you can necessarily make it, they're going to do copper much the etching process etches away the edges of the copper.
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There's odd.
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It's, it's a fascinating, fascinating process.
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I feel like I know almost nothing about it.
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So yeah.
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So cam is getting done.
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And what they're going to do is when they're finished doing their A, what we call a panelized file or an array file, or There's all kinds of different names for it.
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Basically what that package means is it has your individual PCBs in Array.
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So you have four PCBs and one panel, and that panel is what We don't, we don't build on your individual PCBs that that's We have to use automate.
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And our cam, the cam engineers at our fabs, they do a lot of work to so that we can handle it with our automated machines and importantly, I could go on.
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I could go on for hours about fiducials.
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Don't get me started on fiducials, but like fiducials are so important.
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And I remember the first time I heard the term, I was probably, I don't know, I might've only been 16.
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The first time I heard the term fiducials used and I laughed and I, I'm like, oh, is that an industry term?
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And the guy looked at me.
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Well maybe, I don't know.
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Yeah, we use it and I didn't, I thought it was a made up word.
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I thought he was like pulling my leg.
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But let's go on.
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So, okay.
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So we've got that.
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We've got that those working files back from the.
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We're going to finish programming our machines.
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We're going to tell it how that array looks for the machine.
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We're going to identify where the fiducials are.
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So we're going to program our stencil printer.
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We're going to program our pick and place and that will get us a big headstart Oh, we'll also use that data.
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I forgot.
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We'll also use that data for programming.
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The selective solder.
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Which is pretty cool.
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That's, that's a new addition that we just started doing.
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And the AOI AOI will also use that data, but to a lesser extent, we'll mostly just We it's, it's useful for so many different things, so many different things.
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And also if you put, if you put deliberate copper bridges between big solder bridge between leads and we go, oh man, we made this huge mistake.
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Well, we can look at those panel files or we can look at your individual ones, but The customer wanted it that way.
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Okay.
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So because when we see solder bridging, we think we've done Okay.
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So at the same time, as all those machines are getting programmed and ordered just all from Digi-Key or all from Mouser, all from Aero, they're Let's hope not.
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Let's hope we don't have to source from a dozen different places, but.
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There's all kinds of suppliers out there that we buy parts from.
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We're only going to buy from authorized resellers.
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And if for some reason we can't find those parts, but there is, you know, And we'd, you know, we'd have the conversation about whether or sourcing the parts from them or waiting until more get, you know, Cause that happens sometimes.
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So there's a lot that goes on there.
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So in addition to ordering parts, we're also waiting for Cause sometimes they'll have some specialty parts, maybe some prototype And once all the parts come in now, you can't just take those I remember being so confused by this.
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When I first started in this industry, I thought, well, Yeah, just What do you know?
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You, you got to make sure, first of all, that the parts were actually sent.
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Yeah, no, I mean, I mean, this may sound crazy, but if, if you asked to send sometimes only 99 show up, you know, so you may set up your whole machine and And it was just it was just a mistake, you know, manual suppliers make mistakes Yeah.
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I kind of have a funny story about that.
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So it was during one, I think probably my first year at CircuitHub.
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And so our manufacturing platform as it is now, it doesn't even exist.
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And so I actually had to do the whole kitting process for And yeah, that was just an experience, especially, cause I think Digi-Key sent us that they were supposed to go to the contract manufacturer to get assembled.
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So I ended up having to go to the.
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A little shop down the road or, yeah, just sort through the boxes.
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Chris Denny's electronic shop that's wild.
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So you, you know, the pain then, you know, the pain, the pain.
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Yeah.
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And I mean, that happened to us, actually.
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Melissa, you mentioned at the top of the show the open-source ventilators open-source ventilators, we found a wrong part that did Digi-Key.
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Now don't get me wrong.
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I feel like I'm throwing Digi-Key under the bus.
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Digi-Key paid for all of these parts?
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They a hundred percent and the shipping, they, they donated all these So I love them.
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I love them.
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I love them.
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I will forever praise Digi-Key.
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I'm so happy with them as a supplier.
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I genuinely genuinely.
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But you know, mistakes happen.
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I mean, I think Worthington assembly is a fantastic manufacturer, It just happens.
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It's not just Digi-Key.
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It can be other suppliers do the same thing.
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Everybody, every single supplier has made these same mistakes.
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So, and so anyways, so we got the wrong part.
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And we ended up finding that we did have some of the parts in So, so that was pretty good.
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So, so a kitting process has to happen.
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They're going to, they're going to open each box, say, so say They have a boxer Mouser and they have your consigned parts box.
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Well, they're gonna open up.
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You know, in a very deliberate way, they're going to verify that all the quantities are there, and they're going to put them all into one box That way they're the folks on the floor only have to deal with one box.
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They don't have to deal with a Digi-Key box in a Mouser I mean, if the job is really huge, then might have to deal with four boxes just have a process for that, you know, box one of four to a four, so on and so forth.
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Okay.
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So now that.
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Is released to the floor and we mark our schedule that it's ready to be All the parts are in, in the box and you can get started.
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The PCBs have shown up.
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That's also part of the kitting process is the PCBs are showing up and the So all these things have to be verified before we can get started.
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Now the the first people to see that kit is our SMT team.
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This is the surface Mount team and.
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What they're going to do is they're going to take a look at the kit and some how much time and how many feeders they're going to need to load that job.
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And they're going to verify that we have enough feeders.
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So we have feeders for tape.
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We have feeders for too.
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And we have feeders for trays, and those are sort of the three ways that Those are the three primary ways.
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There's, there's ways of loading things manually.
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And, but that's, that's mostly how it gets done.
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So the SMT folks have finished setting up all of the feeders and now we have Solder paste, and we're going to use a fully automated And then we're going to load that frame into the stencil printer.
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Now that frame here's where fiducials come in.
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It's going to have a it's going to have a little burn mark.
00:21:59.310 --> 00:22:14.394
And those, those reference marks, those fiducial marks on the stencil fiducial marks on the PCB and the two of them come together and solder paste You've never seen a stencil before.
00:22:14.388 --> 00:22:16.398
You know, Google it it's, it's pretty neat.
00:22:16.398 --> 00:22:27.753
It's, it's all the copper that where you need to be soldered You've got solder paste all over that board.
00:22:28.894 --> 00:22:38.763
And if you're not familiar with solder paste is it's basically like a slurry They, they powderize it.
00:22:38.763 --> 00:22:50.163
They, they take molten solder and they drip it onto a bar that's And it acts that that drip explodes.
00:22:51.273 --> 00:22:52.953
Thousands or millions of pieces.
00:22:53.554 --> 00:22:56.673
And then they filter it down through various screens to create a powder.
00:22:56.733 --> 00:22:58.324
It's really, really, really neat.
00:22:58.362 --> 00:23:01.897
But then they have you, do you have any videos online that looks through that?
00:23:01.897 --> 00:23:03.518
Well, I would love to find a video.
00:23:03.518 --> 00:23:13.087
I've never actually looked for one, but I've, I've seen it done because I mean, it's all contained.
00:23:13.117 --> 00:23:13.897
Like you can't see it.
00:23:13.897 --> 00:23:15.837
There's no glass on it, but you know, I've seen.
00:23:16.442 --> 00:23:18.647
This the process of making solder paste.
00:23:18.673 --> 00:23:28.794
But then they're going to blend it with acids and all kinds of different And it becomes kind of a paste material, almost like Play-Doh
00:23:28.773 --> 00:23:29.638
you don't want to eat it.
00:23:29.699 --> 00:23:30.568
You don't want to eat it.
00:23:30.568 --> 00:23:31.909
It's way heavier than Play-Doh.
00:23:31.965 --> 00:23:34.695
If you're eating Play-Doh, you're probably still a toddler, hopefully.
00:23:34.692 --> 00:23:36.153
But it's about that consistency.
00:23:36.153 --> 00:23:53.932
And then there's a squeegee blade that gets drawn across that stencil at a very And then the, the stencil separated from the PCB and it's injected The cool thing about that solder paste is it's tacky.
00:23:54.583 --> 00:23:57.857
It's literally like a little sticky, almost like tape is kind of sticky.
00:23:57.858 --> 00:24:01.368
Almost like, like tree sap, very similar to the stickiness of tree sap.
00:24:01.429 --> 00:24:14.038
Maybe not quite that sticky because it has the powdered metal in it, but very, very this day still includes some tree sap in the in the chemical makeup of the flux.
00:24:14.098 --> 00:24:14.398
Yeah.
00:24:14.439 --> 00:24:15.118
Yeah, no joke.
00:24:15.479 --> 00:24:17.128
So that's why some of it smells really good.
00:24:17.159 --> 00:24:19.409
If you ever saw her with it, it kind of smells like a pine tree.
00:24:19.499 --> 00:24:22.618
It's kind of neat, but also don't eat it, but also don't eat it.
00:24:22.709 --> 00:24:23.759
Definitely don't eat it.
00:24:28.078 --> 00:24:36.380
So now, now that board with the solder paste on it is going to be Those feeders are going to be loaded on that pick and place machine.
00:24:36.470 --> 00:25:21.977
And the vacuum tools on that pick and place machine are going to suck that they're going to be passed over a camera, which analyzes where those And then small minute adjustments are going to be made to the motion of And we're talking, you know, tens of microns and sometimes, you know, like, and, and hundreds of degrees of angles to place these really, really precisely pick Really really expensive, even, even like for, for a professional environment, get bench top pick and place machines for, for a few thousand bucks.
00:25:21.977 --> 00:25:52.404
But for the kinds of machines we're using, we're talking hundreds So very highly complicated, very technical very, very fast and So once all of these parts are placed into the solder paste now we have to all at once using a reflow oven and each, each panel gets a, well, I should Reflow profile.
00:25:52.704 --> 00:25:59.335
So what that means is your a tiny little bird tracking circuit board.
00:25:59.724 --> 00:26:04.134
You know, that you, you know, that thing's gonna weigh grams.
00:26:04.224 --> 00:26:13.990
You know, it's going to be tiny, tiny, tiny, maybe tenths of a gram versus It might weight might weigh kilograms.
00:26:14.829 --> 00:26:16.630
So you need to tune your oven.
00:26:17.319 --> 00:26:20.769
To the various size products that you're running.
00:26:21.609 --> 00:26:23.019
And that's what profiling is.
00:26:23.369 --> 00:26:23.509
Yeah.
00:26:23.650 --> 00:26:34.960
Could you explain like a little bit more, what exactly is the profile and the Yeah, they're they're each the end product is.
00:26:36.190 --> 00:26:38.230
Almost identical from board to board to board.
00:26:38.259 --> 00:26:42.640
You want the same ramp rate of heat into the circuit board.
00:26:43.210 --> 00:26:45.609
You want the same amount of soak time.
00:26:45.670 --> 00:27:29.288
You want the same peak temperatures you know, all, all of the critical point where you can melt all of that solder paste, activate all of that It's pretty similar for most surface Mount components because anybody making They're going to want to, they're going to want to make their device So they're all pretty similar, but the difference is how much energy do you supply versus, you know, a bird tracker, which, which weighs almost nothing.
00:27:29.919 --> 00:27:36.038
And it's going to take away less heat and it's going to take way There is a difference.
00:27:36.038 --> 00:27:53.494
There's going to take way less energy in way less time to get that So you, you, you sometimes need to make those calculations and sometimes it's Okay.
00:27:53.494 --> 00:27:55.234
This is the actual ramp rate.
00:27:55.234 --> 00:28:03.275
This is the actual curve that we're seeing in this, in the, in the And oftentimes that requires a sacrificial board.
00:28:03.335 --> 00:28:03.724
Sorry.
00:28:03.762 --> 00:28:17.683
So I guess it's it, it kinda, so I like to bake, Say you're making muffins and you're out, but you also want to make a bread, And you want the same output.
00:28:17.683 --> 00:28:19.513
You want the same consistency at the end.
00:28:19.993 --> 00:28:27.284
So you have to use different, you have to bake it a different Is that kind of similar?
00:28:27.673 --> 00:28:28.634
It's exactly the same.
00:28:28.784 --> 00:28:29.743
It's exactly the same.
00:28:29.983 --> 00:28:30.973
Yeah, totally.
00:28:31.213 --> 00:28:48.493
Because you have that bread pan is going to be way more Your muffins are going to be what, like, you know, two inches tall Could be six, eight inches tall and you know, 12 inches long.
00:28:48.493 --> 00:29:00.074
And, and you're not going to heat the center of that, of that loaf time as you're going to heat the center of the muffin ver it's.
00:29:00.074 --> 00:29:01.574
So it's exactly the same principles.
00:29:01.604 --> 00:29:03.644
You, you hit the nail on the head and I love the analogy.
00:29:03.703 --> 00:29:04.663
I'm going to remember that one.
00:29:04.701 --> 00:29:08.256
So yeah, so that's the goal of profiling a circuit board.
00:29:08.556 --> 00:29:08.826
Okay.
00:29:08.826 --> 00:29:11.885
So now your parts are all soldered to the board.
00:29:12.096 --> 00:29:18.679
The they come out of the reflow oven, cooled, not cold, not And now they're, they're still very hot.
00:29:18.739 --> 00:29:50.593
They'd be a little uncomfortable to handle by hand and they And then from there they're going to go into, what's called an AOI And this is a machine with some, you know, motion system, some lighting and analyzes those images against images that we've programmed to look for and Is it in the right position?
00:29:50.593 --> 00:29:53.863
Is it in the right rotation, which is really critical obviously.
00:29:53.916 --> 00:29:55.057
Is it the right side up?
00:29:55.086 --> 00:30:08.797
Because sometimes, you know, when that vacuum pick process, you can actually, So we're going to make sure that all the parts of the right side up some It's, it's not ideal, but it is acceptable.
00:30:10.852 --> 00:30:44.307
We're going to check the part number and make sure the correct We're going to, you know, if it's a resistor, we're gonna So if the resistor is written 1 0 3, we're actually gonna read that 1 0 3 so that we AOI is a rapidly accelerating technology, but our, our existing equipment has Now we've just recently introduced, and that's what I was talking about So now we're actually going to take height measurements which is pretty cool.
00:30:44.307 --> 00:30:57.505
And when you have height measurements, you can do all kinds of awesome 2d, including importantly, what we're excited about being able to do a full Full solder inspection.
00:30:57.684 --> 00:30:57.954
Yeah.
00:30:58.315 --> 00:31:01.224
Well, today solder is mostly inspected by humans.
00:31:01.375 --> 00:31:11.875
So you have, and really highly talented qualified people with lots looking at all your solder joints to make sure that they're acceptable.
00:31:12.775 --> 00:31:15.355
Now, we should be able to do this with a machine.
00:31:15.355 --> 00:31:18.085
We should be able to measure the volume of the solder joints.
00:31:18.152 --> 00:31:20.751
We should be able to measure the slope of the solder joints.
00:31:20.809 --> 00:31:23.605
You know, we should be able to detect cold solder joints.
00:31:23.654 --> 00:31:26.414
Non-wetting all kinds of potential defects.
00:31:26.414 --> 00:31:28.125
We should finally be able to detect with that.
00:31:28.125 --> 00:31:29.234
So that's pretty exciting.
00:31:29.835 --> 00:31:31.545
That's still to be determined.
00:31:31.545 --> 00:31:32.865
I have a great deal of confidence.
00:31:32.865 --> 00:31:40.755
We'll be able to do it because we're not the first company The automotive industry has been using these for years and years and years.
00:31:41.714 --> 00:31:50.477
And you know, we don't, we don't have Toyota money, so we're, we're That should be pretty exciting.
00:31:50.477 --> 00:31:53.807
I'm, I'm really excited to get, you know, really sink my teeth into it.
00:31:53.807 --> 00:32:02.700
I'll probably be spending a significant amount of my personal So I'm pretty excited about it.
00:32:03.119 --> 00:32:06.390
I know that's one of your favorite things is whenever
00:32:06.795 --> 00:32:07.454
And who isn't.
00:32:07.454 --> 00:32:09.045
I mean, it's like a new toy, right?
00:32:09.734 --> 00:32:10.634
It's fantastic.
00:32:10.634 --> 00:32:10.875
So
00:32:10.875 --> 00:32:13.785
Whenever anyone is where's Chris, "oh he[s with the new machine"
00:32:15.134 --> 00:32:21.914
well, you know, you've just spent a hundred thousand You want to, you want to start making money with it, you know?
00:32:21.914 --> 00:32:22.638
So okay.
00:32:22.878 --> 00:32:25.628
So now if you have a double-sided.
00:32:26.989 --> 00:32:28.128
Shocker of shockers.
00:32:28.128 --> 00:32:55.683
It just goes through the exact same process of everything we've just It just, you flip it over and you run it back through, but And the re reflow profile gets redone for the secondary side, It's pretty rare that that actually affects the profile, but we do it So But then once all of the surface mount is done and all the AOI has done.
00:32:56.013 --> 00:33:06.634
And if there's any repair that needs to be done on the surface Mount, now the two disciplines are completely different surface Mount soldering.
00:33:06.634 --> 00:33:08.824
And through hole soldering, they may as well be two factories.
00:33:08.854 --> 00:33:09.604
They're so different.
00:33:09.654 --> 00:33:13.519
Through whole, largely still gets populated by hand.
00:33:13.969 --> 00:33:37.106
It's still, you know, there's still somebody pulling that part Now there is some automation, you know, depending on the There's in some larger shops they have fully automated equipment, cause to set up those fully automated machines is pretty significant.
00:33:38.037 --> 00:33:40.507
And a lot of times it's only for very specific parts.
00:33:41.146 --> 00:33:43.541
It's only for like certain resistors and capacitors.
00:33:43.571 --> 00:33:49.454
It's, you're not going to do you know, your big transformers Those are still done by hand.
00:33:50.474 --> 00:34:05.505
When you get into serious volume, like, like maybe hundreds of thousands, if And that's, that's custom designed by an automated automation design.
00:34:05.505 --> 00:34:05.595
Right.
00:34:05.615 --> 00:34:42.981
Where they're gonna, you know, design tools specifically to handle No, but you're, you're talking like your, your, your GE refrigerators, they, you their whole line of refrigerators and they're going to be making a million of it either that, or they're going to go to a very low cost region of hand But if it's being done in the United States or Canada, a lot You know, potentially millions of dollars designing fully automated tools.
00:34:42.981 --> 00:34:43.911
Anyway, we don't do that.
00:34:44.871 --> 00:34:51.159
We, we do it all by hand and then the soldering, the soldering It can be done by hand.
00:34:51.188 --> 00:34:55.298
And oftentimes there are certain parts you can really only solder by hand.
00:34:55.298 --> 00:34:57.849
There's no way to do certain parts using a machine.
00:34:57.869 --> 00:35:02.940
But as much as possible, we try to solder parts using machines and.
00:35:04.005 --> 00:35:06.855
We use machines called selective soldering machine picture.
00:35:06.855 --> 00:35:16.465
If you can for a selective soldering machine, it's imagine Okay.
00:35:16.766 --> 00:35:32.885
Full of solder, liquid solder, and then a pump is submerged into that liquid That that's what a selective soldering machine is.
00:35:33.846 --> 00:35:35.166
It's really wild to see.
00:35:35.166 --> 00:35:36.516
We have some videos on our website
00:35:36.695 --> 00:35:38.585
and it's really pretty to actually,
00:35:38.646 --> 00:35:49.820
it is fascinating to watch it's I often say it's like it's like, you You know, it's just, it's like endlessly fascinating to just watch it.
00:35:50.751 --> 00:35:51.820
This is very similar.
00:35:51.860 --> 00:35:55.130
It has that sort of hypnotic effect that you just kind of want to watch at work.
00:35:55.130 --> 00:35:55.940
It's really neat.
00:35:55.923 --> 00:35:58.487
But there's, there's no money to be made in watching machines work.
00:35:58.487 --> 00:35:59.507
So we try not to do that.
00:36:00.827 --> 00:36:02.177
It's, it's really neat to watch.
00:36:02.177 --> 00:36:03.347
It's a complicated process.
00:36:03.347 --> 00:36:06.108
Again, it takes a lot of, it takes a skilled operator.
00:36:06.617 --> 00:36:24.670
To identify what's going on and you know, to keep that thing and keep the process So that's through hole and if it's double-sided again, you just flip it And now we're getting towards the end.
00:36:24.670 --> 00:36:25.210
Now we're going to do it.
00:36:26.019 --> 00:36:31.059
And we're going to make sure that all of the through hole All the through hole, solder joints are where they should be.
00:36:31.048 --> 00:36:56.663
Today we're still doing the surface Mount solder inspection and you know, until But the goal is to augment those inspectors by not forcing them But to be able to look at things that machines are really bad at And then finally it's going to get a depanelized.
00:36:56.842 --> 00:36:59.753
So remember when we started this whole discussion, everything was a panel.
00:37:00.498 --> 00:37:08.215
And everything was going to be built that way, but you don't You want your individual boards.
00:37:08.197 --> 00:37:17.592
So we're going to depend analyze that using what we It has a sharp, long blade on the bottom, and then it has a round.
00:37:18.226 --> 00:37:20.597
You know, it looks like a pizza slicer blade on the top.
00:37:21.347 --> 00:37:37.409
And when we draw that across the PCB, over the grooves that are put in So that's one way we can do it, but also oftentimes you can just And then they're going to get packaged.
00:37:37.469 --> 00:37:58.945
They're going to get wrapped in ESD, safe bubble, electrostatic, And then they're going to get put into ESD shielded bags, and there is a And, and a lot of people don't understand the difference briefly variable.
00:38:00.039 --> 00:38:14.409
A static, safe or a static dissipative product only means that the product itself damage to the circuit board, but it will not prevent damage from anything else.
00:38:14.920 --> 00:38:21.039
So if you take that your ESD bubble bag and your circuit boards inside of it.
00:38:21.340 --> 00:38:23.590
And you know, you go pet your cat with it.
00:38:24.550 --> 00:38:27.610
I don't want you to do that, but cats generate lots of ESD.
00:38:27.614 --> 00:38:28.963
You're going to damage your circuit board.
00:38:29.324 --> 00:38:32.893
It's not going to protect it versus static shielded.
00:38:32.893 --> 00:38:36.554
Those are the silver bags that everything ships in those shielded bags.
00:38:37.034 --> 00:38:39.764
Go ahead, pet your cat all day with a static shielded bag.
00:38:39.793 --> 00:38:42.920
And that's going to protect that product that's inside of it.
00:38:42.920 --> 00:38:44.750
It's going to create literally a Faraday cage.
00:38:45.755 --> 00:38:57.219
And to create a Faraday cage around that product and prevent static electricity So very important that you understand the difference between those two.
00:38:57.219 --> 00:39:09.139
Cause if you ever ship us boards or you ship us parts, you gotta make sure Otherwise they could potentially be damaged and we'll let you know.
00:39:10.079 --> 00:39:22.559
If you sent it to us and we feel it was sent to us in an unsafe way, we'll respond You sure you want us to use these parts because they could So yeah, we'll try to break that down to you.
00:39:23.039 --> 00:39:24.719
So you only use shielded bags.
00:39:24.840 --> 00:39:31.559
We will only ship product in shielded bags, Otherwise you're going to damage the product.
00:39:31.608 --> 00:39:33.137
And then it's going to get shipped.
00:39:33.168 --> 00:39:44.777
It's going to get put into a brown box and a label is going to put it on Shipping shipping within the United States is a piece of cake.
00:39:44.775 --> 00:40:16.047
It's very, very easy shipping outside of the United States is not, it is very, And thankfully we've done enough of it, you know, hundreds and hundreds and customers in Europe, Australia, as we mentioned Asia, as we mentioned Brazil I I, it actually fell down the other day, but yeah, so that needs Yeah.
00:40:16.197 --> 00:40:16.496
Yeah.
00:40:16.527 --> 00:40:20.456
I think let's see what continents aren't we on?
00:40:20.487 --> 00:40:22.427
Well, obviously Antarctic . Yeah.
00:40:23.086 --> 00:40:24.106
We've shipped to Africa.
00:40:24.106 --> 00:40:25.126
We shipped to south America.
00:40:25.217 --> 00:40:26.266
We've shipped to every continent.
00:40:26.356 --> 00:40:26.956
No question.
00:40:27.063 --> 00:40:29.043
It's, it's pretty, but it's pretty complicated.
00:40:29.043 --> 00:40:34.940
And our folks are pretty good at figuring out and That's where That's where the customer comes back into the picture.
00:40:34.940 --> 00:40:43.175
And voila finished board show up and all those things that So you've got all that, Melissa.
00:40:43.175 --> 00:40:44.706
You understand how everything's done now?
00:40:45.155 --> 00:40:45.516
Yeah.
00:40:46.826 --> 00:41:01.596
I, what I was thinking though, is w we got into the weeds on a few of these be fun to kind of break down some of these things individually and really,
00:41:01.856 --> 00:41:05.226
Yeah I think we could go really deep into some of these things,
00:41:05.376 --> 00:41:06.965
which I th I, I don't know.
00:41:06.965 --> 00:41:16.985
I, I think, I think the audience might eat it up because I feel like we're, we're Right.
00:41:18.186 --> 00:41:21.460
So hopefully our audience would find that interesting.
00:41:21.460 --> 00:41:27.831
If you're listening to this and you want to hear, you know, Send us an email.
00:41:28.201 --> 00:41:30.530
Melissa, do you have our, our new email up yet?
00:41:30.860 --> 00:41:31.490
You know what it is?
00:41:31.760 --> 00:41:34.530
It's contact@pickplacepodcast.com.
00:41:34.851 --> 00:41:37.971
Are there any Oxford commas between pickplacepodcast.com?
00:41:39.530 --> 00:41:40.981
Are you allowed to have commas in an email?
00:41:41.510 --> 00:41:41.990
God, no.
00:41:41.990 --> 00:41:42.530
I hope not
00:41:45.411 --> 00:41:47.221
You were about to make me question everything.
00:41:47.288 --> 00:41:50.288
Well inside joke about Oxford commas, but we yeah.
00:41:51.327 --> 00:42:24.719
Is it contact or contacts, contact, contact at pickplacepodcast.com Let us know if you like the show, let us know if you want But I think next week if all goes, according to plan, we may actually who purchasing and what their job is like and what they have to do We talked about ordering parts and dealing with suppliers and authorized I don't know.
00:42:24.719 --> 00:42:25.949
I think it will be pretty interesting.
00:42:25.949 --> 00:42:28.409
You let us know if you don't and you don't want to hear that.
00:42:28.409 --> 00:42:29.775
And then we'll we'll change it up.
00:42:30.045 --> 00:42:30.315
Yeah.
00:42:30.315 --> 00:42:36.525
Well, we'll talk about like muscle cars and whatever, you know, people
00:42:36.746 --> 00:42:39.076
But if all goes according to plans, we'll talk about parts.
00:42:39.286 --> 00:42:40.005
Yeah, that'd be cool.
00:42:40.005 --> 00:42:42.824
So we got we've got Brett and Magnus.
00:42:42.824 --> 00:42:44.293
Hopefully there'll be able to join us.
00:42:44.378 --> 00:42:45.668
They're part of our team and they.
00:42:46.193 --> 00:42:49.704
They do the part purchasing for all of your orders.
00:42:49.793 --> 00:42:52.748
And it's a tough job sometimes, but they're pretty good at it.
00:42:52.748 --> 00:42:54.668
And they're, they're great guys.
00:42:54.668 --> 00:42:55.717
It'd be really fun to hear from them.
00:42:56.918 --> 00:42:57.277
All right.
00:42:57.277 --> 00:43:29.059
So I guess we can I guess we can wrap it up and we just want to If you like, what you heard consider subscribing and your favorite podcast We'll be at apple podcast and now we're on Spotify, Google podcast, We really appreciate a review and a rating as the helps us grow a little and hopefully convinces our losses that we should keep doing the show.
00:43:30.409 --> 00:43:31.699
Thanks for listening guys.
00:43:31.708 --> 00:43:44.289
We'll talk to you later.
00:00:00.479 --> 00:00:03.954
[I'll mention just a little bit about the 3d AOI introduction.
00:00:04.044 --> 00:00:05.485
And like,
00:00:06.155 --> 00:00:09.205
if you have to plan it ahead of time, is it really witty banter?
00:00:11.265 --> 00:00:12.224
That's a great point.
00:00:15.074 --> 00:00:16.364
I hope you're recording all of this.
00:00:19.725 --> 00:00:20.295
Okay.
00:00:20.445 --> 00:00:20.984
Beautiful.
00:00:22.004 --> 00:00:23.625
Well, all right, let me do the.
00:00:24.925 --> 00:00:25.704
Let me do the intro.
00:00:34.075 --> 00:00:44.304
Welcome to the Pick, Place, Podcast, the show where we talk about electronics, This is Chris Denney with Worthington,
00:00:44.844 --> 00:00:46.685
and this is Melissa Hough with CircuitHub.
00:00:47.954 --> 00:00:56.697
So thanks for listening to the second episode, exciting to I honestly was only expecting my grandmother to listen, but
00:00:56.996 --> 00:00:57.807
how did she like it?
00:00:58.527 --> 00:00:59.786
She has not listened to it yet.
00:01:01.476 --> 00:01:05.849
It turns out my cousin getting married was more important than her other grand son.
00:01:06.390 --> 00:01:06.780
Yeah.
00:01:06.900 --> 00:01:07.590
Go figure.
00:01:08.370 --> 00:01:09.433
So but yeah.
00:01:09.462 --> 00:01:17.820
And on a serious note though, we had a few dozen downloads, which And not all of them were just by employees of Worthington and CircuitHub.
00:01:17.840 --> 00:01:18.620
So that was cool.
00:01:18.891 --> 00:01:21.861
It looks like we reached Asia and Australia,
00:01:22.010 --> 00:01:22.471
no kidding.
00:01:22.540 --> 00:01:26.081
Well, Australia, I don't know what it is about Australia, but
00:01:26.921 --> 00:01:27.790
and New Zealand
00:01:28.061 --> 00:01:38.456
and New Zealand, I have to imagine they just don't have a There's it's just a small population, you know?
00:01:38.516 --> 00:01:38.786
Yeah.
00:01:39.325 --> 00:01:41.945
Anyway Melissa, what have you been up to for the past couple of weeks?
00:01:41.926 --> 00:01:51.512
Let's see we filmed Chris and I filmed this video for the showing the assembly process cause we built some boards for them.
00:01:51.751 --> 00:01:54.652
So I've been finishing editing that video.
00:01:55.162 --> 00:02:04.391
That should be pretty neat because we, you know, So you'll see people, everybody with their masks and you'll
00:02:05.397 --> 00:02:13.676
Yeah, I was talking about the other day, how there's just a whole
00:02:13.856 --> 00:02:14.997
Yeah, absolutely.
00:02:15.347 --> 00:02:36.200
You know, normally when it's a full place, There's this sort of like a busy room to, you know, explain something, and then when it's half the staff, And you know, it's a serious reminder that it's a scary world right now.
00:02:37.056 --> 00:02:47.396
Boy, it's, it's weird, but we're doing the best we can to So in case you're not aware our factory is splitting our shifts into two groups.
00:02:47.456 --> 00:03:02.326
So we have team marvelous and team fabulous, which are just cute, So basically if any one team got fully infected by the virus for any potentially be unaffected because they never interact with each other.
00:03:02.812 --> 00:03:06.495
But we're overlapping shifts and we're keeping everybody at close to 40 hours.
00:03:07.094 --> 00:03:11.205
So that's, that's been working out pretty well for us, but yeah.
00:03:11.504 --> 00:03:44.325
And last week so the same day, or it might've been a couple of days machine, a new 3d, automated optical inspection machine, which we'll And that's what I've been really focused on training on that working with some representatives from that machine, doing everything remotely, using zoom team it takes to try to communicate with each other and with a team on the floor so It's it was a first for them.
00:03:44.325 --> 00:03:45.205
And as a first for us.
00:03:45.475 --> 00:03:48.885
So normally would they do all of that type of training in person?
00:03:50.140 --> 00:03:50.591
Exactly.
00:03:51.850 --> 00:03:52.390
Exactly.
00:03:52.390 --> 00:03:57.389
So they might send, you know, like a high level apps engineer to to our factory.
00:03:57.748 --> 00:04:06.929
He'd get a hotel for four nights and, you know, we'd start Monday and everything in between to do training on this sort of thing.
00:04:07.001 --> 00:04:16.447
You know, it's, it would cost them normally thousands of dollars And we're doing it all remotely.
00:04:16.476 --> 00:04:19.927
So everybody gets to be with their family and the training went great.
00:04:19.927 --> 00:04:22.266
Honestly, I was really happy with it.
00:04:22.317 --> 00:04:24.447
I hope to be able to do more of that in the future.
00:04:25.286 --> 00:04:28.826
Do you prefer doing the remote one over the in person training?
00:04:29.187 --> 00:04:29.966
I think so.
00:04:30.266 --> 00:04:31.107
I think so.
00:04:31.139 --> 00:04:33.329
Are there any downsides to doing it that way?
00:04:34.199 --> 00:04:38.410
The downside is, you get to, he gets to physically touch the machine.
00:04:38.410 --> 00:04:45.189
He may notice something about it that I think is normal, but he goes, no, So you might miss out on that kind of stuff.
00:04:45.189 --> 00:04:49.930
So you might delay catching issues a little bit, but the training went great.
00:04:50.139 --> 00:04:51.910
I was able to see all the slides.
00:04:51.939 --> 00:05:01.120
We were able to watch each other, manipulate the software, We were able to watch people in the factory load and unload boards.
00:05:01.180 --> 00:05:09.759
And we actually had a power outage in the middle of training and we got because it was like, okay, well, how are we going to recover from it?
00:05:09.819 --> 00:05:11.860
And normally you don't get to go over something like that.
00:05:12.569 --> 00:05:32.235
When you do normal training, cause you don't normally have a power Now your machine's not running, even though the power has come back So the great thing about having a power outage during training is now we have So that was, that actually worked pretty well.
00:05:32.504 --> 00:05:34.966
So anyway, let's let's talk about,
00:05:35.367 --> 00:05:37.367
I don't think we even said what we're talking about.
00:05:37.627 --> 00:05:38.237
Not yet.
00:05:38.867 --> 00:06:20.728
I think, I think at the end of the last episode, we might have mentioned an order with either Worthington or CircuitHub and the differences between next, but there are some significant ones and we just kind of wanted to Because a lot of times, you know, the customer places, an order, and then Well, what happened in between that sometimes it's a black box for people.
00:06:20.728 --> 00:06:25.767
So it might be kind of interesting for some folks to hear what happens.
00:06:26.848 --> 00:06:27.387
Definitely.
00:06:28.377 --> 00:06:29.846
So well, let's kick it off.
00:06:29.877 --> 00:06:31.887
Let's talk about the ordering process itself.
00:06:31.916 --> 00:06:41.487
Now, this is kind of where the, this is the most significant difference In my opinion, is, is the actual placement of an order.
00:06:41.514 --> 00:06:49.872
You know, why don't I speak to a little bit about how Worthington handles Okay.
00:06:50.411 --> 00:07:02.581
So since Worthington is kind of a traditional contract manufacturer, We have some neat software, but not, not the same stuff that CircuitHub has.
00:07:03.151 --> 00:07:17.934
So when you want to place an order with Worthington, you have to submit your exported X, Y centroid files, your Excel or CSV bill of materials.
00:07:18.564 --> 00:07:24.053
And you're going to have fab notes about your PCB and maybe a separate text file.
00:07:24.053 --> 00:07:25.764
Maybe you'll have some assembly instructions.
00:07:25.764 --> 00:07:27.923
You're going to supply all these documents to us.
00:07:29.084 --> 00:07:31.427
And we're going to take all that.
00:07:31.757 --> 00:07:36.857
And well, first of all, we're going to get you a quote on how much And that can take a few days.
00:07:37.607 --> 00:07:54.776
It could take a few hours if we're not super busy with quoting, but And then once we have all of that data, then it's, it is fairly similar to how So.
00:07:54.774 --> 00:08:02.798
I'll let Melissa, why don't you, why don't you speak to how Yeah, sure.
00:08:02.846 --> 00:08:38.865
So I guess I'd say that the biggest overall difference is that CircuitHub and forth communication and takes the entire quoting process from days We actually, unlike Worthington and most traditional contract manufacturers, we files rather than Gerbers because the EDA fellows really did a great job of giving
00:08:39.414 --> 00:08:41.990
BOM, the entire board and assembly.
00:08:42.230 --> 00:08:54.289
So by having that, we have a bunch of really advanced software that takes in
00:08:55.184 --> 00:08:55.404
Yeah.
00:08:55.404 --> 00:08:58.845
And, and, and to somebody like me, who's been doing this for a couple of decades.
00:08:58.845 --> 00:09:00.225
It's, it's blown me away.
00:09:00.225 --> 00:09:01.934
It blew me away years ago when I saw it.
00:09:01.995 --> 00:09:03.914
And I'm still impressed by it to this day.
00:09:05.024 --> 00:09:26.125
So once, once a customer places an order, either with Worthington or Well, the reason we asked for all those data files and the reason CircuitHub files or KiCAD is because we need those files in order to do our work.
00:09:26.695 --> 00:09:41.051
Those files give us all the information we need to fabricate the PCB to order So the Gerber files are submitted to a fab shop.
00:09:41.081 --> 00:09:45.520
Now we might send it to, it depends on, on the customer.
00:09:45.520 --> 00:09:46.630
It depends on the speed.
00:09:46.630 --> 00:09:55.541
It depends on the complexity, but there's, you know, half a dozen, maybe different And what they want from us is Gerber data.
00:09:56.081 --> 00:09:58.721
So that's where we send that information.
00:09:58.841 --> 00:10:02.201
Now we use the Gerbers ourselves too, because we want to measure things.
00:10:02.211 --> 00:10:06.461
We want to do overlays for our programming process and stuff like that, but really.
00:10:07.025 --> 00:10:12.432
The primary intent of Gerber files is to get the fab to get the PCBs made.
00:10:14.143 --> 00:10:23.208
And then from there, we're going to take your bill of materials and that we can get all the parts, see what parts we may have in stock.
00:10:24.188 --> 00:10:25.999
And so what happens after that?
00:10:25.999 --> 00:10:28.578
So there's, these things are kind of happening in parallel.
00:10:28.698 --> 00:10:32.749
The boards are being fabricated and the parts are being ordered.
00:10:33.229 --> 00:10:48.619
And at the same time, there's a third step that could, that happens in So we're taking your Gerber data and we're taking your X, Y sometimes
00:10:48.678 --> 00:10:51.918
Could you explain what exactly the centroid files are?
00:10:52.099 --> 00:10:52.399
Sure.
00:10:52.668 --> 00:10:52.938
Yeah.
00:10:53.239 --> 00:10:54.277
So this is great.
00:10:54.277 --> 00:10:54.697
I love it.
00:10:54.726 --> 00:10:58.476
I can go as deep as you want, but I hope I don't put our listeners to sleep.
00:10:59.047 --> 00:11:22.942
So centroid file is the literal like X, Y if you were to plot it on a graph, have Y in the vertical, And you were to, you know, maybe zeros in the Well, that is your X and Y centroid of the dot.
00:11:23.062 --> 00:11:37.032
So if you, if you placed a dot one millimeter to the right and And so when you're doing a board layout, you are assigning a location.
00:11:37.032 --> 00:11:47.261
Whether or not, you realize it an X, Y centroid location of The software is going to export that as a text file.
00:11:47.292 --> 00:11:48.432
Literally just a text file.
00:11:48.432 --> 00:12:11.938
Oftentimes it's an, a common delimited format so that we can break up the Which is really key to be able to identify where it is and what Now, the crazy thing is about that, oh, I don't want to go in super the same orientation so we have to manipulate that quite a bit often.
00:12:11.938 --> 00:12:15.538
But so, but those are the three things that are sort of happening in parallel.
00:12:16.408 --> 00:12:35.091
Boards are getting fabbed parts are getting, and machines We can't program everything until we get data back from the fab, but Typically those three steps usually happened probably within the first 24 Yeah.
00:12:35.091 --> 00:12:41.431
Usually within 24 hours, the PCB fab has already started to cut material.
00:12:41.975 --> 00:12:44.255
They've already started to drill and cut material.
00:12:44.775 --> 00:12:55.615
I mean, you have to do that because oftentimes the board And if they don't get started within 24 hours, then you,
00:12:55.676 --> 00:12:56.725
everything is going to be late,
00:12:56.995 --> 00:12:57.956
everything's going to be late.
00:12:58.346 --> 00:12:58.676
Okay.
00:12:58.676 --> 00:13:03.726
So, so the fab, the fab is also going to do something called a CAM process.
00:13:03.817 --> 00:13:07.687
And ultimately what it means is that they are going to.
00:13:08.302 --> 00:13:14.091
Verify that they can actually fabricate the board, make sure Okay.
00:13:15.261 --> 00:13:19.731
Manufacturable because, you know, you can draw the most fancy thing in the world.
00:13:19.731 --> 00:13:27.772
It doesn't mean you can necessarily make it, they're going to do copper much the etching process etches away the edges of the copper.
00:13:27.772 --> 00:13:28.402
There's odd.
00:13:28.432 --> 00:13:30.861
It's, it's a fascinating, fascinating process.
00:13:31.562 --> 00:13:33.831
I feel like I know almost nothing about it.
00:13:34.251 --> 00:13:34.672
So yeah.
00:13:34.672 --> 00:13:36.022
So cam is getting done.
00:13:36.022 --> 00:13:48.506
And what they're going to do is when they're finished doing their A, what we call a panelized file or an array file, or There's all kinds of different names for it.
00:13:49.136 --> 00:13:58.616
Basically what that package means is it has your individual PCBs in Array.
00:13:58.616 --> 00:14:12.866
So you have four PCBs and one panel, and that panel is what We don't, we don't build on your individual PCBs that that's We have to use automate.
00:14:14.047 --> 00:14:28.506
And our cam, the cam engineers at our fabs, they do a lot of work to so that we can handle it with our automated machines and importantly, I could go on.
00:14:29.557 --> 00:14:33.216
I could go on for hours about fiducials.
00:14:33.216 --> 00:14:40.506
Don't get me started on fiducials, but like fiducials are so important.
00:14:40.716 --> 00:14:48.517
And I remember the first time I heard the term, I was probably, I don't know, I might've only been 16.
00:14:48.517 --> 00:14:55.537
The first time I heard the term fiducials used and I laughed and I, I'm like, oh, is that an industry term?
00:14:55.537 --> 00:14:56.197
And the guy looked at me.
00:14:56.186 --> 00:14:57.385
Well maybe, I don't know.
00:14:57.446 --> 00:15:01.046
Yeah, we use it and I didn't, I thought it was a made up word.
00:15:01.046 --> 00:15:02.576
I thought he was like pulling my leg.
00:15:02.572 --> 00:15:03.186
But let's go on.
00:15:03.186 --> 00:15:03.576
So, okay.
00:15:03.576 --> 00:15:04.475
So we've got that.
00:15:04.475 --> 00:15:06.865
We've got that those working files back from the.
00:15:07.895 --> 00:15:09.785
We're going to finish programming our machines.
00:15:09.785 --> 00:15:12.725
We're going to tell it how that array looks for the machine.
00:15:12.725 --> 00:15:15.005
We're going to identify where the fiducials are.
00:15:15.005 --> 00:15:17.826
So we're going to program our stencil printer.
00:15:18.365 --> 00:15:27.418
We're going to program our pick and place and that will get us a big headstart Oh, we'll also use that data.
00:15:27.418 --> 00:15:27.788
I forgot.
00:15:27.788 --> 00:15:29.649
We'll also use that data for programming.
00:15:29.649 --> 00:15:30.349
The selective solder.
00:15:30.984 --> 00:15:31.764
Which is pretty cool.
00:15:31.764 --> 00:15:33.803
That's, that's a new addition that we just started doing.
00:15:34.134 --> 00:15:50.799
And the AOI AOI will also use that data, but to a lesser extent, we'll mostly just We it's, it's useful for so many different things, so many different things.
00:15:50.980 --> 00:16:00.070
And also if you put, if you put deliberate copper bridges between big solder bridge between leads and we go, oh man, we made this huge mistake.
00:16:00.309 --> 00:16:07.745
Well, we can look at those panel files or we can look at your individual ones, but The customer wanted it that way.
00:16:07.774 --> 00:16:08.105
Okay.
00:16:08.105 --> 00:16:12.695
So because when we see solder bridging, we think we've done Okay.
00:16:12.695 --> 00:16:30.754
So at the same time, as all those machines are getting programmed and ordered just all from Digi-Key or all from Mouser, all from Aero, they're Let's hope not.
00:16:30.875 --> 00:16:33.865
Let's hope we don't have to source from a dozen different places, but.
00:16:34.570 --> 00:16:37.480
There's all kinds of suppliers out there that we buy parts from.
00:16:37.750 --> 00:16:40.600
We're only going to buy from authorized resellers.
00:16:41.320 --> 00:17:00.279
And if for some reason we can't find those parts, but there is, you know, And we'd, you know, we'd have the conversation about whether or sourcing the parts from them or waiting until more get, you know, Cause that happens sometimes.
00:17:00.279 --> 00:17:02.559
So there's a lot that goes on there.
00:17:02.615 --> 00:17:25.650
So in addition to ordering parts, we're also waiting for Cause sometimes they'll have some specialty parts, maybe some prototype And once all the parts come in now, you can't just take those I remember being so confused by this.
00:17:25.650 --> 00:17:33.295
When I first started in this industry, I thought, well, Yeah, just What do you know?
00:17:33.384 --> 00:17:38.785
You, you got to make sure, first of all, that the parts were actually sent.
00:17:39.355 --> 00:18:01.018
Yeah, no, I mean, I mean, this may sound crazy, but if, if you asked to send sometimes only 99 show up, you know, so you may set up your whole machine and And it was just it was just a mistake, you know, manual suppliers make mistakes Yeah.
00:18:01.000 --> 00:18:02.520
I kind of have a funny story about that.
00:18:02.520 --> 00:18:06.990
So it was during one, I think probably my first year at CircuitHub.
00:18:07.020 --> 00:18:11.490
And so our manufacturing platform as it is now, it doesn't even exist.
00:18:11.528 --> 00:18:31.209
And so I actually had to do the whole kitting process for And yeah, that was just an experience, especially, cause I think Digi-Key sent us that they were supposed to go to the contract manufacturer to get assembled.
00:18:31.209 --> 00:18:33.669
So I ended up having to go to the.
00:18:34.588 --> 00:18:37.749
A little shop down the road or, yeah, just sort through the boxes.
00:18:37.778 --> 00:18:42.669
Chris Denny's electronic shop that's wild.
00:18:43.028 --> 00:18:46.509
So you, you know, the pain then, you know, the pain, the pain.
00:18:46.689 --> 00:18:47.048
Yeah.
00:18:47.108 --> 00:18:48.909
And I mean, that happened to us, actually.
00:18:48.999 --> 00:18:58.078
Melissa, you mentioned at the top of the show the open-source ventilators open-source ventilators, we found a wrong part that did Digi-Key.
00:18:58.180 --> 00:18:59.067
Now don't get me wrong.
00:18:59.337 --> 00:19:01.077
I feel like I'm throwing Digi-Key under the bus.
00:19:01.928 --> 00:19:03.932
Digi-Key paid for all of these parts?
00:19:04.377 --> 00:19:12.508
They a hundred percent and the shipping, they, they donated all these So I love them.
00:19:12.538 --> 00:19:13.288
I love them.
00:19:13.288 --> 00:19:13.917
I love them.
00:19:13.917 --> 00:19:15.778
I will forever praise Digi-Key.
00:19:15.778 --> 00:19:17.998
I'm so happy with them as a supplier.
00:19:17.998 --> 00:19:19.288
I genuinely genuinely.
00:19:19.268 --> 00:19:21.238
But you know, mistakes happen.
00:19:21.448 --> 00:19:28.897
I mean, I think Worthington assembly is a fantastic manufacturer, It just happens.
00:19:29.018 --> 00:19:30.087
It's not just Digi-Key.
00:19:30.188 --> 00:19:32.167
It can be other suppliers do the same thing.
00:19:32.498 --> 00:19:36.518
Everybody, every single supplier has made these same mistakes.
00:19:36.518 --> 00:19:39.722
So, and so anyways, so we got the wrong part.
00:19:40.303 --> 00:19:47.968
And we ended up finding that we did have some of the parts in So, so that was pretty good.
00:19:47.968 --> 00:19:50.248
So, so a kitting process has to happen.
00:19:50.488 --> 00:19:58.557
They're going to, they're going to open each box, say, so say They have a boxer Mouser and they have your consigned parts box.
00:19:58.857 --> 00:19:59.817
Well, they're gonna open up.
00:20:01.262 --> 00:20:13.803
You know, in a very deliberate way, they're going to verify that all the quantities are there, and they're going to put them all into one box That way they're the folks on the floor only have to deal with one box.
00:20:13.803 --> 00:20:28.883
They don't have to deal with a Digi-Key box in a Mouser I mean, if the job is really huge, then might have to deal with four boxes just have a process for that, you know, box one of four to a four, so on and so forth.
00:20:28.946 --> 00:20:29.336
Okay.
00:20:29.336 --> 00:20:30.436
So now that.
00:20:31.251 --> 00:20:38.902
Is released to the floor and we mark our schedule that it's ready to be All the parts are in, in the box and you can get started.
00:20:38.902 --> 00:20:40.132
The PCBs have shown up.
00:20:40.162 --> 00:20:49.198
That's also part of the kitting process is the PCBs are showing up and the So all these things have to be verified before we can get started.
00:20:49.857 --> 00:20:54.997
Now the the first people to see that kit is our SMT team.
00:20:55.027 --> 00:20:57.247
This is the surface Mount team and.
00:20:58.461 --> 00:21:12.412
What they're going to do is they're going to take a look at the kit and some how much time and how many feeders they're going to need to load that job.
00:21:12.682 --> 00:21:14.721
And they're going to verify that we have enough feeders.
00:21:15.442 --> 00:21:17.182
So we have feeders for tape.
00:21:17.811 --> 00:21:19.642
We have feeders for too.
00:21:20.422 --> 00:21:29.237
And we have feeders for trays, and those are sort of the three ways that Those are the three primary ways.
00:21:29.237 --> 00:21:31.426
There's, there's ways of loading things manually.
00:21:31.426 --> 00:21:33.707
And, but that's, that's mostly how it gets done.
00:21:34.307 --> 00:21:51.017
So the SMT folks have finished setting up all of the feeders and now we have Solder paste, and we're going to use a fully automated And then we're going to load that frame into the stencil printer.
00:21:51.856 --> 00:21:54.376
Now that frame here's where fiducials come in.
00:21:54.497 --> 00:21:57.901
It's going to have a it's going to have a little burn mark.
00:21:59.310 --> 00:22:14.394
And those, those reference marks, those fiducial marks on the stencil fiducial marks on the PCB and the two of them come together and solder paste You've never seen a stencil before.
00:22:14.388 --> 00:22:16.398
You know, Google it it's, it's pretty neat.
00:22:16.398 --> 00:22:27.753
It's, it's all the copper that where you need to be soldered You've got solder paste all over that board.
00:22:28.894 --> 00:22:38.763
And if you're not familiar with solder paste is it's basically like a slurry They, they powderize it.
00:22:38.763 --> 00:22:50.163
They, they take molten solder and they drip it onto a bar that's And it acts that that drip explodes.
00:22:51.273 --> 00:22:52.953
Thousands or millions of pieces.
00:22:53.554 --> 00:22:56.673
And then they filter it down through various screens to create a powder.
00:22:56.733 --> 00:22:58.324
It's really, really, really neat.
00:22:58.362 --> 00:23:01.897
But then they have you, do you have any videos online that looks through that?
00:23:01.897 --> 00:23:03.518
Well, I would love to find a video.
00:23:03.518 --> 00:23:13.087
I've never actually looked for one, but I've, I've seen it done because I mean, it's all contained.
00:23:13.117 --> 00:23:13.897
Like you can't see it.
00:23:13.897 --> 00:23:15.837
There's no glass on it, but you know, I've seen.
00:23:16.442 --> 00:23:18.647
This the process of making solder paste.
00:23:18.673 --> 00:23:28.794
But then they're going to blend it with acids and all kinds of different And it becomes kind of a paste material, almost like Play-Doh
00:23:28.773 --> 00:23:29.638
you don't want to eat it.
00:23:29.699 --> 00:23:30.568
You don't want to eat it.
00:23:30.568 --> 00:23:31.909
It's way heavier than Play-Doh.
00:23:31.965 --> 00:23:34.695
If you're eating Play-Doh, you're probably still a toddler, hopefully.
00:23:34.692 --> 00:23:36.153
But it's about that consistency.
00:23:36.153 --> 00:23:53.932
And then there's a squeegee blade that gets drawn across that stencil at a very And then the, the stencil separated from the PCB and it's injected The cool thing about that solder paste is it's tacky.
00:23:54.583 --> 00:23:57.857
It's literally like a little sticky, almost like tape is kind of sticky.
00:23:57.858 --> 00:24:01.368
Almost like, like tree sap, very similar to the stickiness of tree sap.
00:24:01.429 --> 00:24:14.038
Maybe not quite that sticky because it has the powdered metal in it, but very, very this day still includes some tree sap in the in the chemical makeup of the flux.
00:24:14.098 --> 00:24:14.398
Yeah.
00:24:14.439 --> 00:24:15.118
Yeah, no joke.
00:24:15.479 --> 00:24:17.128
So that's why some of it smells really good.
00:24:17.159 --> 00:24:19.409
If you ever saw her with it, it kind of smells like a pine tree.
00:24:19.499 --> 00:24:22.618
It's kind of neat, but also don't eat it, but also don't eat it.
00:24:22.709 --> 00:24:23.759
Definitely don't eat it.
00:24:28.078 --> 00:24:36.380
So now, now that board with the solder paste on it is going to be Those feeders are going to be loaded on that pick and place machine.
00:24:36.470 --> 00:25:21.977
And the vacuum tools on that pick and place machine are going to suck that they're going to be passed over a camera, which analyzes where those And then small minute adjustments are going to be made to the motion of And we're talking, you know, tens of microns and sometimes, you know, like, and, and hundreds of degrees of angles to place these really, really precisely pick Really really expensive, even, even like for, for a professional environment, get bench top pick and place machines for, for a few thousand bucks.
00:25:21.977 --> 00:25:52.404
But for the kinds of machines we're using, we're talking hundreds So very highly complicated, very technical very, very fast and So once all of these parts are placed into the solder paste now we have to all at once using a reflow oven and each, each panel gets a, well, I should Reflow profile.
00:25:52.704 --> 00:25:59.335
So what that means is your a tiny little bird tracking circuit board.
00:25:59.724 --> 00:26:04.134
You know, that you, you know, that thing's gonna weigh grams.
00:26:04.224 --> 00:26:13.990
You know, it's going to be tiny, tiny, tiny, maybe tenths of a gram versus It might weight might weigh kilograms.
00:26:14.829 --> 00:26:16.630
So you need to tune your oven.
00:26:17.319 --> 00:26:20.769
To the various size products that you're running.
00:26:21.609 --> 00:26:23.019
And that's what profiling is.
00:26:23.369 --> 00:26:23.509
Yeah.
00:26:23.650 --> 00:26:34.960
Could you explain like a little bit more, what exactly is the profile and the Yeah, they're they're each the end product is.
00:26:36.190 --> 00:26:38.230
Almost identical from board to board to board.
00:26:38.259 --> 00:26:42.640
You want the same ramp rate of heat into the circuit board.
00:26:43.210 --> 00:26:45.609
You want the same amount of soak time.
00:26:45.670 --> 00:27:29.288
You want the same peak temperatures you know, all, all of the critical point where you can melt all of that solder paste, activate all of that It's pretty similar for most surface Mount components because anybody making They're going to want to, they're going to want to make their device So they're all pretty similar, but the difference is how much energy do you supply versus, you know, a bird tracker, which, which weighs almost nothing.
00:27:29.919 --> 00:27:36.038
And it's going to take away less heat and it's going to take way There is a difference.
00:27:36.038 --> 00:27:53.494
There's going to take way less energy in way less time to get that So you, you, you sometimes need to make those calculations and sometimes it's Okay.
00:27:53.494 --> 00:27:55.234
This is the actual ramp rate.
00:27:55.234 --> 00:28:03.275
This is the actual curve that we're seeing in this, in the, in the And oftentimes that requires a sacrificial board.
00:28:03.335 --> 00:28:03.724
Sorry.
00:28:03.762 --> 00:28:17.683
So I guess it's it, it kinda, so I like to bake, Say you're making muffins and you're out, but you also want to make a bread, And you want the same output.
00:28:17.683 --> 00:28:19.513
You want the same consistency at the end.
00:28:19.993 --> 00:28:27.284
So you have to use different, you have to bake it a different Is that kind of similar?
00:28:27.673 --> 00:28:28.634
It's exactly the same.
00:28:28.784 --> 00:28:29.743
It's exactly the same.
00:28:29.983 --> 00:28:30.973
Yeah, totally.
00:28:31.213 --> 00:28:48.493
Because you have that bread pan is going to be way more Your muffins are going to be what, like, you know, two inches tall Could be six, eight inches tall and you know, 12 inches long.
00:28:48.493 --> 00:29:00.074
And, and you're not going to heat the center of that, of that loaf time as you're going to heat the center of the muffin ver it's.
00:29:00.074 --> 00:29:01.574
So it's exactly the same principles.
00:29:01.604 --> 00:29:03.644
You, you hit the nail on the head and I love the analogy.
00:29:03.703 --> 00:29:04.663
I'm going to remember that one.
00:29:04.701 --> 00:29:08.256
So yeah, so that's the goal of profiling a circuit board.
00:29:08.556 --> 00:29:08.826
Okay.
00:29:08.826 --> 00:29:11.885
So now your parts are all soldered to the board.
00:29:12.096 --> 00:29:18.679
The they come out of the reflow oven, cooled, not cold, not And now they're, they're still very hot.
00:29:18.739 --> 00:29:50.593
They'd be a little uncomfortable to handle by hand and they And then from there they're going to go into, what's called an AOI And this is a machine with some, you know, motion system, some lighting and analyzes those images against images that we've programmed to look for and Is it in the right position?
00:29:50.593 --> 00:29:53.863
Is it in the right rotation, which is really critical obviously.
00:29:53.916 --> 00:29:55.057
Is it the right side up?
00:29:55.086 --> 00:30:08.797
Because sometimes, you know, when that vacuum pick process, you can actually, So we're going to make sure that all the parts of the right side up some It's, it's not ideal, but it is acceptable.
00:30:10.852 --> 00:30:44.307
We're going to check the part number and make sure the correct We're going to, you know, if it's a resistor, we're gonna So if the resistor is written 1 0 3, we're actually gonna read that 1 0 3 so that we AOI is a rapidly accelerating technology, but our, our existing equipment has Now we've just recently introduced, and that's what I was talking about So now we're actually going to take height measurements which is pretty cool.
00:30:44.307 --> 00:30:57.505
And when you have height measurements, you can do all kinds of awesome 2d, including importantly, what we're excited about being able to do a full Full solder inspection.
00:30:57.684 --> 00:30:57.954
Yeah.
00:30:58.315 --> 00:31:01.224
Well, today solder is mostly inspected by humans.
00:31:01.375 --> 00:31:11.875
So you have, and really highly talented qualified people with lots looking at all your solder joints to make sure that they're acceptable.
00:31:12.775 --> 00:31:15.355
Now, we should be able to do this with a machine.
00:31:15.355 --> 00:31:18.085
We should be able to measure the volume of the solder joints.
00:31:18.152 --> 00:31:20.751
We should be able to measure the slope of the solder joints.
00:31:20.809 --> 00:31:23.605
You know, we should be able to detect cold solder joints.
00:31:23.654 --> 00:31:26.414
Non-wetting all kinds of potential defects.
00:31:26.414 --> 00:31:28.125
We should finally be able to detect with that.
00:31:28.125 --> 00:31:29.234
So that's pretty exciting.
00:31:29.835 --> 00:31:31.545
That's still to be determined.
00:31:31.545 --> 00:31:32.865
I have a great deal of confidence.
00:31:32.865 --> 00:31:40.755
We'll be able to do it because we're not the first company The automotive industry has been using these for years and years and years.
00:31:41.714 --> 00:31:50.477
And you know, we don't, we don't have Toyota money, so we're, we're That should be pretty exciting.
00:31:50.477 --> 00:31:53.807
I'm, I'm really excited to get, you know, really sink my teeth into it.
00:31:53.807 --> 00:32:02.700
I'll probably be spending a significant amount of my personal So I'm pretty excited about it.
00:32:03.119 --> 00:32:06.390
I know that's one of your favorite things is whenever
00:32:06.795 --> 00:32:07.454
And who isn't.
00:32:07.454 --> 00:32:09.045
I mean, it's like a new toy, right?
00:32:09.734 --> 00:32:10.634
It's fantastic.
00:32:10.634 --> 00:32:10.875
So
00:32:10.875 --> 00:32:13.785
Whenever anyone is where's Chris, "oh he[s with the new machine"
00:32:15.134 --> 00:32:21.914
well, you know, you've just spent a hundred thousand You want to, you want to start making money with it, you know?
00:32:21.914 --> 00:32:22.638
So okay.
00:32:22.878 --> 00:32:25.628
So now if you have a double-sided.
00:32:26.989 --> 00:32:28.128
Shocker of shockers.
00:32:28.128 --> 00:32:55.683
It just goes through the exact same process of everything we've just It just, you flip it over and you run it back through, but And the re reflow profile gets redone for the secondary side, It's pretty rare that that actually affects the profile, but we do it So But then once all of the surface mount is done and all the AOI has done.
00:32:56.013 --> 00:33:06.634
And if there's any repair that needs to be done on the surface Mount, now the two disciplines are completely different surface Mount soldering.
00:33:06.634 --> 00:33:08.824
And through hole soldering, they may as well be two factories.
00:33:08.854 --> 00:33:09.604
They're so different.
00:33:09.654 --> 00:33:13.519
Through whole, largely still gets populated by hand.
00:33:13.969 --> 00:33:37.106
It's still, you know, there's still somebody pulling that part Now there is some automation, you know, depending on the There's in some larger shops they have fully automated equipment, cause to set up those fully automated machines is pretty significant.
00:33:38.037 --> 00:33:40.507
And a lot of times it's only for very specific parts.
00:33:41.146 --> 00:33:43.541
It's only for like certain resistors and capacitors.
00:33:43.571 --> 00:33:49.454
It's, you're not going to do you know, your big transformers Those are still done by hand.
00:33:50.474 --> 00:34:05.505
When you get into serious volume, like, like maybe hundreds of thousands, if And that's, that's custom designed by an automated automation design.
00:34:05.505 --> 00:34:05.595
Right.
00:34:05.615 --> 00:34:42.981
Where they're gonna, you know, design tools specifically to handle No, but you're, you're talking like your, your, your GE refrigerators, they, you their whole line of refrigerators and they're going to be making a million of it either that, or they're going to go to a very low cost region of hand But if it's being done in the United States or Canada, a lot You know, potentially millions of dollars designing fully automated tools.
00:34:42.981 --> 00:34:43.911
Anyway, we don't do that.
00:34:44.871 --> 00:34:51.159
We, we do it all by hand and then the soldering, the soldering It can be done by hand.
00:34:51.188 --> 00:34:55.298
And oftentimes there are certain parts you can really only solder by hand.
00:34:55.298 --> 00:34:57.849
There's no way to do certain parts using a machine.
00:34:57.869 --> 00:35:02.940
But as much as possible, we try to solder parts using machines and.
00:35:04.005 --> 00:35:06.855
We use machines called selective soldering machine picture.
00:35:06.855 --> 00:35:16.465
If you can for a selective soldering machine, it's imagine Okay.
00:35:16.766 --> 00:35:32.885
Full of solder, liquid solder, and then a pump is submerged into that liquid That that's what a selective soldering machine is.
00:35:33.846 --> 00:35:35.166
It's really wild to see.
00:35:35.166 --> 00:35:36.516
We have some videos on our website
00:35:36.695 --> 00:35:38.585
and it's really pretty to actually,
00:35:38.646 --> 00:35:49.820
it is fascinating to watch it's I often say it's like it's like, you You know, it's just, it's like endlessly fascinating to just watch it.
00:35:50.751 --> 00:35:51.820
This is very similar.
00:35:51.860 --> 00:35:55.130
It has that sort of hypnotic effect that you just kind of want to watch at work.
00:35:55.130 --> 00:35:55.940
It's really neat.
00:35:55.923 --> 00:35:58.487
But there's, there's no money to be made in watching machines work.
00:35:58.487 --> 00:35:59.507
So we try not to do that.
00:36:00.827 --> 00:36:02.177
It's, it's really neat to watch.
00:36:02.177 --> 00:36:03.347
It's a complicated process.
00:36:03.347 --> 00:36:06.108
Again, it takes a lot of, it takes a skilled operator.
00:36:06.617 --> 00:36:24.670
To identify what's going on and you know, to keep that thing and keep the process So that's through hole and if it's double-sided again, you just flip it And now we're getting towards the end.
00:36:24.670 --> 00:36:25.210
Now we're going to do it.
00:36:26.019 --> 00:36:31.059
And we're going to make sure that all of the through hole All the through hole, solder joints are where they should be.
00:36:31.048 --> 00:36:56.663
Today we're still doing the surface Mount solder inspection and you know, until But the goal is to augment those inspectors by not forcing them But to be able to look at things that machines are really bad at And then finally it's going to get a depanelized.
00:36:56.842 --> 00:36:59.753
So remember when we started this whole discussion, everything was a panel.
00:37:00.498 --> 00:37:08.215
And everything was going to be built that way, but you don't You want your individual boards.
00:37:08.197 --> 00:37:17.592
So we're going to depend analyze that using what we It has a sharp, long blade on the bottom, and then it has a round.
00:37:18.226 --> 00:37:20.597
You know, it looks like a pizza slicer blade on the top.
00:37:21.347 --> 00:37:37.409
And when we draw that across the PCB, over the grooves that are put in So that's one way we can do it, but also oftentimes you can just And then they're going to get packaged.
00:37:37.469 --> 00:37:58.945
They're going to get wrapped in ESD, safe bubble, electrostatic, And then they're going to get put into ESD shielded bags, and there is a And, and a lot of people don't understand the difference briefly variable.
00:38:00.039 --> 00:38:14.409
A static, safe or a static dissipative product only means that the product itself damage to the circuit board, but it will not prevent damage from anything else.
00:38:14.920 --> 00:38:21.039
So if you take that your ESD bubble bag and your circuit boards inside of it.
00:38:21.340 --> 00:38:23.590
And you know, you go pet your cat with it.
00:38:24.550 --> 00:38:27.610
I don't want you to do that, but cats generate lots of ESD.
00:38:27.614 --> 00:38:28.963
You're going to damage your circuit board.
00:38:29.324 --> 00:38:32.893
It's not going to protect it versus static shielded.
00:38:32.893 --> 00:38:36.554
Those are the silver bags that everything ships in those shielded bags.
00:38:37.034 --> 00:38:39.764
Go ahead, pet your cat all day with a static shielded bag.
00:38:39.793 --> 00:38:42.920
And that's going to protect that product that's inside of it.
00:38:42.920 --> 00:38:44.750
It's going to create literally a Faraday cage.
00:38:45.755 --> 00:38:57.219
And to create a Faraday cage around that product and prevent static electricity So very important that you understand the difference between those two.
00:38:57.219 --> 00:39:09.139
Cause if you ever ship us boards or you ship us parts, you gotta make sure Otherwise they could potentially be damaged and we'll let you know.
00:39:10.079 --> 00:39:22.559
If you sent it to us and we feel it was sent to us in an unsafe way, we'll respond You sure you want us to use these parts because they could So yeah, we'll try to break that down to you.
00:39:23.039 --> 00:39:24.719
So you only use shielded bags.
00:39:24.840 --> 00:39:31.559
We will only ship product in shielded bags, Otherwise you're going to damage the product.
00:39:31.608 --> 00:39:33.137
And then it's going to get shipped.
00:39:33.168 --> 00:39:44.777
It's going to get put into a brown box and a label is going to put it on Shipping shipping within the United States is a piece of cake.
00:39:44.775 --> 00:40:16.047
It's very, very easy shipping outside of the United States is not, it is very, And thankfully we've done enough of it, you know, hundreds and hundreds and customers in Europe, Australia, as we mentioned Asia, as we mentioned Brazil I I, it actually fell down the other day, but yeah, so that needs Yeah.
00:40:16.197 --> 00:40:16.496
Yeah.
00:40:16.527 --> 00:40:20.456
I think let's see what continents aren't we on?
00:40:20.487 --> 00:40:22.427
Well, obviously Antarctic . Yeah.
00:40:23.086 --> 00:40:24.106
We've shipped to Africa.
00:40:24.106 --> 00:40:25.126
We shipped to south America.
00:40:25.217 --> 00:40:26.266
We've shipped to every continent.
00:40:26.356 --> 00:40:26.956
No question.
00:40:27.063 --> 00:40:29.043
It's, it's pretty, but it's pretty complicated.
00:40:29.043 --> 00:40:34.940
And our folks are pretty good at figuring out and That's where That's where the customer comes back into the picture.
00:40:34.940 --> 00:40:43.175
And voila finished board show up and all those things that So you've got all that, Melissa.
00:40:43.175 --> 00:40:44.706
You understand how everything's done now?
00:40:45.155 --> 00:40:45.516
Yeah.
00:40:46.826 --> 00:41:01.596
I, what I was thinking though, is w we got into the weeds on a few of these be fun to kind of break down some of these things individually and really,
00:41:01.856 --> 00:41:05.226
Yeah I think we could go really deep into some of these things,
00:41:05.376 --> 00:41:06.965
which I th I, I don't know.
00:41:06.965 --> 00:41:16.985
I, I think, I think the audience might eat it up because I feel like we're, we're Right.
00:41:18.186 --> 00:41:21.460
So hopefully our audience would find that interesting.
00:41:21.460 --> 00:41:27.831
If you're listening to this and you want to hear, you know, Send us an email.
00:41:28.201 --> 00:41:30.530
Melissa, do you have our, our new email up yet?
00:41:30.860 --> 00:41:31.490
You know what it is?
00:41:31.760 --> 00:41:34.530
It's contact@pickplacepodcast.com.
00:41:34.851 --> 00:41:37.971
Are there any Oxford commas between pickplacepodcast.com?
00:41:39.530 --> 00:41:40.981
Are you allowed to have commas in an email?
00:41:41.510 --> 00:41:41.990
God, no.
00:41:41.990 --> 00:41:42.530
I hope not
00:41:45.411 --> 00:41:47.221
You were about to make me question everything.
00:41:47.288 --> 00:41:50.288
Well inside joke about Oxford commas, but we yeah.
00:41:51.327 --> 00:42:24.719
Is it contact or contacts, contact, contact at pickplacepodcast.com Let us know if you like the show, let us know if you want But I think next week if all goes, according to plan, we may actually who purchasing and what their job is like and what they have to do We talked about ordering parts and dealing with suppliers and authorized I don't know.
00:42:24.719 --> 00:42:25.949
I think it will be pretty interesting.
00:42:25.949 --> 00:42:28.409
You let us know if you don't and you don't want to hear that.
00:42:28.409 --> 00:42:29.775
And then we'll we'll change it up.
00:42:30.045 --> 00:42:30.315
Yeah.
00:42:30.315 --> 00:42:36.525
Well, we'll talk about like muscle cars and whatever, you know, people
00:42:36.746 --> 00:42:39.076
But if all goes according to plans, we'll talk about parts.
00:42:39.286 --> 00:42:40.005
Yeah, that'd be cool.
00:42:40.005 --> 00:42:42.824
So we got we've got Brett and Magnus.
00:42:42.824 --> 00:42:44.293
Hopefully there'll be able to join us.
00:42:44.378 --> 00:42:45.668
They're part of our team and they.
00:42:46.193 --> 00:42:49.704
They do the part purchasing for all of your orders.
00:42:49.793 --> 00:42:52.748
And it's a tough job sometimes, but they're pretty good at it.
00:42:52.748 --> 00:42:54.668
And they're, they're great guys.
00:42:54.668 --> 00:42:55.717
It'd be really fun to hear from them.
00:42:56.918 --> 00:42:57.277
All right.
00:42:57.277 --> 00:43:29.059
So I guess we can I guess we can wrap it up and we just want to If you like, what you heard consider subscribing and your favorite podcast We'll be at apple podcast and now we're on Spotify, Google podcast, We really appreciate a review and a rating as the helps us grow a little and hopefully convinces our losses that we should keep doing the show.
00:43:30.409 --> 00:43:31.699
Thanks for listening guys.
00:43:31.708 --> 00:43:44.289
We'll talk to you later.
