These days we’ve got powerful free tools to do CAD and circuit design, cheap desktop 3D printers that can knock out bespoke enclosures, and convenient services that will spin up a stack of your PCBs and send them hurtling towards your front door for far less than anyone could have imagined. In short, if you want to build your own professional-looking gadgets, the only limit is your time and ambition. Well, assuming you only want to build a few of them, anyway.
Once you start adding some zeros to the number of units you’re looking to produce, hand assembling PCBs quickly becomes a non-starter. Enter the pick and place machine. This wonder of modern technology can drop all those microscopic components on your board in a fraction of the time it would take a human, and never needs to take a bathroom break. This week Chris Denney stopped by the Hack Chat to talk about these incredible machines and all the minutiae of turning your circuit board design into a finished product.
Chris is the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Worthington Assembly, a quick turn electronics manufacturer in South Deerfield, Massachusetts that has been building and shipping custom circuit boards since 1974. He knows a thing or two about PCB production, and looking to help junior and mid-level engineers create easier to manufacture designs, he started the “Pick, Place, Podcast” when COVID hit and in-person tours of the facility were no longer possible. Now he says he can tell when a board comes from a r ..
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