Tools That Speed Up Rapid Prototyping
How do you speed up prototyping for a small business that isn’t ready for full scale manufacturing tooling? You design custom tooling that allows them to move faster and prove designs before full scale manufacturing.
SMD Pick and Place
There’s a real market gap at the prototyping level for small companies. At scale circuit boards are assembled by machines, however getting small validation runs built is often expensive and slow. Skilled technicians can assemble boards by hand, however modern electronics are on a constant march towards miniaturization making this task harder.
For one small team we designed and put together what we call a manual pick and place allowing for far more accurate hand placement of tiny components. This tool allows for rapid assembly of small design validation runs before larger orders are placed. The team is now able to quickly and reliably place fine pitch ICs and components down to 0402 size and get prototype boards built in hours, not weeks.
The tool works so well that CEGAN Consulting uses one for building prototype boards as well.
Stencil Fixturing
To go with the manual pick and place, The team also asked for a better way to handle solder paste stencils. There aren’t many good solutions for using smaller frame less stencils and many teams resort to aligning them by hand using tape and other bare circuit boards to hold the target board in place.
This custom fixture pre-tensions the stencils and provides an alignment platform with 3 degrees of adjustment, making alignment easy and repeatable. The fixture also makes use of a parallel lifting mechanism to avoid smearing paste on smaller pads, something that other options fail to do. Cleaner solder paste stenciling leads to fewer defects on hand assembled boards.
This system is now used for all of CEGAN Consulting’s own internal prototyping as well.
Programming Stations
The final pain point to prototyping circuit boards is programming the boards. You can incorporate engineering test points or dedicated programming headers, but those can take time to setup for each board. This modular station allows different board designs to be quickly swapped out depending on what is being worked on that day.
This standardizes the process for provisioning prototypes and small scale manufacturing runs, greatly decreasing the time required.