[TriEmbed] Excellent walk-through of an Australian SMT manufacturing line

[Pete Soper]

Here's a very detailed tour 
<http://www.eevblog.com/2014/11/19/eevblog-684-ness-smt-maufacturing-assembly-factory-tour/> 
of the assembly line belonging to Ness <http://nesscorporation.com/>, an 
Australian security system manufacturer that also does contract hardware 
manufacturing.

A few points that grabbed my interest:
   1) They use glue for boards with surface mount parts on both sides of 
the board.
   2) They are careful to use an (expensive) saw to cut boards vs just 
snapping V-groove PCBs apart. Of course with hobby boards, we'll take 
the chance. But I was astonished to see the manual labor involved with 
this and wondered if only a tiny fraction of their boards were cut this 
way. The throughput numbers suggested this would be a killer bottleneck 
in their process if it applied to all boards.
   3) Conformal coating needs multiple layers to be effective. Lots of 
layers, according to this extremely experienced gent.
   4) Dave Jones seems to have wangled a deal where his "uCurrent Gold" 
current measurement adapter is made by Ness there is a brief view of his 
boards going through the build process.
http://www.eevblog.com/2014/11/19/eevblog-684-ness-smt-maufacturing-assembly-factory-tour/
   5) Who would have realized that Fresnel lens quality is to infrared 
sensing performance as antenna quality is to RF signal handling 
performance? Not all PIR detectors are alike, according to this old hand.

-Pete

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