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Here's a <a
href="http://www.eevblog.com/2014/11/19/eevblog-684-ness-smt-maufacturing-assembly-factory-tour/">very
detailed tour</a> of the assembly line belonging to <a
href="http://nesscorporation.com/">Ness</a>, an Australian
security system manufacturer that also does contract hardware
manufacturing.<br>
<br>
A few points that grabbed my interest:<br>
1) They use glue for boards with surface mount parts on both sides
of the board.<br>
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.<br>
3) Conformal coating needs multiple layers to be effective. Lots
of layers, according to this extremely experienced gent.<br>
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. <br>
<a
href="http://www.eevblog.com/2014/11/19/eevblog-684-ness-smt-maufacturing-assembly-factory-tour/">http://www.eevblog.com/2014/11/19/eevblog-684-ness-smt-maufacturing-assembly-factory-tour/</a><br>
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.<br>
<br>
-Pete<br>
<br>
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