Yesterday we spent a day in the factory to assemble the first badges.

Paste dispensing

Paste is applied using a stencil and a machine to align the PCB with the stencil resulting in a nice and accurate solder paster being applied.

Component stuffing

With a variety of machines: larger pick and place machines for the bigger components and a high speed ship shooter for the passives and SOT23 packages, we managed to do our first test PCB with everything correctly mounted.

Baking 

Once we manually inspect the board for proper placement of the components, the boards goes through a large reflow oven for approximately 7 minutes. 

Quick test to verify component orientations

Before continuing we did a quick test to verify all the component orientations. 

Mass production

As you can see, we've got a lot of boards to stuff this week.