PineapplePNP.com

Design Files In -> Assembled PCB's Out

Jacob Christ

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Description

PineapplePNP.com is a low cost service for low volume prototype PCB's.

So here's what happened. About a year ago the contract manufacture that pontech.com uses to assemble our very small volume of PCBA's kicked us to the curb. They did this because we were too small. Apparently we were not the only customer they did this too. This was very frustrating since we had spent $10K+ (USD) over the last three year on NRE (non reoccurring engineering) on PNP (pick-n-place) programming and stencils and were once again looking to have to spend the same money again. On top of this we were now very aware that this scenario could happen again. To mitigate the risk we had several ideas:

1. Buy our own PNP machine.
2. Build our own PNP machine.
3. Do not put all our eggs in one basket (use more than one CM).

Details

Currently in alpha testing. Contact me if you want to try it out.

We choose options 2 and 3.

The reason we didn't choose option 1 was due to the nature of what we build. Commercial pick and place machines are designed to pick lost of parts fast to build the same boards over and over. The lowest end machine we considered would have 90% excess capacity for what we build. Also, it wasn't hack-able.

Components

2 × LAMP + Python Web Servers
1 × eagle-bom.py
1 × ki-cost.py
1 × Custom PNP Machine
1 × OpenPNP Software

Project Logs

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twillio.com
Jacob Christ • 02/06/2016 at 20:43 • 0 comments

One of the first things we got working was phone number verification using twilio.com. We probably didn't need twilio.com verification for the time being but we plan offering crazy incentives to use our site and we need a mechanism to minimize abuse of offers. You can try this feature out today by getting an account and verifying your phone number.
Eagle BOM Extraction Working
Jacob Christ • 02/05/2016 at 23:18 • 0 comments

A couple of weeks ago I got prototype functionality of BOM extraction from eagle files working on the site. Its not live live, but it works on the site. This was mostly made possible by the use of eagle-bom.py.Next step is to rip the guts out of ki-cost.py to do costing.