When a new telescope is completed, one of the big milestones is known as “first light” – the first time that the telescope is used as it is intended.
Now that I am the proud owner of a reflow oven – a modified Black & Decker toaster oven fitted with Whizoo’s Controleo3 reflow oven kit – and I have a new version of my boards back – it’s time to think about how to build these things in a reasonable way.
The plan is obviously to switch from hand-soldering to reflow. To do that, the first thing that I need is a stencil that I can use to apply solder paste. Thankfully, kicad makes this really easy; you can modify the solder pad tolerances in the program, and the pcb editor can write out SVG files (thanks to Rheingold Heavy for this post). If I have the pads, I can easily cut a stencil, likely out of mylar because it’s a bit cheaper than Kapton is.
That would give me a way to do a single board if I could hand-align it closely enough. But each of the globes needs 12 of these boards, and hand-aligning is a pain.
So… what my real plan to do is to cut holes in a piece of hardboard (or cardboard) that will hold a number of the boards (12 or 24) and then a matching stencil. If I align the stencil one, then I can put solder paste on all of them.
So, here’s the test. I took the pad svg and the board edge svg, joined them in inkscape and then cut them on the glowforge. As you can see, the boards fit perfectly into the cutouts, and the solder pads cut correctly. Next I will need to do a better version of this, with different colors for the pads and board edge so I can turn them off and off when laser cutting. I’m also probably going to cut holes for some posts that will give me registration between the board with cutouts and the stencil.
You can also see the first two boards that ran through the reflow oven. I did the solder paste without a stencil and I also skipped baking the LEDs since they showed up in a factory-sealed pack and have been sealed since, and both boards came out fine. And a 10 minute reflow cycle is a lot quicker than hand soldering…