At each company I have consulted for, there is one or more recognized company manual electroinic rework technician(s). They solder stuff. And some of them are like AWESOME at it (and some are far less awesome, but I won’t mention that here). As an EE consultant seeking praise and accolade often resulting in extensions and recommendations for other internal gigs, I am happy to assume the credit for any successes. But as for soldering, why do the work when one can delegate? So I have had years go by since needing to do any actual soldering.
Well, I got blindsided the other day when I was in the electronics lab at DMS. The lab is awesome now, and so my presence in there alongside the fact that I mentioned being an EE had resulted in a request from a gentleman needing a small amount of rework. I’ve done plenty of soldering back in the day, and all he needed was to fix the connector on a USB memory stick that had been broken. The connector that we all recognize as USB prior to plugging into the side of the laptop had broken off the board. Simple enough, right? I told him it should take me just a few minutes.
Well, many, many minutes later, I was still wrestling with this problem. In fact, I spent the whole evening working on this, and never even fixed it. It was embarrassing. I am shamed forever…it should not be so hard to do a simple four solder joints.
But it was, and I want to explain why. But most importantly, I see opportunity, and I want to see what others think,
The problem was that the pads had been lifted where the connector usually attached. They appeared goldenish to the naked eye, so I spent a good half hour wondering why I could not get the the solder to flow onto them when heated. I also had not used the equipment in our lab for soldering, so I had to get acclimated to which of the tools available were the good ones for this, that. And there is no stereo ring light optics, so I tried to use my eyeballs only.
Finally, I realized that I needed a magnified look, so I grabbed one of the old school magnifying things on adjustable stand (I hate these, we need optics in there). This helped and I gathered the notion that I had no pads, but wanted to confirm. So I used the magnified camera with platform system recently donated,. This thing was cool for looking at stuff, and I could clearly see that there was no pads.
So now, my plan changed to grab power and ground from nearby vias, then rub soldermask off the USB pair and flow solder to the point at which the trace ordinarily contacts the now missing pad. After a long time trying to do this, I was not able to get the soldermask off well enough to make solder flow. And even if I had, the traces were too small for me to keep them from bridging.
I tried soldering direct to the USB transceiver. This was the point where I started to realize that things had shrunk to the point where my hands were not a good tool for this work at these sizes.
And so that is where I am right now and the reason I am writing here. You see, I think a robotic soldering system is in order now for not only DMS, but I think it could be useful in the industry generally. I have not seen one in the industry for board design (chip probing is different setup, picoprobe big name). And I think that this is something easy to make for my background, as LabVIEW, robotics and cameras are strengths in my resume. I could whip up a nice gui for this in a few hours.
So what do others think? Does this sound crazy to you? Have you guys seen such a thing in the industry?
Now I need to differentiate what I am talking about vs. automated soldering equipment used in manufacturing. Automated soldering stations are a thing in manufacturing, but I think something more flexible and user drivable (while watching magnified ringlight camera) with iron (or hot air, or both), camera, solder, and wire holder, all controllable through the gui or game controller.
Am I crazy or is this increasingly becoming a good idea? Suggestions about how such a thing should be made to operate? Any items anyone has seen that would work well for iron? Solder dispensing? magnified machine movable camers? Movable mechanical grasper?
