Welcome back to the factory. You've caught us right in the middle of commissioning six new pieces of machinery for our SMT production line. This week, I'll walk you through what each one does and what it means for our SMT capabilities in the future. Let's do it.

We spent all day Monday just moving the crates into this space, uncrating each machine and getting them on the ground then aligning them in roughly the orientation that they need to be for this final alignment and commissioning. In all, we've had six new machines arrive.

Let's start from the start of the assembly line. At the front is a PCB destacker. This accepts a stack of PCB panels, and it's capable of separating them and feeding them down the line one panel at a time. In our previous configuration, we were pasting panels with a semi-automatic paste machine and then loading them into a PCB unloader. That's a magazine that injects pre-pasted panels onto the production line.

Now, the PCB destacker feeds directly into a fully automatic stencilling machine. We load a framed stencil into this machine and charge it with paste, and then it takes the rest from there. It will automatically paste every panel that passes through it and perform a visual inspection. And this is super important.

Where before we were semi-automatic pasting and then visually inspecting ourselves, this machine will automatically inspect the quality of the solder paste job. And this is one of the most important steps in the production line because it affects the quality of the board all the way through. If you have a improperly pasted board, it means that components may not stick to that paste during pick and placement. And of course, it won't solder correctly when it goes through the oven. So this is a huge upgrade for the speed and consistency of solder pasting. And this machine is enormous. It's the heaviest machine on our line at about a ton. And when you take a look through the service hatch, it's no surprise why.

Looking in the lower doors, you can see this enormous cast iron piece that gives the machine its weight and stability. The automatic stencil also cleans stencils automatically using these fiber cloths and some alcohol. So in the back, there's a alcohol reservoir, presumably to charge these cleaning rollers to clean the stencil. Periodic cleaning, of course, being really important for the quality of the stencilling for really, really small apertures. You don't want any solder paste being exposed to air for too long and drying and blocking those apertures from the stencilling machine.

We move along an upgraded conveyor into the pick and place machine. The components get placed and then from the pick and place machine along another new conveyor into our T4 reflow oven. It's nearly two meters long and it has four heating zones each on the top and bottom. So that's, I guess, eight zones total.

Now, the extra length means that the belt speed can move faster, which is important for really high throughput boards like our Glowbit Rainbow. Each of those can be processed faster than, say, once every two minutes by the pick and place machine. And with our old setup, the constraint was actually the belt speed of our older IN6 reflow oven. With a longer oven, we can get the same amount of heating time, but over a longer distance with that faster belt speed.

Now, a rather important feature of this oven, the T4 is a rail oven, unlike our previous IN6, which was a belt. And that means that the center of the oven is actually hotter than the edges. So we have to take that into account when we're doing our reflow profiles. We have to make sure that the center of the board gets up to temperature, but we don't want to overcook the edges. So it's a little bit of a balancing act to make sure that we get a good reflow across the whole board. The panel will be in free space, which is a huge technology unlock for us, because it means that this production line theoretically should be capable of double-sided loads. That's where you put a board through the production line to put parts on one side, then you flip it over and put it through again to load parts on the other side. And that's an enormous upgrade when you think about the differences that it can make to the designs that we create.

If we can load components on both sides, there's obviously an opportunity there to miniaturize the boards or just offset having a really large component, like, say, a microSD card connector on the opposite side of the board to where most of the components are.

Looking under the hood of the T4, you can clearly see the four heated zones. They seem to be arranged in two racks, one rack of three and then a final rack on the output of the oven. At the start of the rail are these two oilers, which will drip oil at a controlled rate onto the rail to make sure that it stays lubricated and free of oxidation.

The T4 has a monster power budget. I think it requires, according to the data sheet, about 24 kilowatts during heat up, and then while it's idling at temperature, it runs at about seven kilowatts. So we've had to drop three-phase power just for this machine. And even so, that heat up current draw is a little higher than we would like. But thankfully, in the configurations, you can dial it down to say heat up at half that amount.

And finally, at the end of our production line is a PCB cassette loader. This will catch each panel as it comes out of the oven and load it into a cassette. In this way, rather than catching every panel individually as it comes out of the oven, like.We had to start with the IN6. This will just create a batch of panels that are ready to be cleaned and tested. In the case where we might be doing a double-sided load, we would take that cassette off, walk it to the front of the production line, flip the boards over, and then we'd be able to send them through again by loading them into the PCB unloader.

Now, even though we have this new, fancy, fully automatic pasting machine, we'll probably hang on to that semi-automatic pasting machine because we're quite familiar with using it. And for lower volume runs, it may actually be faster to set that machine up than to set up the fully automatic machine. But certainly for high throughput designs like the Glowbit Rainbow and other Glowbit products, the fully automatic machine will be able to process hundreds of boards much faster than we could semi-automatic paste them.

What remains to be done is to connect power and air supply to each machine and then to give the production line a final levelling so that all the rails line up nicely, so that a PCB can pass all the way through. That'll probably be done by the end of this week.

This upgrade really is greater than the sum of its parts. Any one of these machines by themselves would have been a welcome upgrade and increased our capability. But together, they create a production line that is basically hands off. You can load panels in one end and catch them in a cassette as they come out the other. Aside from that, all you really have to do is keep the thing fed with components.

We can't wait to see what we can make using this new production line, and the improvements it gives to challenging soldering jobs like our GlowBit Matrix boards and PiicoDev line-up.

And of course, we'll keep you updated with any lessons that we learn along the way. In any case, we've got more commissioning to do. So until next time, thanks for watching.