New stencil machine at the 3D Robotics factory

That's a new fancy stencil printer coming in, beside one of our pick-and-place machines at the 3D Robotics factory in San Diego. All sort of new equipment is in place, including the new reflow oven, automatic glue dispenser (for two-sided boards), lots of smart feeders for the pick-and-place etc.

All this automation and high-quality equipment has meant a massive improvement in board quality and yield. Our aim is to produce the most reliable and robust boards in the industry, and this kind of investment will help us get there.

We'll be moving to an even larger (8,400 square foot) space in the next few weeks, in anticipation of ramping up with a bunch of new products. If you're in San Diego and want a tour, ping me and I can arrange a time with the team there.

Richard: all boards do go through a very comprehensive QA process before leaving the factory (nothing leaves if it's not tested and working), but what we've learned is that for complex boards like these with many fine-pitch components, there are things that can go wrong after it leaves the factory: in shipping, use (vibration), and errors in user soldering.

We've already made many small changes in the boards to reduce these problems. We've switched to gold-immersion foils, redesigned contact pads to be bigger, upgraded both the pick-and-place machine and reflow oven for more consistent placement and soldering (and as this post described, have now upgraded the stencil machine, too) and enforced better antistatic measures throughout the factory. All those are designed to improve the yield at the factory and to make the boards more robust and vibration tolerant in use.

Our yield rate (QA pass) out of the machines is now 97%, which is up there with best-of-breed electronics manufacturing. So I think you'll see a dramatic reduction in hardware issues in the field.

The last thing is user soldering error, which continues to be a problem as we reach a bigger, less technically-skilled market. So I think you'll see future boards all pre-soldered. Going forward, all designs are focused on minimizing chip counts, using specially reinforced USB connectors, moving all configuration to software rather than hardware switches (which can break in crashes) and otherwise making these things as bulletproof and foolproof as we can. All of the investment you're seeing in the factory reflects three years of learning with thousands of autopilots in the field. Aside from the military I don't think anyone has stress-tested autopilot electronics as much as our community has, and all that experience (sometimes painful!) has led to the design and production process that we've now got in place.

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3D Robotics

Chris Anderson August 4, 2011 at 11:20am

Soldering skills are something that can always be improved, even by those of us who have been doing it a long time. But I think that rather than teaching better soldering techniques, we're going to eliminate soldering altogether from most of our products. It's a barrier to entry for many people and increases the tech support load for us.
3D Robotics

Chris Anderson August 4, 2011 at 10:34am

Richard: all boards do go through a very comprehensive QA process before leaving the factory (nothing leaves if it's not tested and working), but what we've learned is that for complex boards like these with many fine-pitch components, there are things that can go wrong after it leaves the factory: in shipping, use (vibration), and errors in user soldering.

We've already made many small changes in the boards to reduce these problems. We've switched to gold-immersion foils, redesigned contact pads to be bigger, upgraded both the pick-and-place machine and reflow oven for more consistent placement and soldering (and as this post described, have now upgraded the stencil machine, too) and enforced better antistatic measures throughout the factory. All those are designed to improve the yield at the factory and to make the boards more robust and vibration tolerant in use.

Our yield rate (QA pass) out of the machines is now 97%, which is up there with best-of-breed electronics manufacturing. So I think you'll see a dramatic reduction in hardware issues in the field.

The last thing is user soldering error, which continues to be a problem as we reach a bigger, less technically-skilled market. So I think you'll see future boards all pre-soldered. Going forward, all designs are focused on minimizing chip counts, using specially reinforced USB connectors, moving all configuration to software rather than hardware switches (which can break in crashes) and otherwise making these things as bulletproof and foolproof as we can. All of the investment you're seeing in the factory reflects three years of learning with thousands of autopilots in the field. Aside from the military I don't think anyone has stress-tested autopilot electronics as much as our community has, and all that experience (sometimes painful!) has led to the design and production process that we've now got in place.

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