The heart of the operation: the pick and place machine
A lot has changed since my last photo tour of the DIY Drones San Diego factory. We've moved next door to space more than twice as large and added all sort of new pro equipment including everything from a big new reflow oven to a special high-precision scale that allows us to count the exact number of parts in a kit by weight, so we never miss one.
It's easy to make a few PCBs or even send them out to a fab to have them made, and a lot of people getting into electronics start that way. But once you get beyond a few dozen boards to hundreds and then thousands, you need your own factory to ensure that the products are manufactured and tested right. For every product there must be a test jig and test code to check it and you need as many people in customer and technical support as there are in production.
DIY Drones now has a dozen employees doing everything from new product development to customer support. Here are pictures of many of them and their work stations:
The pick and place doing its magic!
Arturo applying solder paste
Close-up of the use of a paste stencil
Anette and Mireya in shipping
Cindy testing
Changing the feeders for a different board
Final hand-placement of components by Brian
Operations manager Lorenzo Lopez. He's The MAN!
Amateurs break their PCBs along the score lines. Bad idea (it can cause cracks)! Pros use a PCB cutter.
Rebecca does the accounting
The reflow oven!
Here's the oven's control panel
Samuel, one of the design engineers, shows off a glimpse of a new OSD board that's in development. Shhh!
Anette at a shipping station
Shipping supplies!
Comments
Nice photos. You have good working conditions and do a great job! I was happy to look it.
P.S. Why Yvett's photo is from the back?
Nice to see you have the samereflow oven as i have.
Pros use a PCB cutter if the board made right with the right Solder you dont get problems.
Pros also use a Real Stencil Printing Machine.
Nice kit
It always struck us ever since VA Research & Redhat that the mark of an open source operation was employed factory workers, accountants, & managers, with engineering conspicuously absent, engineering was the 1 part made up of all volunteers doing something else for a living. Why wasn't the customer service, accounting, manufacturing, & shipping done by volunteers, too? It was because the open source movement was started by engineers & that has always kept it specific to the engineering part in our minds.