Archive for September 15, 2013
Open Access v4 boards nearly ready!
A lot of folks have been e-mailing to ask when the new Open Access v4 boards will be ready. They are actually getting made right in Southern California at a small manufacturer near 23b. I went over to the factory yesterday to sort out a few minor issues, and the first run of PCBs is nearly done. We’re looking at being able to ship product in the next week.
The owner of AD Assembly was kind enough to show us around and let me take some pictures. Basically, I’ve concluded that small startup ventures can easily get their stuff made locally if they’re willing to put in a little work and optimize their designs to minimize hand-labor.
Machines aren’t really cheaper to run in China than here, and there is a huge advantage to being 5 miles away when the factory calls you to sort out a problem.
Here we have about 25 stuffed PCBs queued up to go into the wave soldering machine. They have previously been stuffed with SMT parts and reflow soldered.
This is the last step before cleaning and QA. When they get to us, they are final-inspected, tested, programmed with a bootloader and the latest release version of Open Access and packed for shipping.
The owner Anoi is pretty involved with his assembly business. Here he is doing some QA work on a PCB mid-way through the run.
This is the Pick-and-place running our PCBs. When this thing fires up, it’s fast. The 1-hour hand-placing operation gets done in about 30 seconds with this thing.
In any case, we’ll be ready to ship soon. Also expect a new software release at the same time,.
Arclight
September 15, 2013