MISC

How Moteinos are made

In the present all Moteinos are machine assembled on a pick and place and reflowed in a 3-zone conveyor SMT reflow oven. Watch this video lapse of a MoteinoMEGA panel assembly:

In the beginning…

… there was a lot of hand picking and placing. Moteinos were hand assembled using various tools that I built to make the job easier and faster. For instance I perfected a method to make soda-can SMD metal stencils and spread solder paste to the bare PCBs. Back then stencils were still expensive. I then placed the SMD components using a manual home-made PnP (pick and place) apparatus. I reflowed the boards in a toaster oven following a reflow profile, and hand solder the transceivers on the bottom. I then set the fuses and load the bootloader using a programming jig. Many thousands of early revision Moteinos were made this way.

apply pastebakeprogramming jig

Here’s a video of some hand assembly action:

Moteino first revision & 3rd party reviews