Perfect prototype soldering with the eC-reflow equipment – a lively Eurocircuits workshop in Augsburg.

On 28 – 29 November 2012 Eurocircuits GmbH ran two one-day workshops in Augsburg, Germany. The topic was SMD assembly. A total of 36 people attended.

Our hosts were Claudia and Benedikt Sauter, the owners of embedded projects GmbH, a young company distributing third-party products from Atmel Arduino and Olimex as well as developing their own embedded measurement and control solutions. Their flagship product is the Gnublin Linux family of boards (http://www.gnublin.org/designer). These allow engineers to develop their own embedded solutions.

Benedikt Sauer started the proceedings each day with a presentation of his company and its products.

Uwe Doerr then gave a short introduction to Eurocircuits GmbH, followed by an overview of the theoretical part of the workshop. He followed this with a presentation of the features and operating principles of Eurocircuits’ reflow soldering equipment, the eC-stencil-mate solder paste printer and the eC-reflow-mate reflow oven.


 

 

Ben Verwaest, SMT specialist from Arcoss, Belgium, and Eurocircuits’ soldering technology partner, then explained the different processes and materials used for assembling PCB using surface-mount technology.

This completed the theoretical presentations and we moved onto the practical part of the day. The first step was to print solder paste onto demo PCBs using the eC-stencil-mate printer. Each step was explained in detail to show the participants how to achieve professional quality results.

Next the components were placed and the boards reflow soldered in the eC-reflow-mate. A big screen was on hand so that the audience could see what Ben and Uwe were describing as they explained the critical features of each stage of the soldering process.

Ben then moved on to demonstrate tricks and tips for hand soldering. The participants had been encouraged to bring their own problems and queries for this part of the day, so that they could work with Ben to find solutions..

Finally he showed how to solder a BGA. This was a live demonstration using a special BGA soldering station. Ben explained in detail the difficulties of soldering BGAs and what procedures to adopt how to overcome them.

Throughout the participants showed great interest in the topics presented. Their questions made each workshop a lively and successful event. Even between presentations, Benedikt, Uwe and Ben were kept busy answering yet more questions..