Re:Show HN: Reverse-Engineering a Switch Lite with 1,917 wires
by eichin on Sunday February 25, 2024 @05:43PM
(#39505691)
This is amazing (particular the hand soldering - I love the genre of "this is impossible, you'd need to do this thing thousands of times" "so I did the thing thousands of times" persistence) but I wonder, now that homebrew pick-and-place is starting to become a thing, is there any practical way to take advantage of that? I pick-and-place tip that was vaguely like a wire-wrap tool seems almost plausible. Or is this more like bond-wires on chips and needs an order of magnitude more precision?
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Re:Show HN: Reverse-Engineering a Switch Lite with 1,917 wires
by uSoldering on Sunday February 25, 2024 @06:18PM
(#39505966)
For this PCB, the smallest targets are about 0.2mm in diameter. In terms of precision robotics, this is very manageable. A robotic soldering iron, or even a laser soldering system, with a wire feeder and cutter could be used to make something like a rudimentary die-bonder, that simply solders the wires to the correct pads.
My background in process engineering made me lean towards a figuring out very manual process that could be automated, instead of figuring out a highly automated process.