We just wanted to remind everyone that next Wednesday, November 17th is our Solder Stenciling Class! If you are going to be mass producing boards (or even just doing more than a few), solder stenciling can be a huge time saver and sanity preserver!
Just not that fun to solder by hand.
In this class we will be teaching the basics of solder stenciling, including showing you the patented (not really) method of using a skillet to do your reflow. You'll also get to take home an Arduino Pro that you created.
For the class, we are getting our stencils from Ryan O'Hara of OHARARP. This is a great source for your stencils with a quick turnaround and a quality product! Hope to see you at class!
Will SparkFun be uploading a podcast of this class?
If i know SparkFun, they will.
Just wanted to say that we are glad we could help out!
Great class! It was fun and informative. Thanks!
I agree! Just enough challenge to make it really interesting... ...next time you get an board, stop and look at those tiny, tiny little components and think about placing them on not-to-sticky/pretty slippery solder paste pads with tweezers. :) Still, it was awesome to get 100% yield (not counting the first stenciling that got washed off the board) after reflow! What happens to all the extras we made?
Hi,
This seems to be very useful to us. But since we are from Sri Lanka, we cannot participate to this. So it will be a great help, if you can arrange a full DIY kit kind of a thing for this. So that, we can purchase online & follow the instructions at home.
Thanks.
Man I wish I could go to this, looks like a blast.
Thanks for the tip on the stencil source though.
What a coincedence. I'm at my desk right now waiting for the postman to deliver my stencils from Ohararp. This will be the first time I've tried Ohararp and I'm anxious to see how the stencils turned out. I had been ordering from Pololu but their quality seems to be going down and I wanted to try Kapton instead of Mylar.
The kapton stencils are much nicer than mylar - less burrs / ragged edges on the cutouts.