PCB Stencils- what are they? When trying to apply solder paste to a printed circuit board for surface mount soldering, a PCB stencil can be very useful. A stencil is a flat sheet with pads cut out to match your pcb design. This allows you to build boards faster, better, and more easily. Most PCB …
Month: July 2018
Daily Update: 7/10/18
Both yesterday and today marked the most exciting days of my co-op so far- I finally got to put my U2F tokens together! After figuring out the reflow oven (a set-up walk through will be in another blog post), and building a stencil, it was finally time to put everything together. First, I watched …
Daily Update: 7/4/18
Today I worked on the blog, helped rearrange the office, opened up all our beautiful PCBs (https://blog.redkeyu2f.com/2018/07/05/u2f-token-building-the-pcbs-arrive/), and started learning about reflow ovens. Now that all our parts are here, we have to learn how to properly use our toaster oven to solder our boards. Apparently there’s quite a bit of technique to this- good …
U2F Token Building- the PCBs Arrive!!
Today our package from http://dirtypcbs.com/store/pcbs arrived! We ordered a +/- 10 protopack of a design we knew should work, as well as a protopack that I had updated the Gerber files on and resubmitted. We had NO idea if these would turn out at all, but they look perfect. Here’s the package the 22 PCBs came in …
Learning KiCad
We first stumbled across KiCad when looking to modify PCB components before sending the boards in for manufacturing. We learned that to modify the PCB, we had to modify the Gerber files, and to do that, you should use KiCad. This was a bit of a snag in our plan as none of use knew …