Blinky grid PCBs in panels?

We recently received an SMT pick and place machine in my electronics shop were I teach. I would like to buy your Blinky grid PCBs in panelized form if available. Our machine can handle up to a 10" x 10" panel. Please let me know if this is available. Thank you.

Hello, thanks for the message. We’d love to discuss, so please fill out our contact form over here: http://www.wayneandlayne.com/contact/

Thanks!

Hello
I have been trying unsuccessfully to get a reply to my question regarding purchasing the blinky grid PCBs in panel form. Can someone please get back to me?

G Nyzio

Hey there, we haven’t seen a message come in from that google form we use, but I’ll check again to see if any messages got stuck in the queue.

We haven’t made panelized PCBs before, but we have played around with populating a blinky grid smt with a pick-n-place machine. It worked pretty well, the 1206 and SOIC components aren’t too demanding in terms of placement accuracy.

The only reason we haven’t tried a multi-board panel is that we don’t have one of the nice stencil jigs to for doing the solderpaste. Do you have one of those tools? So far I’ve been applying solderpaste and pick-n-placing the parts for one board at a time, then reflowing a dozen together at once.

When you say “our machine can handle up to a 10” x 10" panel" does that mean the maximum panel size, or the maximum size of the area where components can be placed?

If you’re interested, I can figure out how to make a panel of grid smt boards and sell you a couple. Otherwise we can certainly sell you individual PCBs, just let us know.

Hi,
The 10" x 10" board size our machine can handle is what its limitations are of its conveyor system. The actual area the machine can physically pick and place components is quite a bit larger than that. I would imagine that whoever your vendor is for your PCBs must panelize all of them to optimize production and keep costs low and then singulate them prior to shipping. If you could find out what that size is for me that would be great. We also have a manual and semi-automatic stencil printer which should also handle that size (I will double check).

I teach electronics at a vocational school and we run an eight week exploratory program at the beginning of each year to recruit students into our shops. My intent is to be able to demonstrate our high tech electronics manufacturing capability to all students and let them each have a blinky grid circuit to keep as a gift. We generally get about 15 students per week which works out to about 120 students. An amount of 15 PCBs per panel would be ideal. If we can do this economically we would also give them as gifts to people/companies that donate to our VEX robotics teams.

Please let me know,
Thanks
Guy Nyzio

Hi Guy, that sounds really cool, thanks for thinking of us and our Blinky kits. I’ll follow up with your manufacturers to see how many copies of the grid smt circuit board we could fit in a 10x10 inch panel. I’m out of town this coming weekend but hopefully we’ll hear back before Friday.