Pre-Christmas Crazy times – Expansion of production capacity with three new Samsung machines

Probably many of you wonder why we are so silent recent months and nothing new is posting on the blog. The reason is quite casual – we are overwhelmed with work!

Starting from September something odd happens. Our OLinuXino customers went in crazy mode and we start getting almost twice more orders than usual. All who have been dealing with production know that to double capacity needs time.

This is the reason for the delay with iCE40HX8K-EVB, A64-OLinuXino, TERES release – there is simple no free window on the SMT assembly machines and testers to may run them, the machines are busy with OLinuXino and SOM assembly.

The small orders are shipping on time i.e. in 1-3 working days, but all bigger OLinuXino and SOM orders for 50+ boards are now shipped with a bit of delay as we have quite backlog for these boards.

We apologize to all our established customers which do wonder why the orders which we usually shipped to them in 1 week before, now are shipped with delay of 3-4 weeks.

We assure you that we do everything humanly possible to ship all orders ASAP.

To add little more crazyness the three new Samsung machines arrived two weeks ago. We wanted to build new space for them and working more than year on this, but the lazy and ignorant Bulgarian administration still didn’t issued us permit to start building, so we have to install them in the old building where we run out of space.

One SM471 and  two SM482 with printers, loaders, unloaders, conveyors, packed in 20 wooden boxes were unloaded from the containers:

Immediately we start to break walls, extend doors, and other funny things so the big machines may enter the building.

We did same 1 year ago when our first Samsung came, but shortsighted decided to rebuild the walls with intention the new machines to be installed in the new building, without taking into account how long and difficult the building permit is to get in Bulgaria.

Now the three machines are installed and testing, but as you guess they will not run alone, so we will need new employees to train.

New Year – new luck we say here, I hope things will go back from crazy to normal mode in January!

EDIT:

Some words about the machines SM471 is the Samsung fastest and greatest from SM series. It has two heads with 10 nozzles each and dual rail conveyor which allow two different boards to be assembled at same time. With maximal performance 75000 csp (which you never reach on real boards). The machine can place down to 01005 components which are with size 0.4 x 0.2 mm (400 x 200 microns)!

SM482 is flexible mounter which can place both small and big components, we already have one such machine and it performs very well. The listed maximal speed is 28000 cps.

Each SM482 machine comes with full set of 8, 12, 16, 24, 32 mm feeders and tray changer which can hold up to 80 trays with components.

Both SM471 and SM482 support the new splice-less tape feeders which can be load even with component stripes without need to have initial empty cells on the tapes.