Help day focus – SMT technology – Solder paste and what we should know about it

May 28th in Olimex training building we will have our Help day.

There we will discuss everything around electronics, but we want to add small twist to these meetings, so each time we make Help day we will add small focus theme with slide presentations and transfer some know how we have.

This help day focus will be around SMT technology and production and specially one of it’s very important componets – the Solder paste.

There are lot of myths and mysteries around solder pastes and we will try to remove them, so at the end of the day you know:

• what is solder paste
• what are solder paste most important characteristics
• what types of solder paste exist
• how solder paste should be handled
• what happens after solder paste expire date
• can we bring back to life old solder paste
• how to trouble shoot problems related to solder paste

We will share things we learned during the last 25 years dealing with electronic design and production.

 

 

Our next Help Day is 28th of May

What is help day?

It’s once per month event (usually at the end of the month) where you can come to our place and get help with using our boards.

Sure you can bring stuff not made by us, and we will try to help with it too, but we are most familiar with our own boards and will be of much more help with them.

If you have project using our boards and something doesn’t work as expected, bring it here and we will do our the best to help you.

Our engineers will be available and you can ask questions and get help from the developers.

Or if you plan something but hesitate how to implement it we may help you to pickup the proper boards/sensors for it.

We do not guarantee that we will solve for minutes every problem you have, but at least we will try.

No e-mails – but good old face to face communication. Unfortunately we can offer this just once per month

Our Help day for May is on 28th – Saturday, starting from 14.00 o’clock to not rush the people who will come from outside Plovdiv.

Help Day recap

On 28 November we had Help Day at our training building, we got dozen of visitors!

Radoslav Kolev and Leon Anavi made talk about OpenEmbedded, Yocto, Poky:

They had the same talk at OpenFest but due to the limited time there they couldn’t show all demos, here they had plenty of time to show how core-minimal distribution is made, and how you can add your own programs to the distro.

What are the good practices when you build Linux with Yocto and why it’s choosen de-facto for Industry standard by all big players working for industrial and automotive applications.

We show H3-OLinuXino and A33-OLinuXino and of course the new DIY Laptop plastic parts:

Everyone was able to touch and feel the different parts and plastics and to see the quality.

The LCD is special laptop edition very thin and light with just 2.8 mm thickness.

The battery is 8000mAh also very thin.

you can see the laptop size compared with A20-OLinuXino-MICRO

Total dimensions are 29 x 20 x 1 cm with final weight less 1 kg – a bit less the size of A4 paper.

November Olimex Help day will be 28/11

Our Help day for November will be on 28/11 in Saturday in Olimex training building starting 14.00 o’clock.

What is Help day is explained here.

If you have something interesting you want to show us or if you want help with your project you are welcome.

Radoslav Kolev and Leon Anavi had interesting presentation on Open Fest about Open Embedded and Yocto and how to build Embedded Linux system with these tools. Their demonstration was with A20-OLinuXino-MICRO.

As the OpenEmbedded talk time was limited they couldn’t demonstrate all their work, so we invited them to come on the Help day and show in more details their demos, so everyone who is interested in how to setup Linux image with OpenEmbedded and Yokto receipts is welcome to the party 🙂

We will have also some H3-OLinuXino and A33-OLinuXino (waiting first prototypes to come from assembly line today)  to play with for those who are interested in them.

We will show also our new A20-OLinuXino-LIME2 with eMMC 4GB on it, which achieve remarkable speed compared to SD-card and ordinary NAND Flash:

root@OLinuXino-A20:~# time sh -c "dd of=/dev/null if=/dev/mmcblk0p1 bs=64k count=10240 && sync" 
255+1 records in 
255+1 records out 
16776704 bytes (17 MB) copied, 1.06662 s, 15.7 MB/s 
 
real    0m1.088s 
user    0m0.000s 
sys     0m0.460s 
root@OLinuXino-A20:~# 
 
root@OLinuXino-A20:~# time sh -c "dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/testfile bs=100k count=1k && sync" 
1024+0 records in 
1024+0 records out 
104857600 bytes (105 MB) copied, 6.56964 s, 16.0 MB/s 
 
real    0m8.678s 
user    0m0.010s 
sys     0m1.170s