Tag: melbourne

All Hands on Deck!

This year we’ve reached another milestone for Agile Electronics. Previously we’ve only had a maximum of two people working on electronics assembly at any one time, and that second person has been me (Sandra) since December 2020. This year, we’ve welcomed Hank to be a new casual employee, whose main role is to take on the manual through-hole soldering of boards for our customers. So this week, we’ve had Hank busy soldering and testing boards for one customer, while I was looking after the machines doing surface mount assembly for another customer, and while John inspected boards, supervised everything and helped out where needed.

With our new employee, we will be able to take on more manual soldering, so if this is something your product needs, contact us for a quote.

More Gear

Since the last update, we have acquired a dehumidifier, which is handy for humidity-sensitive materials and parts. We also have a new 3D printer that provides much better quality prints than our old one, which had a tendency to curve or distort in places. While it is mainly used for creating customised matrix trays and fulfilling a few other in-house requirements, we also provide a 3D printing-based prototyping service for our customers. Need a quality 3D print? We might be able to help.

Bambu Lab X1-Carbon 3D printer at Agile Electronics, Camberwell, Victoria, Australia.

One for the Silly Season

Greetings all. Here’s this year’s Agile Electronics video for the silly season, The Agile Electronics Alphabet Song. Enjoy!

See you in the new year!

New Era for Agile

I’m pleased to announce that Agile Electronics is now in a position to employ its first non-founding staff member to assist with manufacturing. Currently this is on a casual basis, but we hope that the job will grow with the business. We welcome Gen!

Is there anything worse than cut tape? Sadly, yes.

Previously I wrote about how providing your components on cut tape slows the SMT assembly process for the assembler, because they need to mount your tape on a reel before putting the reel on the feeder.

There is one thing worse than cut tape, and that is loose components! You might think it is a saving to just buy a bag of the components you need, but if you are using a professional assembler, it is often cheaper to buy in bulk on a reel, or to make use of the very reasonable reeling service from suppliers like Digikey or Mouser, where your small number of components are mounted on a reel, ready for assembly.

So, what do we do when we receive loose components? Some are taken out of their plastic bags and put into a belt or tube feeder. For others, we need to design and print a special matrix tray, and then manually place the components into the matrix tray. For really short cut tape, we stick the tape into the matrix tray area with removable double-sided tape. For each tray or short cut tape, the pick and place machine needs to be programmed to indicate the dimensions of the tray and the type of component contained in it. As you can imagine all this preprocessing takes quite a bit of time. So, do think twice about how you provide components to your friendly assembler!

matrix1
Custom matrix trays set up in the Europlacer pick and place machine. Also a short piece of cut tape with only two components, stuck into the matrix tray area.

 

Seven years of electronics assembly

Seven years ago today we received our first pick and place machine, a Novastar. Since then we’ve upgraded to a high-speed Europlacer XPii that can handle smaller components. This month we have acquired an Exmore VS-500 vapour phase reflow oven. With the addition of this unit, we can achieve a more even temperature across circuit boards, regardless of the uneven thermal mass of some designs, meaning fewer tombstone errors on assembled boards.

vapourphasereflowoven_open
Our new Vapour Phase Reflow Oven.

Welcome to Agile Electronics

Hello world!  Agile Electronics has been providing electronic assembly services since 2010. We’re located in the Melbourne metropolitan area. We have a Europlacer XPii-IIT pick and place machine; a Dek solder printer; and convection and vapour phase ovens.  We can provide surface mount assembly services for any size job, including prototypes.

pick_and_place