I admit that when I saw this in my feed, I thought it was showing me the previous version. You should give it a v2 in the name! I'm so glad that I clicked, because this is amazing progress. I do have some ideas for improvements; first, your box needs some rubberized feet, suction cups or even some mounting threads because you really don't want it moving around. I think that a lot of folks would love to be able to plug in a unit like this to a bench power supply or one of those low priced Chinese AC power supply units, because something like this is likely to see a lot of use and a LiPO would need to be recharged frequently if supplying current to drive a drone motor. Finally, this might be getting a bit in the weeds but you might want to offer some advice on considerations for enlarging the size, as many folks might need to work on a board that is just slightly bigger than this version. Thank you so much for all of your hard work. NeoDen has every reason to hate this. Good riddance!

nice, something aesthetically pleasing seeing how well the paste formed under the microscope lol @ the blades acting as an amplifier for the chiptune

There's actually a much simpler & easier way to align your stencils, especially as you are 3D printing the PCB holder. Add a few ~2mm NPTHs to your board or panel at specific locations and ensure they end up in your Gerbers. When you print the PCB holder add 1.9mm dia "pins", long enough to pass through the NPTHs in the board and stencil. Now just drop the PCB over the printed alignment pins and slide the stencil down over them too, turn on the vacuum and everything will stay in place perfectly aligned.

This is fantastic! Very cool process, and thank you for the update!

It's a pretty nice design idea. But for my purpose, i'd probably do a few things differently. First, the size. I'd probably make it large enough for at least a "Euro Size" PCB. Thats 100x160mm. They might not be that common of a size anymore, but back when i started with electronics, that was the go-to size for a lot of projects, and a lot of precut PCBs came in that size. For the fan, i'd probably just go with an off the shelf 12VDC impeller fan. Put two 4mm banana sockets on the base, and hook up my lab powersupply to the fan to control the speed. With all the added electronics you need to drive that brushless motor, i think i can buy a pretty powerful impeller fan and reduce the complexity and required assembly by a lot. And since we usually put at least two alignment holes (2.05mm hole, with +0.1/-0.0mm tolerance) for our 2.0mm alignment pins we use on test and programming fixtures in the PCB, i'd use these holes and some 2.0mm dowel pins to quickly align the PCB and stencils to eachother.

Well done, that was some very impressive engineering and your fusion timeline is so well organised! The airflow and static pressure you're getting with the 3d printed impeller was much more than I expected. Looking forward to your next video. I expect you'll be using the portable stencil holder!

Wow - just saw the initial version and was impressed then saw there was this v2 - superb! 🎉

dude youre a hero!

whats the stencil made out of? you could maybe use magnets instead of loud air to pull it down! this could be a completely mechanical build instead. love this design!

Those motors are designed taking a lot of airflow into account. You might want to direct some output air over it

I like to use a Servo tester for the speed control instead of the Poti, buck converter and rp4020

I love it

it's a cool thing, but I'm wondering what about repeatability? when you need to apply paste on several identical boards. do I need to adjust the stencil every time? is it possible to add traforet retainers? to set up and pin it once.

How did you get these stencils so that they perfectly fit the size of the device

Do you have a speed limitation built in?? To avoid that the fan will desintegrate due to the rotating forces? Did you balance the fan at all? or just based on the print quality it was deemed "balanced"?

@scheffield

8 ай бұрын

Surprisingly, I had no issues with that. As I iterated on the design, I printed many impellers and all of them worked just fine.

That's a cool project. I might build one of these, although I don't really see the point with the lipo battery. It's an added cost, and complexity with charger and all. I think I would prefer to use an USB power bank instead. I might even omit the battery and have it hard wired. After all the pcb goes into an oven afterwards, and that is not battery powered.

@scheffield

7 ай бұрын

Ah, yes the battery is an added bit of complexity and I like the idea of just using USB. The kind of motor I'm using requires higher voltage and current than default USB would deliver. So, we would need to use USB PD which comes with its own complexity. Doable but might be a bit more complex than the current setup.

@janpetersen8441

7 ай бұрын

@@scheffield yes, would need to advertise the power need. There are ready made modules that allow for setting those parameters and they negotiate with the power supply. Brian Lough has one I think, that from memory he called the TS100 flex-c-friend. At least I recall he made videos describing how the power negotiation works.

@janpetersen8441

7 ай бұрын

Found an interesting chip. The Infineon EZ-PD PMG1-S3 MCU. They have a dev board available for about $25. This board supposedly takes care of the USB C connection, and replaces both the MCU, and the ESC as well. Infineon has made an article about this use case (controlling an BLDC motor from USB C power), that are available on the net. I have the parts on order, and will do some experimentation when they come in. Probably start of next year.

@danmanmgm

5 ай бұрын

I also preffer using a power supply. Can you please measure the power consumption?

This is really good! How important is it for the pcb to match the size of the bottom tray? I would have imagined that the pcb could also be clamped pretty well by the vacuum even if its smaller. If I ever get into SMD pcbs I'll surely consider making this thing!

@scheffield

8 ай бұрын

The vacuum itself holds it down pretty well but you don't want a large gap between the PCB and the lifter as the stencil would be pulled into the gap and bend, if that makes sense.

@DanielSimu

8 ай бұрын

@@scheffield Makes sense, so we need to design some expandable gap brider part, like a scissor mechanism ;)

@ryanvoots9827

8 ай бұрын

​@@DanielSimujust use some tape to cover holes. Blue painters tape or electrical tape should work fine.

Hmm guy designing a stencil holder for DIY SMD PCBs and drops in some modules cramped together on a perf board? Come on 😆 So hoping for V3 to come with a custom made PCB or thinking of doing one myself.

@scheffield

5 ай бұрын

Haha, I hear you! V3 will have it.

@Knochi77

5 ай бұрын

@@scheffield and I wonder if some flow simulation could improve the efficiency. Less noise, more power.

Sorry for this question but, how do you cut the stencils so nice? , normally when I order one they are quite big like an A5 or something like that, when I cut them they actually bend a bit even with very sharp scissors. Cheers!

@telefon72

11 күн бұрын

JLCPCB has an option for custom size stencils

Do Yourself It ™

What are the length, width, and height of the base part? I'm importing the STL files into Inventor and it all looks good, but scale is off, and is way too big at 162 in square.

@scheffield

6 ай бұрын

It's 162mm. So the unit seems to be off.

I and made a vacuum stencil device in the past. I had issues with paste being slightly sucked by the vacuum resulting in small pads at some locations having a oozed effect. it doesn't look like you're having this issue but do you think it will?

@scheffield

8 ай бұрын

I have used this version and the previous one for a while now and didn't see that issue. What I have seen though is too much paste being applied form pressing too hard and going over the same opening too many times

@alanjrobertson

7 ай бұрын

​@@scheffieldyes I've always tried to do just a single pass with the scraper (after seeing it mentioned in a video from someone that very much does it for their day job!) and it works well - I think multiple passes make it much more likely to push too much paste through and force it to spread out under the stencil.

Hi Max, I don't know if it's just me, but when I put the lid on the lifter, the small curves don't fit directly into the holes. I had to adjust this, otherwise the whole thing jams when you press the 2 parts into each other

@vajrakilla9124

2 ай бұрын

I see you wrote this a few months ago. I had the same problem this week, but after giving the small curves a light sand, it fit very well. The holes for the M3 screws seem to keep it aligned, so even if you sand too much off or unevenly, it should remain mostly square to itself. Hope this helps!

@localhost2933

2 ай бұрын

@@vajrakilla9124 Hello, i have redesigned the Part, fits now perfectly

sell me one? haha