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Title: Raspberry Pi Cuts Product Returns By 50% By Changing Up Its Pin
Soldering

Link: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/04/30/...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Raspberry Pi boards
have a combination of surface-mount devices (SMDs) and through-hole bits.
SMDs allow for far more tiny chips, resistors, and other bits to be attached
to boards by their tiny pins, flat contacts, solder balls, or other
connections. For those things that are bigger, or subject to rough forces
like clumsy human hands, through-hole soldering is still required, with leads
poked through a connective hole and solder applied to connect and join them
securely. The Raspberry Pi board has a 40-pin GPIO header on it that needs
through-hole soldering, along with bits like the Ethernet and USB ports.
These require robust solder joints, which can't be done the same way as with
SMT (surface-mount technology) tools. "In the early days of Raspberry Pi,
these parts were inserted by hand, and later by robotic placement," writes
Roger Thornton, director of applications for Raspberry Pi, in a blog post.
The boards then had to go through a follow-up wave soldering step. Now Pi
boards have their tiny bits and bigger pieces soldered at the same time
through an intrusive reflow soldering process undertaken with Raspberry Pi's
UK manufacturing partner, Sony. After adjusting component placement, the
solder stencil, and the connectors, the board makers could then place and
secure all their components in the same stage. Intrusive reflow soldering
this way involves putting solder paste on both the pads for SMD bits and into
the through-hole pins. The through-hole parts are pushed onto the paste, and
the whole board then goes into a reflow oven, where the solder paste melts,
the connectors fall in more fully, and joints are formed for all the SMD and
through-hole parts at once. You can watch the process up close in this
mesmerizing video from Surface Mount Process. Intrusive reflow soldering is
not a brand-new process, but what it did for the Raspberry Pi is notable,
according to Thornton. The company saw "a massive 50% reduction in product
returns," and it sped up production by 15 percent by eliminating the break
between the two soldering stages. By removing the distinct soldering bath
from its production line, the company also reduced its carbon dioxide output
by 43 tonnes per year (or 47.4 US tons).

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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