Alternative Component Mounting

In today's episode, Chris teaches us about different categories of components that don't use a traditional surface mount or through-hole mounting methods. Think epoxy mounting, press-fit, mechanical assembly, swaging hardware, snap sockets, dome switches, hot bar soldering wires and cables, adhesive tape, and RTV.

Exciting news, Chris is a guest host on Hackaday Chat! Join him on Wednesday, February 9, 2022, 12:00 pm PST (3 PM eastern): https://hackaday.io/event/183578-pick-and-place-hack-chat

Episode links:
Epoxy capacitor mounting explained
TE whitepaper discussing the details of press-fit parts
Press-fit design and assembly considerations
How to determine a torque specification
Snap socket example
Dome switch example
Hot bar soldering machine
3M VHB Tape
MG Chemicals RTV

pickplacepodcast.com

Transcript

0:08

Welcome to the pick place podcast. A show where we talk about electronics, manufacturing and everything related to getting a circuit board into the world. This is Chris Denney with Worthington. And this is Melissa Hough with CircuitHub Welcome back, Melissa. welcome back, Chris. And you been. I've been pretty good. Yeah. How have you been. Yeah. Tired. Exhausted. Yeah. I go to work and then I come home and work and once the kitchen is done, I am not going to work. Hopefully you'll enjoy some delicious food in your new kitchen. I hope so. I hope so. I've been enjoying delicious food regardless of the fact that I don't have a kitchen because we set up a little mini kitchen in our finished basement. And my wife's been cooking some amazing stuff, Excellent. Excellent. very talented. She is Speaking of delicious food, or we hope that everyone who celebrates lunar near is having a wonderful celebration, happy year of the tiger. and eating lots and lots of dumplings lots of dumplings to bring you lots of fortune. Have you eaten any dumplings this week? I haven't, but I got a funny story. I was so, as we announced on last, on the last episode, That we're buying a pick place machines from a company called Fuji. I had to inform some other companies that we didn't buy from to let them know like, Hey, you know, sorry, but we're going with another vendor. And I reached out to one and the one guy he had listened to the Chinese new year episode Huh? and he goes, he goes, oh man, I guess I have to return all these celebratory dumplings I was going to bring in when you bought my equipment. Oh, no, no dumplings for you, if you, if you want to bribe me, you know, forget, forget baseball game tickets, you know, forget trips and money under the table. You bring in some dumplings. I'm a bribe all day, all day. Oh, and you're asking, I don't know if we actually ended up putting in this, this, in the show, but you were saying, wouldn't it be great if there are sweet dumplings? That is an actual thing. I don't know if they're technically dumplings, but yeah, there's sometimes filled with like peanuts or like sweet beans, you know, so, to have to look this up. Oh man. I wish I could cook some of that kind of stuff. You know, like you ever watch like Anthony Bourdain show and then you just see like all this amazing stuff that he gets all around the world, like, oh, be so neat to cook all those sorts of things, but you need like 20 different ingredients that are specialty stories. And then all of a sudden your kitchen is full of all these ingredients that you use for one yeah. That's like the entire the entire door of my fridge. I'm pretty sure. Yeah, exactly. Well, I hope everybody's enjoying the, how Chris and Melissa can not cook foreign foods show. Hey, I never said I couldn't cook. yes, it's true. You probably know. can cook and I can consume that's. That's what I'm excellent at. Yes. Yes, but it is not a food show. It is a show, an electronic show. And speaking of electronics, you are going to be chatting about electronics at. where are you going to, what are you going to be on? It's called, I guess it's called the Hackaday chat or chat. I think it's called the hack chat. I might've heard of them. I'm not, I'm not sure. How could I, I figured you might've heard of Hackaday I'm just kidding. Of course. yeah, they call it a hack chat and I it's pretty big shoes to fill lady ADA was on last week, which was like, I don't know. The lumber, she swings is way bigger than mine. Like that is, that's a baseball reference in case nobody understands what that means. Especially people from out of the United States. They're like, what is he talking about? Swinging lumber, the, the, you know, the big sluggers in baseball. They carry the big bats onto the, you know, onto the plate and they get the home runs. That's what that references I've used that reference before, and it's gone over people's heads. And all of a sudden, I'm thinking to myself, I'm recording this. Nobody's going to understand that. But for sure, like, that's a, I don't know, it's kind of an honor that I was asked. Yeah. How did you, how did you end up getting asked to be on the, Funny enough, our our guests for our next episode they're from a company called fixture fab. We're gonna be talking about test fixtures. They had participated in a hackchat and they suggested that I'd be a good guest and they reached out and here we are. So that's going to be on Wednesday, February 9th at noon Pacific. So that'd be three Eastern. And you can do your, your Googling to figure it out what time it is in your neck of the woods. Awesome. I'll definitely be listening. cool. They it's, it's going to be a text-based thing. So I guess it's purely, text-based, I've never participated in one Oh, how does that work? What do you mean? so people text in questions or, I think you just chat, I think it's just like a private chat room that you join. And I guess, I there's no video. You're not, you're not talking. no, I don't think so. I don't think so. So it's like a, it's like a live ask me anything or something. Yeah. Something like. Exactly. So they, the focus is going to be about they, they want to kind of focus on pick and place machines in general. That would be kind of the focus of the discussion, but obviously would anybody brings up a manufacturing topic? We'll just talk about it. Like no big deal, but yeah. Cool. I'm kind of excited kind of, kind of terrified, but kind of excited at the Nah, he'll do great. Yeah, sure. We'll see. We shall see. I gotta make sure I got a backup keyboard just in case. That's true. Oh, horrible. Or just day your keyboard decides to stop working. I know. I know. Well, you know what? The, my primary computer is a laptop, so I'll plug in an external keyboard and if they get external keyboard dies, we'll go to those. There you go. problems. We'll be good. So yeah. Hope everybody who listens is, or at least hope some people who listened to the show listened to it in time to participate in that hack chat again, Wednesday, February 9th,

noon, Pacific 3: 6:33

00 PM Eastern. Be there. Yep. And we'll leave a link to it in the footnotes. If you want easy access to where to find it. Excellent. Thank you for, thank you for putting together those show notes each week and all the editing you do, by the way. I don't know if listeners realize that Melissa does all the editing for each one of these episodes. There's a ton of work involved in that I do. Yeah, And you're still working on the transcriptions. Are ya yeah, yeah. I am. I mean, all of the new episodes that come out, I am releasing with a transcription. So those are already there, but, you know, slowly going through the old ones and getting those added. I think like at some point it might be good to have a not exactly like a well, it's sort of like a best of episode where we take some of the, kind of the, more popular things in more evergreen topics and kind of cut them up into small bits and put them all together. That might be a fun thing. It might be a fun thing to exist. It might not be a fun thing to create. True, true, That would probably be a lot of work. good point. Maybe that can be a. I don't know, two year, two years celebration episode or something, which is not that far away. I was gonna say, I feel like we're probably fast approaching that. Wow. Oh my goodness. Unbelievable. It's crazy to think that it's been almost two years, I know. Right. And that people actually listened to us. you know, what's funny is I was thinking about it and there's a formula one podcast I listened to where. They get, hundreds of thousands of downloads or maybe if not hundreds of thousands, they certainly get tens of thousands of downloads. And one of the person who started the podcast mentioned to his cohost, you know, we could fill Wembley stadium with a number of people who are listening to us right now. Wow. That's terrifying think of if there's that many people and you're like, oh my goodness, don't make a fool of yourself. We I don't know if listeners are aware, but electronics manufacturing is not quite as popular as formula one. So we couldn't exactly fill Wembley stadium, but we could feel like a nice, like a nice Helton conference room, like a good size Hilton conference room. Yeah. Yeah. we could can do that. We'll we'll do a live, we'll do a live show maybe. Hey, that's an idea. 2023 apex. We'll do a live show. We'll do it live. We'll do it live. Oh, there was a call back to an old episode. So, apex just ended IPC apex just ended last week which is a huge trade show. It's probably the second, second or third largest trade show in the world for electronics manufacturing. I think the largest is still Productronica. But there is also one in China. That's quite quite a big show that might be the largest now, you know, who knows? I'm not sure. But yeah, that's a, that's a big show that we tend to go to every single year, but obviously since the beginning of COVID we haven't. And since we already made a decision on purchasing a bunch of equipment there's not, not really a lot to shop for at the moment while we get this other equipment up to speed, but 20, 23 maybe. And boy we're well, we'll have to pitch that to IPC. that would be a terrifying, but also exciting. That would be terrifying, but also terrifying. I'm, I'm, I'm genuinely sincerely excited about today's show now that we've spent you know, how many 20 minutes here I know. Right. Rambling on. But we've found ourselves in the position where customers are asking us, Hey, can you do this? Can you do that? And a lot of times they know, no, we can't do this. Can't do that. And I thought, well, why don't we kind of put all these various things into one episode of different types of components, different types of mounting methods that might go onto a circuit board or adjacent to a circuit board somehow. And just kinda talk about what they are the realities of the challenges that, that. You face when trying to do these sorts of things. And you know, whether or not it's feasible for a shop like Worthington or CircuitHub to do that for customers. So I forget, what are we calling this episode? Alternative component mounting yeah. Parts that are not strictly surface mount or through hole that a good way to put it. That's, that's an excellent way of putting it. That's the way I tried to approach it when I was putting together the show notes. So, for example poxy mounting, press fit, mechanical assembly, swaging hardware, snap sockets, dome switches, hot bar soldering wires and cables, adhesive tape, and RTV. So these are all different sorts of things that we see that where components get mounted either directly with these materials or these materials get added after the through-hole or surface Mount components get mounted. There's more, there's like under fill there's conformal coating but I think we could probably have like a dedicated episode to coating, for example. So we can start, we can talk about a poxy mounting. This has been, I can't tell you the number of times that a part number for a ceramic capacitor has ended up on a customer's bill of materials that, you know, customer supplies us, a bill of materials with a, with a part number for a ceramic capacitor meets all their specs, right? It's the appropriate tolerance, the temperature coefficients and everything, you know, the package size, yada yada yada, well, there's one like little character change in the part number that creates it, or that changes that into an epoxy mounted capacitor instead of a solder mounted capacitor. I don't know if you've ever seen these. Like if you ever seen us complain about this, Melissa, seen you. I've seen you complain about them. I haven't seen the difference in assembling them. It's so hard to catch that's the trouble is it's you, it's so hard to catch before you actually go to assemble them. They look identical. The part numbers all look identical. Like you really have to pay very close attention to see that there's something there's like one little word where it in the description where it says epoxy. We've done some things since then to try to catch these epoxy mounted part numbers, not getting into our manufacturing process, but basically their terminals are not designed to be soldered. They're designed to be epoxy mounted. And the epoxy we're talking about here is not just like a, not just like a glue it's it's like a conductive epoxy. So they'll put, they'll put a lot of silver in the epoxy itself, which by the way, makes the epoxy very expensive, all that silver. But then That's how, that's, how you Mount these types of components is with this conductive epoxy. So there's some advantages of it, right? Because it's a little bit more compliant than your solder, you know, it's better for like vibration and shock and, and all kinds of thermal cycles and everything. But it's got its downsides because it's epoxy and not a metal. It like changes over time. So it'll like increase its resistance over time. So, you could do a fully assembled board. I think, I think you could make a fully assembled board with all epoxy Mount components. Yeah, I don't ask me to do it, but I think it's possible. I think largely where it's done is, is in like led boards where you'll have like, you'll have epoxy Mount an led and then you'll have ceramic capacitor next to that led to. You know, even out the, you can get like weird blinking and weird issues if you don't have nice steady power on an led. So they put out, they'll put capacitors right next to them. And so the whole board becomes epoxy mounted. I don't think you're like your microcontrollers and stuff are on that board. I think there'll be wired in through a cable harness or something like that or a connector, so that's, that's what they're used for and if we end up populating them onto a board, right. So we stencil print pick and place machine reflow oven. When they come out of the reflow oven, they look like they're just sort of sitting on the solder and instead of the solder wicking up the sides of them, it's it's, as soon as they come out of reflow you just see it immediately, you can't miss it. And it's like, oh, no, Is that when you discover that happened a lot of the times, That's typically when we discover if we miss it, if we miss it during like our engineering processes and our purchasing processes and our receiving processes, like we have ways of catching it in purchasing and in programming and receiving to try to prevent it from ever ending up in the SMT process. But if we miss all three of those and it ends up it's post reflow and it's the worst, because then you're like, you got to stop and you may have a hundred feeders all loaded, and now you can't proceed with the build because you've got to find a capacitor that's going to fit. And it's a nightmare when that happens. So largely, like we're not set up to do epoxy assembled circuit boards. We probably have all of the right equipment to do it. Like, I'm pretty sure you can just stencil print the epoxy.'cause there's like one part epoxy that you could use. I think there's also two part epoxy. I'm not exactly sure. Like maybe you could probably like pre-mix them and then you have a certain working life where you gotta stencil print the epoxy and then populate the boards. I'm not sure if they're thermally cured or if they're you know, just over time, they're cured, but technically we probably have the capability of doing it, but we're just, you know, we're choosing not to, Yeah. you know, like if you need epoxy assembled boards there's a couple other shops that kind of, have a lot of experience with it. We could probably refer you to. So if you're listening to this and you're wondering, just reach out to us and we'll try to connect you with a technically a competitor, but you know, we'll, we'll find somebody who is able to help you out. So when you, when you do encounter it, since the part numbers are usually so close, is it most commonly an accident? Would you say? Like the, the customer didn't mean to select an epoxy part? A thousand percent, a thousand percent. It's always accidental. That that was not intentional at all. Yeah. Thousand percent. So it's, it's a bummer, but you know, like I was saying, we probably have the equipment to do it. We just choose not to it's. I love to use the analogy of of Chick-fil-A and making a hamburger. Right. Like you go to Chick-fil-A and you're like, okay. I would like, I'd like a hamburger please. And Chick-fil-A is going to be like, well, we're Chick-fil-A we don't, we don't do hamburgers. And then I'd be like, well, yeah, but you got a grill. Right. And you've got a fridge and you got buns and toasters and yeah. Like just make me a hamburger, just, just there's a grocery store right across the street. Just. Just get some, ground meat and bring it over and make me a burger, sir, this is a Chick-fil-A, you know what I mean? That's, that's the analogy I use when it comes to these sorts of things. Can we do them? Yes. Technically we can do them. Of course. But we're, it's just not our focus. It's just not what we're trying to, trying to do. But that being said, you know, if you, if, if we're making all the other control boards for you and you like working with us or whatever and you say, Hey, I have this idea for this, or I have this product, that's epoxy mounted and I've been hiring this other shop, but I'd really like to give it to you. It's like, we can look at it, right. We can consider it. And, but there's going to be some engineering time that goes into it. There's going to be a learning curve. There's going to be you know, resources poured into this that normally we don't have to pour into a standard SMT and through whole board And, and so we have to evaluate it. So if you just getting 10 boards made, no, we're not, sorry. It was this. We're not even going to consider it, you know, but you know, if the numbers are right, if the revenues right, and the, and the volumes make sense, then, then we might consider it. And that, that, that little spiel I just gave for the past 60 seconds or so is true for everything else we're Yeah, I was just about to say, I think you're going to see a reoccurring theme with all these different types of parts. exactly. So for example one thing that we actually do a fair bit of, but we do not generally agree to do for customers is press fit press fit components. There's a great white paper written by for all of these subjects. We found information we'll include in the show notes, links that talk about a poxy mounting and. But T E a manufacturer of connectors and press fit connectors. They have a great white paper. I think they wrote it quite a while ago, but it's all about the advantages of press fit connectors and different sorts of components. They really are pretty awesome. One fun side effect of a press fit connector far lower carbon footprint Oh, you don't have to heat up solder. Right? You think about it. But also mechanically very strong very reliable, extremely reliable. You don't have to worry about voiding and soldering and things like that. However, you really, you kind of have to design a manufacturing process for each connector. Like it's not like through whole, an SMT where the component is designed around the understanding of what it takes to Mount an SMT component, what it takes to solder a through hole component. Like every component that's manufactured. That calls itself, an SMT component or calls itself a through hole component. There's kind of a known process for all these. They're going to design it for pick and place. So they're going to design it for wave solder and your selective solder, your hand soldering, like there's a known process that they're going to fit that into when it comes to press fit, it can be kind of all over the map with the processes that it takes to assemble them. We've run into this issue so many times we had to finally, like, I didn't, I never found a great article that explained the challenges of that, that like the engineering time that goes into designing the manufacturing process for each component. Like for example, in the white paper that TE produces, there's like a blurb about like, you know, you'll have to engineer a manufacturing process and that's like, it. But it's like, okay, well, what is that? Yeah. And then everyone goes, oh, these are awesome. I'm going to use these. Yeah, exactly. So, and they are awesome. Don't get me wrong. I think they're pretty awesome. But we put together an article on our website. We'll include in the show notes all about what it takes to do a press fit component. It starts out with a press. You need a strong enough press. And depending on the type of component that press might not, you might not be able to do it by hand. Some of these big connectors you might need, some kind of, pneumatic or hydraulic press that actually presses the component in for you because a person's just not strong enough. And especially if you're doing it over and over and over, you're going to get fatigued from the person pulling down on the Arbor. So like an Arbor press is pretty, a pretty popular way of doing this. It's just like an arm and. You'll just have to Google Arbor press. I don't know how to describe them, but you know, you pull down in it, it, you know, you're pulling two foot bar, but you're only moving the press 10 millimeters, you know, do the math and you can see how much strength you can push on that connector. That's what your Arbor press is. But in the press, you, you need to have a head. You need to have something on that press designed specifically to push that component, because let's say that component is four inches long by half an inch. Well, you can't just press the center of that connector. If all I had was a one inch block by one inch, one inch by one inch block and I press on the center of that thing, oh, I'm going to completely. Picture what's going to happen. You're going to make a boomerang. It's going to be a mess. So you need to have a press head that goes the whole length of that connector. And then, you know, some press fit components. They actually don't want you to push on the housing of the connector itself. They want you to put some push on the pins, so then you really need to make sure you have the right press head because you gotta, you gotta make sure it's pushing the pins and not pushing on the housing of the connector. So that has to be designed and engineered and sometimes the manufacturer will design them like they'll design the head and then you have to design the connection between the head itself and the press. You have to come up with how are we going to join these two things together? So that has to be designed. And then you need an anvil you know, that's kind of the generic term for it, but basically you need something to push against. You need something underneath the board that supporting the board, otherwise you just you'll just blow right through the board and completely delaminating the board and destroy the board. So you need to have like relief cutout for each of the holes so that when the pins come through that, you know, cause just imagine if, if I just put this board onto a flat table and then I come down with my press and say, I've designed my head and it interconnects with my Arbor and blah, blah, blah, and got the connector and come down. Well, if those pins come through the board, they're going to push against that. So you need to have something, you know, designed, that's going to allow those pins to come through, but not blast out the PCB, because if you've got if you've got multiple rows of pins, you need to support between each of those rows, because otherwise you will literally you'll, you'll completely destroy the PCB. It'll just push out the the fiberglass and the copper and everything. It all just get destroyed. So you need to have the appropriate anvil underneath the board to support all that. And then on top of that, oftentimes, oftentimes you'll you'll need like, some custom tooling that lines up the board to the connector, to the Arbor, right? There's there's, there's just a lot of engineering time that goes into it. It's not that the press fitting components is like impossible. It's just. There's a lot that goes into it. It's not just a matter of like throw it on your BOM and your cm will be able to handle it. You need to have a discussion with your cm and ask them like, okay, can you guys handle this with your current equipment? If not, what are the engineering charges I have to pay for, somebody to design this this head in the anvil and the tooling for me. And you know, and then how much is the anvil? How much is the head? How much is the tooling? You got to have that discussion and then you gotta quoted appropriately because you're not going to quote a press fit the same way you're going to quote through hole. Right? It could be less expensive, right? Because if you have like a 400 pin press fit component and you know, you obviously you pay for your tooling and your anvil and everything. And but the process of soldering, a 400 pin component, it's gonna take a long time compared to just. Pressing it in with just a quick two second motion. So it could potentially be less expensive. It depends on the volume, those sorts of things. Generally speaking, press fit components are going to cost more money and labor to do because it's a separate process. You're taking it out of your selective soldering machine or your wave solder, your hand soldering area. It's going to a different area. You gotta have floor space set up and designed to do press fit. And you know, generally speaking again, generically speaking, you will pay more to have a press fit component installed in your circuit board, but just have that conversation with your cm. Get it figured out ahead of time. Don't make any assumptions that they can handle it, you know, just have that conversation and you, and you should be in good shape. Generally speaking again, as I mentioned about epoxy, we do not accept a press fit components on your bill of materials, but we can have a discussion about it if it's simple enough and we have the right tooling and everything already, we might be able to handle it for you. No problem. I think a good example might be a press fit threaded nuts, right? So rather than soldering a nut onto the board that you, you know, you then put a screw into maybe you press that nut into the board. Those we can almost, almost always handle with the existing equipment. Those are fairly simple to do, but you gotta have the conversation up front because the other thing you might run into is you need to have enough clearance on the bottom side. Again, you may, we may end up needing tools. To do that because if you have bottom side surface Mount and top side surface Mount, well, we have to have, we have to support the region of the board where that nut is going to get inserted and is going to get pressed in without damaging the adjacent SMT components. So, yeah, maybe it's just as simple as a little, you know, socket that you get from your craftsmen set or something to support it. That's possible. We've done it, right. It's, it's worked, but that's not always the case. So you just have the conversation up front before you order it and make sure that your CMS prepared for it, I guess. Does that make sense? Sounds good. Got all that, Melissa. You ready to do press fit connectors? No, No, thank you. it's worth noting too. That CircuitHub's platform does not currently support quoting that appropriately. So if you do want something through CircuitHub, you have to reach out and have the conversation ahead of time to get that quoted appropriately. yeah. And we unfortunately don't identify them automatically. Yeah. It's not identified in the software, so you might be able to place your order, but then you're going to get a surprise later on when we're like, Hey, wait a second. We didn't agree to this. In probably if you're ordering 10, 20 boards, we're not going to, we're going to say, no, you gotta, you gotta handle that on your own or something. But you know, if it's an ongoing product and you're, or you're gonna use that same connector on a bunch of products, maybe we can have the discussion and figure out how to get you tooled up for it. So, mechanically assembled part parts, so things that are held into the board with nuts and bolts a commonan example would be like a heat sink heat sinks are often maybe secured to a, power transistor somehow before soldering onto the board. I don't know if you've ever seen this, Melissa, where w we do this for some of Worthington's customers. I don't know that we've done it for CircuitHub'scustomers, but it's, they're typically, they're like aluminum, like, you know what a heat sink looks like. I assume. I don't know. Maybe I'm making, okay. Maybe I'm making a poor assumption here. Okay. So, and you know, you've got to, you got to fix that heat sink to your, Oh, but maybe not everyone knows what heat sink looks like. Yeah we'll include include a a link to it, images to a heat sink, but it's like you got fins on it that, that you know, they increase the surface area of what you're trying to cool basically. And you'll fix that to whatever devices that's getting hot. Now, the old school way of doing it was literally, you know, a bolt or a screw that went through the voltage regulator or some kind of power transistor. And then it goes through that and then it goes into your heat sink. And then on the backside of the heat sink, you have a nut to secure it. And a lot of times they'll use a thermal compound or thermal grease between the heat sink and the power transistors, so that it transfers the heat really, really well. That's kind of, the, you know, it depends on the application. If it's if it's really, really power hungry, you're probably still going to do something like that or. More often, what we've been seeing is where this is really, really cool. And actually I use this in a recent design we did for a customer where the power hungry component, the hot component is a surface Mount component. And the board acts as a heat sink. So we put like a large thermal plane in the board to absorb, and disperse the heat. And then a heat sink gets soldered over that component, right to the board. So the energy that heat energy is taken out of the component, dispersed into the board. And then, because it's the heat sink is soldered to the board, it gets dispersed into the heat sink and out and away it's, it's really pretty slick. Yeah. Yeah. I'll have to, I think I have some pictures of it. I'll have to include those. So we get that in the show notes that it's a really cool way of doing it. And because then it's just another SMT component and they oftentimes come in tape and reel. So it's just a pick and place machine doing the work. And it's way better than even thermal grease. It's solder, that's transferring the energy, you know, it's, it's, it's great. That's, that's a really cool way of doing it. You have to specifically designed the bare board for that right. To yeah. Yeah, for sure. Absolutely. Yup. You got it. Absolutely. You do. Yeah, I'll try to find a picture of that design I'm I'm sure. I I'm sure I've got one somewhere. We can include that in the show notes too, so you can see that. And there's all the, you know, there's little baby heat sinks, there's big giant heat sinks. Then a lot of times what a lot of What you see a lot of times in a typical Intel microprocessor computer is the heat sink gets mounted to the microprocessor long after the processors assembled into the circuit board. And, you know, that's, that's another mounting method and it'll have its own design and engineering and everything, but you know, with all these sorts of things when it comes to kind of mechanically securing components to a board, cause that's the other thing we've seen, like, you may have a large edge connector that gets soldered in, but then it'll have two you know, one on each end of that long connector, it'll have a bolt that goes through it in a nut on the bottom side to secure it. So again, that's another thing where CircuitHub's software is not going to detect it, but it's going to be probably necessary. Right. So you got to have the conversation ahead of time. If you need this sort of thing, Same with any cm, you have the conversation ahead of time that you're going to need these nuts and bolts installed. And the tricky thing with that is according to IPC, you need to make sure to secure those nuts and bolts before you solder and oh yeah. And I've seen the good and the bad and the ugly out there. You know, in my previous career where I would visit lots of manufacturers where they would solder the thing and then they would throw them in afterward and you're Ooh, What happens You're putting mechanical stress on the solder joint now, because if you think Okay. let's say that component. Wasn't nice and flat when you saw. Even, even if it was just a 10th of a millimeter, right. It was up just a little tiny bit. Well then when you, when you secure it down to the board with your nuts and bolts, now you're pulling on that, which is pulling on the solder joints in your, you know, there's all that mechanical stress on that over time, that's going to fatigue and fail which is why you want to secure it first and then solder it because there's no mechanical stress on those solder joints. Now, all they have to do is carry their signal through. Yeah. So that's also worth having a conversation with your cm to make sure they're doing that the right way. Like, Hey, you know, this connector here, make sure you secure it before you solder. And there's you know, through hole old school, through hole voltage, regulators and software, the same way where you sometimes instead of using a heat sink, you it's to secure them to the board and use the board as a heat sink, same deal. Got to make sure to do that nut and bolt first before you solder the legs of it. So. But again, like everything else, we generally don't want to have these sorts of, Yeah. you know, this sort of work. You know, it's not that we don't want to have it. I know that sounds weird, but like, we're just, we're tooled up for SMT and through hole components. And this is a curve ball in the process. So you got to have the conversation ahead of time and make sure your cm is prepared for it. And have the conversation with them to make sure that they can handle it. I know it sounds silly. Well, it's like, well, it's just a nut and bolt. It's like, yeah, well, it is just not a nut and bolt. It's going to take a lot more time than just our standard hand soldering process. So we got our charge appropriately for that, you know, time is money quite literally in manufacturing. Torque specs, torque specs. You need to give us a torque spec I know you don't want to, I know you don't want, I know, cause it's, it's a pain to come up with a torque spec. It really is. What kind of material are you using? What, what size, nut and bolt are you using? You know, it's a pain. Don't get me wrong. I get it. It is a pain to come up with a torque spec, but we need to have a torque expect we can, we can work. Yeah. There's I ha I found an article from assembly, mag.com that talks about how to come up with a torque spec. It is so over my head, but we'll link to it in the show notes. there's a formula for doing it. But really the best way to do it is just trial and error. Assemble these things together. Is it secure? Are you pleased with how secure it is? Can you run some pull tests on it? If you just build in 20 of these things, a lot of times you're just going to say, oh, I'll just make it tight. It's like, yeah, I know. I know. Just make it tight, but, but Brad's tight is going to be completely different from Chris's tight is going to be completely different from Melissa's tight and you really need to have a torque spec. And we have torque drivers and torque wrenches and things here to measure that torque and to make sure we do it right the first time it's just it's risk, right? It's just like, we don't want to come up with a torque spec for you because we don't want to feel liable for something that fails in the field. When, you know, we said, oh, this is probably tight enough. And, but if you work with us on it, we'll, we'll try to, we'll try to come up with something. We, we could maybe do prototypes of like five of them and say, Hey, we torque these to so many inch pounds. Is that, you know, can you confirm this is meeting your expectations. And we'll try to, we'll try to work with you on that and your men, you know, your cm w we'll do the same thing. They'll try to come up with a method of making sure it's an appropriate torque, but yeah, you gotta, you gotta come up with a torque spec. You gotta have a consistent process for securing these things together. I know it's a bummer. That's a bummer because nobody ever wants to do it, but you got to do it. It is, it's annoying. It, it trust me every single time we ask a customer, well, what torque? It's it's always like, oh, I'm not really sure. Just tight. Yeah. And we just can't, we can't accept tight. Yeah, you gotta, you gotta give us a torque spec. Let's talk about swaged hardware. We're swedged hardware. It depends on who you ask. There's different ways of pronouncing it. what does that. This is where you sort of like. The component itself will probably drop into the hole. No problem. There's no, no resistance dropping into the hole, but then you literally fold the metal of the component against the board itself. Kind of like riveting, but not, it's not a rivet rivet. That's a whole other thing we're not even talking about here is it is riveting stuff together. Yeah, if you want to have riveted if you want to pull things together with rivets, you got to have a conversation about that. Do we have the right riveting tool, the right size rivets, all that kind of stuff. Yeah. Got to have that conversation, but suede hardware is where again, you use a press and an anvil and tooling to hold everything together and the press will push down on the component. And the bottom side of that component is going to likely be made of a thinner material. And when it gets pressed into that anvil, the anvil is going to have a particular shape to it. That's gonna, that's gonna fold that thinner metal and either push it against the wall of the PCB, or actually folded up into the PCB, like folded against itself into the PCB. There's a lot, this is another way of, of like press fit nuts, so to speak. So a lot of press fit nuts. They'll have these like ribs on them and the ribs will be just a little bit wider than the hole itself. And so when you press it in, it digs into the hole. That's just a standard press fit nut, but then there's also these nuts where they drop right into the hole and then you swage them and it folds the bottom side of the nut out and holds it securely against the PCB. We do a ton of swaged connectors. But it's for one specific customer who supplied us, they supplied us the Arbor press and the anvil and the process of doing it, right? Like they came up with a process that said, here do this. So the conversation was had long ahead of time, like, this is how we're going to do it. It wasn't just dropped on us. Right. So that is, that's an again, make sure to have the conversation ahead of time. It can almost certainly be done, but you've got to have the tooling and you gotta have the press and the anvil it's very similar process to press fit components. But yeah, th they're actually like spade connectors. I don't know if you've ever messed around with a lot of times they're used like if you're installing. Something on your car afterward, like maybe you're adding like a backup camera to an old car or something I've seen. That's where they use their, like these spade connectors. We have a male and a female spade and well on for this particular customer. They have the female spades are on the board itself. And then in the field, they connect their wire harnesses with the male spades into the board. And because it's a kind of a heavy duty environment, they have to be really, really strong in case they yank those out. Actually they might install relays into them. I'm not sure if they're relays or cable harnesses whatever it doesn't matter. The point is it's, it's a swaged piece of hardware and it's very, very, very, very strong. But even this particular one, even after we swayed them, we still solder them. So swaged and soldered they're really, really strong, but they still come back to our customer broken, even with all that, you know, you know, it's, it's not the manufacturing process. It's just, it's an enormous amount of stress on the circuit board. And those circuit boards are actually, I think they're double thickness. I think they're two millimeter. Maybe like 2.4 millimeter, they're really thick boards. And they still get damaged because, you know, they're just in a heavy duty environment. So yeah, that's swaged components a little bit different from press fit and, and press fit, digs into the walls of the PCB. And swaged actually gets folded, you know, against the PCB, but yeah, a little bit different. Another type of component. Oh, snap sockets are sometimes called so the snap sockets they're standoffs these are plastic. Components the deformed when you press them into a board these are usually pretty easy to install. We can pretty, pretty confidently handle this, but again, like you got to quoted appropriately because it's not just in a normal, through a process. It's not just in a normal SMT process. So it's going to be, you know, going somewhere else. We have a link to a type of, you know, a snap, a snap in locking a PCB support. So if you've ever assembled a PC, like an old school ATX PC tower, you've probably seen these where they're like these plastic supports that hold the board up off the chassis of the, of the tower and they kind of snap through the motherboard. Really, really common. We can install those. That's fine. But again, got to have the conversation. Usually it's honestly, you know, the best tool we use to install these things. We just take a nut driver. That's like just a little bit larger than, than it, and just pop it right into the board. It works every time. It's pretty neat. And there's, there's a woman at work who absolutely Carol loves to install these things. Anytime, anytime these things come up, she's like, oh, bring those over. Those are mine. That's There's something very satisfying about installing them. Yup. Those are, those are, nice little pop, a little snap. it is. It's like a, it's probably the similar sensation of, of popping a bubble wrap. You know, I don't know everybody, everybody loves it. But yeah, got to have the conversation, got to quote that appropriately ahead of time because it's not a standard component like through horror SMT. Dome switches. Now these are a weird one. Not everybody's going to know what these are. And I might not be using the right term for them, but Keystone calls them a dome switch. Keystone is a pretty large manufacturer of these things. The 5 1 7 series is a really popular series of these dome switches. We'll link to that too, so people can see what we're talking about, but they're not soldered to a board they're, they're held to a board with adhesive and typically that adhesive is going to be like a sheet of adhesive and it's going to be custom designed for your PCB. So, we we've had a few customers ask us about these and, and we've said, no, To the kind of low volume application for it, because again, it probably is going to require tooling to get the, you know, w we don't want to just line up these adhesive strips by hand. It's, it's kind of a, I mean, I guess you could, but it's easy to mess up. But they, they you know, they're going to be punched out in the die know progressive die process probably. And they're going to be specifically designed for where you want the dome switches and the size of your board and yada yada, yada trust me if you're using dome switches, you, you know what I'm talking about, but they're really nice. They're actually a very nice switch because they last a long, long time. They have a really nice kickback. When you, when you push on them, they have a really nice, tactile feel to it, way better than, than standard switches that you, you know, you buy for surface monitor through hole. They're going to last forever. So a lot of like H ATM's use them. Like a key pad on like an ATM machine or something, or, or maybe a I don't know. I, it's funny. I have for listeners to the show, know I love car racing and stuff. And so I have, I have a bracing simulator wheel that uses these things. And I know this because I watched a tear down of how this wheel is built and. And most of the switches are kind of the typical surface Mount or through hole switches that, you know, the very normal feel to them and kind of like what you might see on an Xbox or PlayStation controller, but you can feel the difference in these two particular switches because they take like an enormous amount of like you are pushing against these things to get them to switch. And it is a big 'kachunk' when you, when you do it. But they're really, really nice switches. So look them up. Keystone is a popular manufacturer. I think there's other manufacturers of them as well, really, really cool design. I think it's a really innovative way of doing it. But again, you gotta have that conversation with your manufacturer upfront. See if they're okay with doing this, do you need to have some way of aligning these really, really well so that you get consistent results, you may need to get some custom tooling made, yada yada yada. They're not a standard component. So got to have the conversation at a time about how to assemble those. This is a fun one. Hot bar soldering has been haunting me for my entire career in electronics manufacturing, because everybody underestimates what it takes to do. Everybody wants to do it, but they don't really know what's involved. Are you familiar? You've ever heard of hot bar soldering, Melissa. I haven't. That was my first question. Can you explain what it is? So, when you, they're almost always an external key pad or an LCD screen, it's, it's the most common application for them. And then you'll have a flexible kind of like a ribbon cable coming off the LCD and the most common way of connecting that LCD display to a circuit board is with a connector. So you have like a zero, zero insertion forces. For short Ziff connector that goes on, that gets soldered to the circuit board. And then you, you open up the clamp on that. You install the ribbon and then you clamp it back down, and then you make your connection to your LCD screen. That is the most common way for low volume manufacturing to do that. However there's a lot of expense in the connector itself and the time it takes to, you know, install the LCD onto it and the soldering and all that kind of stuff. Right? So a way around that for higher volume has been this hot bar soldering process where instead of a connector, you just have pads on the board and then the stencil printing process you add solder, and then it goes through reflow and now you have all these beautiful, perfectly even bumped pads of solder on the board. Hm. Well then how do you secure that flexible ribbon cable to those bumped pads? You heat them up. But it's just not that simple. You'll take a now I know there's ways of doing this by hand. I'm sure listeners are listening to this and going Chris and I do this all the time. It's not a big deal. And it's like, yeah, I know. I know you're able to do it by hand, but a manufacturing process where you want repeatability and you're putting your name on it what you have to do is you have to, you have to perfectly align that ribbon cable to those pads. The best way of doing that is with tooling. And the best way of doing that with tooling is to have a have holes in the board that matched the holes in the ribbon cable, and then having tooling pins that stick up through the board, and then you place that ribbon cable onto the board through those tooling pins so that everything is perfectly aligned. Does that make sense with me so far? Once you've got everything perfectly aligned, you come down with a long, skinny, basically soldering iron, for lack of a better term. It's not quite a soldering iron but it's, it's like an, it's typically on some kind of a controlled press head. So the head is going to have a closed loop feedback of how much pressure it's pushing onto the ribbon and onto the PCB, so that it's pushing with an appropriate amount of force, not too much, not too little. And then it's going to start to heat up that bar, that skinny bar, the skinny long soldering iron bar, the hot bar, if you will. And. Then once it gets to the appropriate temperature, it's going to melt the solder underneath the LCD ribbon cable and create that solder joint. But we're not out of the woods yet. If you were to just lift that bar up into the air, the ribbon cable will almost certainly want to lift with it because that ribbon cable is just a floppy little hanging out in the, you know, it's not going to want to stay on the board. It's going to want to lift up. you then have to cool that hot bar back down below the melting temperature so that it then cools the circuit board that know the solder joint. And then you can lift that hot bar up. And now you have a secure, a nice secure solder joint. that is the, that is the hot bar soldering process. In a nutshell, there's, there's obviously variations there's ways of, of tooling this without having the tooling pins and, and. The junk, you get the general idea. You need to align the LCD ribbon cable to the circuit board. You need to heat it up and cool it off all while holding pressure down. It's complicated. It usually requires capital equipment investment. Not every manufacturer has a hot bar soldering machine. And by machine I'm not talking about, I mean, they do make like big automated machines that do this, but most, you know, contract manufacturers, even your contract manufacturers with hundreds of employees, they're going to have kind of a benchtop station. And w we'll put a link to a popular one made by fan court in the in the show notes. And this is generally what's going to be used, but then each job has to get tooled. Like you need custom tooling for every job to do this, right? So you get repeatable results if you're just making. not going to want to pay for all that tooling and all that engineering. Right. So just use the Ziff connector. That's the moral of the story. If you're, if you're not building enough of them where you can, where you can make your money back on, on the lack of a connector by the hot bar soldering process, then just use the connector. These conductors, I mean, they can get kind of expensive. They, some, you know, some of them might be only be like 50 cents, but some of them could be a few bucks. And if you're making say 10,000 of them, you know, you're talking about tens of thousands of dollars that might pay for the capital investment and the The tooling to, to get that done. So, depending on your volumes, it might be cheaper to use a hot bar soldering process, but don't go into designing your product with that, with that process in mind, if you don't have an expectation that you're gonna make tens of thousands of these things, what we typically see is customers will do all their prototypes with the Ziff socket. And then once they know that that works, then when they go to a production environment, then they'll design the hot bar soldering process into it. If that makes sense. Do we do this? We do not, we have not done this for any customers. The reason I know a lot about this is because I used to sell hot bar soldering equipment. And it was very, very expensive. I mean, we're talking 30,000 plus dollars for a closed loop feedback head with a power controller and and each bar, that's the other thing, the bar is going to probably be custom to your design as well. So you have to order a custom bar a lot of times. Yeah, so it's, it's pretty expensive process. I had a customer who was they were making like a thermal they, they, they made like flexible thermal. Not, they weren't fabrics. They, they were, they were made a polyimide, but they would get warm and they were used for all kinds of applications. Maybe you had a, maybe you had a scientific application where you had to closely control the temperature of a tube. And so they would wrap this stuff around the tube and, and they would use a lot of our gear for hot bar soldering because that's how they made the connection to the power controllers that they, so they, they had a standard power controller and then they had a standard method of connecting their heat wraps to the power controller. So no matter what product they made, they always had the same connection. Right. So they always, you know, it was always that same ribbon and that same power controller. And so they, they were making tens and thousands of these things, even though maybe they only made 30 for this one particular application, it was always the same union. So it made sense for them to that's clever. Yup. Yup. It was kinda neat. Wires and cables. That's another one, you know, we do plenty of it. We S we say yes to plenty of it, but the CircuitHub platform is not designed to quote it appropriately. So you've got to have the conversation ahead of time, make sure that we're prepared for it. But if you have say like a battery pack or some kind of you know, maybe a nine volt battery connector or some kind of wire harness you know, gotta have the conversation ahead of time, about to get that quoting done right. And figure out. Cause you know, a lot of times what you'll do is you'll just have like a Molex connector and you'll plug this wire harness into your Molex connector. That's kind of the most common thing that we see. And so you just, you know, to us, we just see it as a through hole connector or surface Mount connector. And then when you get it, you plug in your wire harness. But the cheaper and more reliable ways to solder that wire harness directly into the board, if you know, You know, you're not going to have to remove this harness in the final product. Well, if that's the case, then you got to get that quoted. You got to figure out how much that's going to be. And, and just get that figured out ahead of time, you know, it's perfectly fine to do not saying we can't do it. It's just have the conversation ahead of time about it. Most likely we will say no to your 20 piece order again, but if you get enough of it, like we have one customer, they have like a they have a battery pack that holds, you know, three or four AA batteries. And and, but we do hundreds of thousands a year. We do thousands a year for this customer. So, you know, we had the conversation at the time. How much is it going to cost? Yada, yada, what's the process? Boom, no problem. Cause we make them over and over and over. We were able to figure that out and that is a CircuitHub customer. So it's not that we can't do it. Yeah, Again. Yeah, I'm I'm I, if we could make a super cut of how many times I've said, it's not that we can't do it. You just gotta have the conversation ahead of time. been thinking we need to come up with some sort of acronym for like the things you need to do when you encounter these. Like, don't assume like ask and I don't, I don't know. Oh, man. We'll figure don't know something. the we'll figure out the acronym for it. And we'll tweet about it. That sounds great. Rather than live on the show, just Melissa and Chris spitballing for 30 minutes about an appropriate acronym. Another thing that we see quite a bit of is adhesive tape. So you may have a through hole component that's kind of heavy or, you know, would otherwise be flopping around in the final product. And maybe it goes into an environment where, you know, maybe it goes into a car or a boat or something where it's going to experience a lot of vibration and it's a big, heavy capacitor battery. You probably want to secure that to the board somehow, so it's not flopping around. And a lot of times adhesive tape double-sided tape is used to do that by far, the most popular is the VHB series of tape from 3M I'm sure there's knockoffs of it at this point, but it is. If, if you want to secure something with double-sided tape, don't waste your time with anything. Get VHB. This stuff is unbelievable. It is just, there is like, there's like poetic engineering articles written about VHB tape. Like people love this stuff. It really is cool stuff and can solve a lot of problems. So if you need to secure something, somehow look up VHB tape. It's great stuff. But like we've said with everything else, talk to us first, make sure we're prepared to handle it. Don't just send it into us because this keeps happening. We keep, we keep getting all of a sudden, it just shows up where we're like, ah, did you quote this? Did you quote this? Did you see this? How are we supposed to do this? Yeah, just have the conversation ahead of time. Similar to that is RTV. Oh, boy. I used to remember what this stood for. Room temperature, something basically it's, it's silicone that, you know, you, you becomes an, either a tube, like, like if you're, if you've ever used a caulking gun around your windows or when you're painting or something like that, you know, the stuff, it can be silicone, it can be latex. It can be all kinds of stuff. By far, the most popular material in electronics manufacturing is silicone. Instead of latex, don't ask me why it just is. And it's stinky stuff. It smells bad. Nobody likes to do it, but you gotta do it. I had this customer at a previous job, they made emergency lights for helipads and runways and stuff like that. And if they, if they, if they went into the ground, then not much vibration, maybe a little bit of vibration, cause you're landing at how many ton, Boeing 7 77 onto a runway. You're going to get some vibration, even in that concrete. But but especially if it went into a boat or some other, platform where it was going to move a lot, they had these large resistors and capacitors through whole resistors capacitors that went into the board and they would get the solder joints would get fatigued over time from all the vibration, from the engines and crashing against the waves and stuff. So, they, they would use RTV and they would basically not exactly encapsulate the components and RTV, but like. You know, we would solder them together. And then we would dump all a lot of RTV all, all over these resistors and capacitors, and it held them in place really securely. And they had a much longer life span in the field, much lower failure rate. So if you, if you, if you have an application, that's going to experience a lot of vibration and you're getting field failures. You might want to look into RTV. Mg chemicals is probably the most popular brand. There's a bunch of them. Mg chemicals is a popular one. They have a really nice application guide we'll link to in the show notes for folks who are interested in that. Room temperature. Vulcanizing that's what There you go. Thank you. Thank you. Well, I'm gabbing on and on. You're able to find that for us. I appreciate it. There's probably some stuff I'm missing in here. I'm sure there's people shouting at their car stereos right now going well, what about this? Let us know tweet at us. Let me know what we forgot. I'm sure there's all kinds of stuff that I'm missing out on here, but yeah, that's the bulk of it. That's the bulk of it. Something I think might be worth pointing out. I know you kept repeating over and over and over did I repeat? I try not to repeat myself too much. yeah. I mean, I'm just, yeah, I'm sorry. There was No repetition at all in this No repetition whatsoever. That we might not be interested in doing it in low volume, but if it's going to be higher volume, come talk to us. I think sometimes the opposite might be true too, that, you know, like we might agree to it. Just thinking that you're, it's going to be like a one-time thing, building 10 boards. Like that's no problem to, you know, muscle through it, but you definitely have to have a conversation about whether or not we want to take that on for higher volumes. Yeah. I could see a situation where like, you know, they're like, Hey, could you you know, put this nut and bolt through this this edge connector for us. And it's like, ah, it's five boards. It's like, yeah, it's going to cost us more money. But the time it takes to quote it and figure all this out, we'll just get it done for you. And if it's just five boards, we know it's just for prototypes. That's going to be sitting on somebody's work bench and it's not going out into the field. So torque is just tight. It's not a torque spec. Right. And then all of a sudden we get an order for 500 with that same thing? Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, Yeah, we got to talk about this. yeah, Yeah. Assumptions are bad, Melissa. That's the moral of the story. back to it. Don't assume. I do not assume. Great. Can we please talk about my pet peeve of the week now? Yeah. Yeah, we can. I have been waiting to get this off my chest for two weeks. I have spent the past two weeks. I feel like if I've spent 80 hours working the past two weeks, 79 of them have been spent working on printers. Oh God. Wow. What We already talked about this. I know we, this was like one of our earliest pet peeves was printers, but ah, Melissa, it's just, it doesn't get better. It only gets worse and it's not like we're buying cheap printers, you know? Like, okay. So yeah. Okay. So we bought, we bought these Dell printers ages ago, 10, 11 years. They were workhorses, man, they just, for like eight, nine years, we use these things. They just lasted. All we did was put toner in them. They were great. So when we're expanding and growing, we're like Dell, we're buying and Dell, this is the way we're going. So we bought some more Dell and then all of a sudden Dell gets out of the printer business. And then the, so we start buying HPS and the HPS are not Dells. They're not. And not that the Dells were great. Like they were, they were workhorses, they got the job done, but there were still cheap plastic and, you know, poorly made, but we kept them running. Why Melissa? Why isn't there? Why isn't there an apple of printers, right? Why isn't there a premium printer brand? It's like, I don't okay. I can buy the HP printer for 500 bucks, you know? Cause we're buying laser printers designed for decent volume of, is there somebody I can buy a printer from $4,000 and just have it work reliably? Does this exist? Probably not. but that sounds like a good business opportunity. There's going to be a thousand ears listening to this. Somebody please tell me that there's like a premium printer company out there that is reliable and is not made of cheap plastic and just works. And I just, oh my gosh. I'm so sick of printers. I wanna get, I wanna, I wanna make it so we don't need printers at all. Cause we use printers for like packing lists and Traveler's bills and material. Sometimes we, we have all access to most of this digitally, but a lot of times we still need the paper. Ultimately I want to get to the point where we have the correct software where we don't need. Paper at all. And even like, I would love to be able to put you know, like on our ups label, if we could just put like a QR code to the packing list and they could look it up digitally, I would love to get to that point where we can even eliminate packing lists. But we can't yet. So I have to deal with printers. So somebody please tell me there's a better printer out there. And while we're on the subject of printers, let's just talk about windows updates for a second, because you are part of the problem. You are part of the printer problem I had. Okay. So we, the database we use to manage our inventory is it's old software. If you've ever been to like. An old school, like lumberyard or you buy and tires, or like, we're going to say, cause I think even Costco, like if you've ever seen the user interface that a lot of these companies use and it's this old black and white, and it looks like something out of the eighties, it's because it is it's the same software. It, they just run it in an emulator. They run it in a virtual machine. We're no different. Our, our database management software was written in the mid nineties. It is a graphical user interface. It was designed for probably windows 95, I think maybe windows 98, but we keep it going through virtual machines. This is very, very common. Don't be surprised by this, that a high-tech company is using this old software. Now there is modern software, but we own this software. It, you know, it's like when you have a car with no car payment, do go out and buy a new car just for the fun of it. No, because if it's still running, you want to, you don't want to have to pay for the car payment. It's the same way with new MRP software, they're so expensive, they're so expensive. And we're able to use this old software and it gets the job done. But if we move to the new software, we could probably go paperless and eliminate the printers altogether. And the reason I'm pointing at windows updates is because when I was trying to get this old software to print to these brand new printers, windows updates would either break or fix the printing issue. So I was running into these situations where these, some computers were able to print some computers. Weren't the computers that could print either had not updated windows updates and a long time, or had had all of their windows updates recently. It was the in-between ones that couldn't print. So like some, some windows update broke the printing. And then they found out that it broke the printing. And so they, another windows update, fixed the printing. So if somebody was not regularly updating their windows updates at all, they could still print. If somebody else was doing their windows updates, but not regularly enough, they could not print. And then if somebody had excellent windows updates, hygiene, they could print. And it was such madness to try to figure this out. I don't understand why it's so complicated. I don't get it. I don't get it. I don't know what I'm missing. What am I missing, Melissa? Why is it so complicated? It's because It's a conspiracy. They want you to get, get you to buy the new software. big printer. Yeah. printer. Well, you know, you know, the truth is when you're trying to print from. Just windows or Mac or your iPhone. No problem. All of these devices print. No problem. It's when we go into the virtual machine that we have problems, it's really, the problem is we're using this old software. I shouldn't be complaining so much So what you need to do is just keep keep a tally of all the hours that you have spent working on this and then convert that into how much, how, yeah, there you go. sounds like a plan to me. Oh yeah. Yeah. Well, if if you hate printers as much as Chris does or if you want to know of alternate methods of mounting components to your circuit board, and you have questions about how to do that, where can they reach us, Melissa? They can reach us at contact@pickplacepodcast.com or of course you can always tweet at us at CircuitHub or at w assembly. And don't forget Oh, yes, yes, yes. February 9th.

At 12: 1:05:49

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00 PM. Eastern. Join us for the hack chat. Be there or be square. Yep. Oh boy. I think, I think everybody who's there will probably be square. probably true. Thanks for listening to the pick place podcast. If you like, what you heard consider following us in your favorite podcast app, and please leave us a review on apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts from. Thanks so much everybody.