Pick, Place, Podcast
Pick, Place, Podcast
Showstoppers that delay PCB assembly w/ Production Manager, Rob OConnell
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We love it when PCB orders run through the assembly line smooth as butter. Inevitably, however, sometimes things do get delayed. On today's episode, we sat down with CircuitHub Production Manager, Rob OConnell, on the biggest showstoppers that cause orders to run late and some things customers can do to prevent this from happening.
Chris' KiCon 2019 Talk - Your Manufacturer is Stupid
The Perfect 0402 Footprint
pickplacepodcast.com
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
Melissa:And this is Melissa Hough with
Chris:looking back, Melissa.
Melissa:welcome back, Chris. I think we're finally back on schedule, right for the last episode of the year.
Chris:You know, what's funny, I listened to a Tesla podcast and the host of the show went away for Thanksgiving and he didn't even miss an episode because he prerecorded episodes to make sure he could miss an episode. And he goes, I've been doing this show for six years and I've never missed one episode. And I just think. I'm terrible at this, this guy hasn't missed an episode in six years.
Melissa:We had a pretty good streak for awhile, but
Chris:We were doing good there
Melissa:we're, we're, we're busy people.
Chris:if you're still listening, thanks so much for listening and, and I'm glad to see our break didn't scare you away. And but yes, Melissa, we are busy people. It has been, we're still doing our pick and place research, which involves a lot of travel and just an enormous amount of like, just talking to salespeople and engineers and figuring out quotes and what do we need, what don't we need and all this kind of stuff, you know, it's just, and then, and that's on top of everything that we normally do, right. It's like,
Melissa:Yeah.
Chris:but it's been exciting. We got a new solder paste inspection machine we put in line recently and
Melissa:Oh really?
Chris:an entire line. Yeah. Well, not brand new because New to us. Yeah. Cause there's certain things you like to buy brand new, like pick and place, but you know, solder paste, inspection machines, you can often get by with buying used because they they're just less complicated. They're, they're, they're not as cumbersome. They don't get as dirty, you know, you're not banging feeders and trolleys in and out of the machines. They're just, they're simpler. Right. And so they, they tend to have less wear and tear on them. So I was happy to go with a used one there. And but yeah, we've had that sitting around for a while and I finally decided the last, this week to get the thing installed and the, yeah. All right. Let's, let's start with an early pet peeve. We'll talk about industry pet peeve. If listeners aren't familiar, there is a spec in our industry for how a machine should be configured for sitting in an assembly line. Okay. So if you have a conveyor inside your machine, You need to meet the specifications that every other manufacturer has agreed to meet in order to put this machine in line with all other machines. Basically at the end of the day, it just means how do we communicate between machines? So if I have a my data pick and place machine and a flex link conveyor, and an Omron SPI all in line with each other, how do I make sure that when it's coming out of the SPI and onto the conveyor and into the, my data and there's three different vendors, how do I make sure that that board flows smoothly and that there's no interruption and that each machine communicates with the next machine? Well, that's a spec in our industry called schema S M E M a. Don't ask me what it stands for.
Melissa:Yeah, I think we've mentioned it on the show before.
Chris:yeah. And, and so we're putting all these in line. The other thing that it does is it specifies the height that all the conveyors should be set to. And the schema spec says 36. The 37 or is it 30 now 36 to 37 millimeters or inches. Excuse me. And
Melissa:Freedom units
Chris:freedom units, freedom units glazed donuts per bald Eagle, believe is how it's, how it's measured properly. And our SPI machine this this particular vendor Omron, they don't that they, because ma ma many of their machines are sold in Japan. They kind of, Japan has a different spec for a conveyor height, so they cannot reach the spec of SMEMA they can't reach the full height. And when you try to set them that high, they have all kinds of vibration issues and there's all kinds of problems. So we had all of our equipment set to the spec, but in order to get this one machine in this entire assembly line to work, I had to lower all the other machines to meet it. And that just took a ton of
Melissa:Oh really well.
Chris:I could have. I could have bought SMEMA blocks and raised the height
Melissa:Yeah. I was going to say, why don't just lift the other machine that seems like a lot less work.
Chris:It's a lot less work. It's definitely a lot less work. But I actually quite like that height. I personally, even though I'm not a short person I'm a five foot 11 on a good day, but many of the folks who work on our assembly lines, aren't that tall and, and the height a little bit lower height might be more comfortable. I don't know. We'll see either way. We're setting it up to the Japanese spec now, which is 900 millimeters. And that's just what I'm cause every here's the thing. Everybody works with the 900 millimeters, every single machine, every single conveyor, they all work on 900 millimeters. No problem. So that's just what we're moving forward with all of our equipment, 900 millimeters done. And that's just, that's how it's going to be. But anyway, that's, that's been a distraction a bit from the podcast, but we're getting. about yourself? You've been moving any machines around Melissa?
Melissa:I have not been moving any machines around. Nope. I cannot say I have been, I've just been gearing up for the end of the year, doing all the end of the year. Yeah. Oh yeah. And Chinese new year, I was thinking it might be fun to have an entire episode. Probably pretty soon in the new year where we just got where we just talk about that and why it's such a problem in the industry. Not problem, but you know why there's
Chris:how disruptive it
Melissa:How disruptive it is and why, why it's just disruptive for so much longer than just the length of the actual holiday, you know? Yeah.
Chris:Yeah. And I believe you know, we referred to it as Chinese new year. That's what it's been known by at least most people in the Western part of the world for a long time. But I think the more accurate way of saying lunar new year, because I think it applies to a lot more countries than just China.
Melissa:Yeah. Well, I think the entire holiday is called spring festival
Chris:Oh, is that it? Yup.
Melissa:for the cause it's the whole week is called spring festival. And then the lunar, well, I guess it's just, this is just their new year. I
Chris:Well, I'll tell you what listeners tune in to the next episode and you'll, we'll do this research. We'll figure it all
Melissa:Or somebody will tell us.
Chris:He's these ignorant Westerners will finally understand how it all works.
Melissa:Well, because our, our or overseas Chinese supplier, he refers to it as Chinese New Year
Chris:he does. Yeah. CNY is what he normally refers to it as. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Understood. And that's, it's just like calling it Kleenex, maybe who knows. And for overseas listeners, that's a facial tissue. Well, it's like the Brits. We're gonna have a Britt on the show. We can ask him, but I know that they don't call them vacuum cleaners. They call them Hoovers, you
Melissa:Oh, yeah,
Chris:was the big, that was the big vacuum brand. So these things. Language, it's weird. This is not a language podcast. This is a circuit board podcast. Let's talk circuit boards.
Melissa:Brits on the show,
Chris:yes. Why don't you tell us a little bit about today's guest,
Melissa:yes. So today we have Rob, who is a production manager at CircuitHub and he usually works remotely from the UK, but he has been visiting us in Massachusetts this week, this past couple of weeks. And so we decided it was a great opportunity to have him come on the podcast and chat. Welcome to the welcome to the show, Rob.
Rob:Yeah. Thank you.
Chris:Nice to have you welcome to America. How
Melissa:Yeah. It's your first time, right?
Rob:is. Yeah. Yeah. It's a long overdue though. I was due to come before COVID but obviously that went out the window. So I've had to wait two years longer than planned, but here I am. I'm here
Chris:very nice. Nice, nice to have you. How have you enjoyed the United States?
Rob:yeah, it's great. Yeah. It's yeah, it's been a real experience. It's, it's nice to to be around people that are locals as well, because. been able to see a lot of stuff that you probably wouldn't do as a tourist. So, yeah, I've seen a lot of what I would call real America these last couple of weeks. Those it's been really good. Yeah.
Chris:find out the stereotypes then what's real America in your mind then
Rob:yeah, I've
Chris:trucks and diners.
Rob:yet. So everyone drives V8 pickups and Walmart and target are just as big as you expect them to be. Yeah, look a lot of the, well, some fantastic food, but the portions are quite large compared to a UK restaurant, for example. So I'll be, I've eaten well, this last couple of weeks.
Chris:What sort of things what sort of things have you eaten more specifically? What did I make for you that you've eaten.
Rob:So I have been introduced to something called fluff, which sounds quite strange to someone who's not American, I guess, but in fact, I'm sure someone said to me, it's fairly local to this area as well. Right? Is it not actually.
Chris:I wonder if it started to be kind of local to the Northeast, but I think you can find it most, but like, Melissa, did you have fluff growing up? Cause you came from California
Melissa:I wouldn't say it's something I had regularly, perhaps my mom just didn't give it to me, but we definitely had it available.
Chris:probably because she was a good parent and didn't feed her children like sugary
Melissa:exactly. She, she wanted my brain to function during school
Rob:So I've had a couple of fluffernutters, which sounds really strange for a British guy to be saying that word, but yeah, it's been a bit of a running joke over the last week of it's turned into a bit of a competition. Various people bring in,
Chris:who can make a better fluff sandwich for Rob.
Rob:but they've all been great, but
Chris:I think Rob's the real winner in this whole, this whole war, by the way. His belt is probably not the winner
Rob:no,
Chris:war.
Rob:no. And yep. I've got a couple of jars to take home, so I'll be introducing it to my wife and a close family. Try this. We don't have any, anything similar in the UK that I can think of. We have marshmallow, but nothing like spreadable, like what that is. So yeah, looking forward to introducing that to some British people, see how they get
Chris:that's great. Well, I'm happy. You've enjoyed your time here. We've been, it's been, it's been great having you here.
Melissa:All right. So Before we get into the meat of today's episode, Rob, would you be able to give us a little bit of background about what you were doing before CircuitHub and how you got into the engineering world?
Rob:Yeah. So I have been, I guess I've been around electronics for over 10 years now. Funny story. I never really intended to be involved in it. I, you know, I was just a young, like 18, 19, 20 year old, and I was just desperate for a job at the time. So I joined an employment agency and and they said, yeah, we've got some, you know, easy jobs, how'd you find this go into an electronics factory nearby. And I said, yeah, I'll, I'll give it a go. Sounds interesting. You know, I was just, I needed the money. I didn't really think that Evolve into a career.
Chris:gas money. You
Rob:Yeah. that's right. Yeah. Well, at the time it was beer money. So
Chris:There you go.
Rob:being young,
Chris:Yeah, not, not over here. It wasn't. You
Rob:I know. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. But yeah, I said, yeah, I'll give it a go. That sounds sounds interesting. So yeah, I went and they put me on just through hole soldering, at the time. And I had I had a bit of experience with, you know, like welding, if you like, which. In the same kind of ballpark, I suppose, if you like, you know, trying to, trying to join two pieces of metal together, if you like, and then yeah, I kind of to be quite good at it. And then they said, well, why don't you, you know, move on to some smaller stuff. Why don't you start looking at surface Mount and reworking surface Mount? And I said, yeah, fine. I went in surface Mount, and then. I realized that I had quite a good eye for inspection. So I was predominantly an AOI operator for probably three or four years
Chris:what AOI machine?
Rob:muetec I on and
Chris:are, those are headquartered, not 60 miles from us, their
Rob:oh, well, okay, cool. Yeah. And I mean, they, they were, they were good machines, but. They were only 2d for a start, which kind of, kind of limits you in, you know, how good you can actually get them. So there was a lot
Chris:They have 3d now,
Rob:yeah. yeah. But there, you know, it also involved a lot of manual inspection for a scope, for example, because as you know, there are just some parts you cannot see from top down and yeah. And then yeah, I was working on AOI and then I just ended up. You know, increasing responsibility. And then so it became in charge of the surface Mount department from a previous job. And then yeah, just times changed.
Chris:company? I'm curious, employing a number
Rob:yeah, I guess, I guess probably around a hundred employees, they were an OEM. They, they worked in a foreign security. Sector. So, you know, a wide variety of products and yeah, quite interesting, but it was, you know, just churning out five hundreds all the time, rather than contract manufacturing where you're, you're doing like fives and tens, for example. And then, yeah, it just, it just came to a period in my life where I thought, okay, like I'm enjoying this and let's see what else is out there. And then I just applied for circuit hub kind of on a whim. I mean, I was looking for another job sort of in the background, but I thought yet this one, this one looks good. I'll apply for it. And then yeah, here we are today. I mean, when I, when I first started CircuitHub it's fair to say, like in its infancy and it was a bit of a risk joining CircuitHub cause it was what you would class as a startup I would say. So, you know, as I was coming from this comfortable comfortable employment that I had to join this startup which you know, is a massive risk. The, in the four years that I've been here or just under four years, is it has grown massively. The factory or Pico factory at least is, has grown massively. You know, we've, we've gone from having one robot in the factory to, you know, like multiple people and robots still. So it's like, Yeah, really, really cool. Really cool to see.
Chris:Happy to have you. It's interesting your, your employment experience parallels really similar to mine where I just, I just needed some gas money. I was 18 and working at a cm and I, I was responsible for our AOI machine for a couple of years and then on a whim applied to the different company. And
Rob:Yeah,
Chris:it's so funny it's how we all start in this
Rob:that's right. Yeah,
Chris:and for whatever reason none of us ever leave. Yeah. Excited to excited to get into it. I, so we, we, you know, we're always trying to think of, of what to do on the show and, and we liked the interview shows. We liked the technical shows and we love it when our interview shows our technical shows and how this all went down. And the reason we have Rob on the show here today is because we propose to have him on the show. We're trying to think of a topic. And I think Rob was your idea, or maybe it was Melissa. To propose what are the biggest showstoppers the biggest hurdles in getting something to ship. And I'm, I'm excited to discuss that. And, and one of the things that we we mentioned a number of times, and if you're a new listener, I'll just repeat it real briefly. And if you're an old listener, I I'm sorry. You have to hear this again, but we're trying to pull back the curtain behind what happens to get a circuit board in the world. We had to stop doing tours during COVID and we thought this would be a great way to kind of expose people to what the manufacturing world is like. And it's been it's been a lot of fun and by extension we keep hearing feedback from people, especially senior level engineers that say this kind of content is great for junior engineers, because they're still learning about all these things. They're still learning the lessons that I've learned for 30 years, you know, not, not me. Me the senior level engineer, who's been doing this for 30 years. And so, so these are the kinds of things. These are the kinds of things we're going to talk about today. These are the kinds of things that really throw a wrench in the gears and really cause all kinds of problems of getting stuff out the door. So I'm thrilled to talk about it. I'll shut up now. I'll let Rob talk.
Rob:Yeah. I mean, as everyone is well aware, there is a global chip shortage at the moment. So yeah, you may have heard of it. So where. It's inevitable that part's going to be consigned on some jobs like, you know, engineers just have parts in there on their desk for example. The problem we're seeing now with the chip shortage is there's more and more consignment parts. And if they're not sent on time, for example, or they're sent, take us for example, in a circuit hub where we waiting for don't know and an ST32 IC, for example,
Chris:Which are basically solid gold right now because nobody can
Rob:Yeah.
Chris:Get there ST32s
Rob:so we're waiting for that. And then something completely different turns up, but we're like, well, is that correct? Is that expected
Chris:So wait a second. Am I understanding this properly? The customers provided a part number. They say I'm sending you S T 32 1 2 7 3 9 7, whatever it is. And then an S T 32 AB 4, 3, 1 shows up a different part number. So they've told, they've told you a and you, and, and then in the boxes B that's the scenario.
Rob:Yep. So that, that obviously has like a massive knock on effect because then there's, there's the initial, well, is that intended that we've received that part. And then, so we're not necessarily in the business of trying to change a customer's design, but we need to then know, is it still going to fit the footprint, for example, like, is it, is the package correct for that job? So with chip shortage, we're seeing more and more consignments all the time. And then this, this problem is now becoming bigger and bigger all the time because customers don't have parts, they're scrounging parts out the drawer at the top drawer of their desk. For example, they're sending them, they're sending them loose in just like little bag thing
Chris:you imagine, oh, you.
Rob:you have no way of placing them on the machine. So then you've then got this mechanical problem of like, how are we going to get them on the machine, for example?
Chris:Yeah. Yeah. So I I've seen talk about footprint not matching, so you may still send in, you know,"ST32ABC" and then, and it seems like the same part number. There could be a 100 pin QFP 0.5 millimeter pitch or a 100 pin QFP 0.4 millimeter pitch. And the part number is almost identical. It might have like one character difference. Yeah.
Rob:It's inevitable that we're going to have consignments and this will always be a thing, whether there's a chip shortage or not, but it's a real showstopper for us if the part where we're expecting is not what we receive. It just has this massive knock on effect in V from receiving all the way to placement and shipping. So,
Chris:Yeah. There's so, you know, one, one thing I I've seen a few times, that's, that's similar to this on the, on the Worthington side and not just at Worthington, but at other companies I've worked at you know, you'll be on the phone with somebody and they'll say, all right. Yeah. I'll send you those ST32s. And you're like, great. Awesome. And then they'll, they'll ship them and it'll say like attention, Chris Denney. then, and then they just sit on the cause maybe I'm on a cruise ship somewhere in the Caribbean, you know? And so they just sit on the work bench of the receiving department. They're like, oh, we gotta wait till Chris comes back. I don't know what these are for, you know, that's the best. That's my favorite.
Rob:Yeah. Yeah. I think as a customer, the best way that they can work around this is just to give us as much information as quick as possible. So we're aware that when these parts do arrive in, they're slightly different, We know that it's fine. So one of, one of the other problems we, you know, as a, as a cm is things do go wrong. But when they do, we need a fairly quick resolution to them because the time it takes to set the machine up the board is in the machine and then all of a sudden, oh, you know, there's packages wrong. So at CircuitHub we have some pretty good designed for manufacture checks before that boards even gets in the machine, but we definitely come across it every now and then where parts are wrong on the machine and it is a problem, but it's not much of a problem if, we can reach out to the customer and then within 30 minutes, we've got an answer back. Whereas there's been times where we're waiting and then we're like, okay, we can't stand around any longer. We need to tear the kit down. We need to move on. So promptness from the customer is very critical, even more so at the moment we have all these part shortages that we're seeing
Chris:yeah, totally. I'll share a a story that I did not experience myself, but I've been told that in the nineties it was not uncommon that if a cm found their customer at fault for a line going down, that they would charge their customer the per minute rate that, that assembly line costs.
Melissa:Can you imagine.
Rob:Yeah.
Chris:So, so like, for example, in the nineties, it was probably like, like five bucks an hour, or excuse me, five bucks a minute. So, you know, if you're down for 30 minutes,
Rob:Yeah.
Chris:you're charging your customer a lot of money for that downtime. The truth is a typical surface Mount let's just talk surface Mount assembly line. The equipment cost itself, not talking about the space, the floor, the lighting, the HVAC the personnel to operate it, just the equipment itself anywhere from one to $2 million for just that equipment. And you really only expect to use most of these mid-teens at most, for 10 years, you can push it past 10 years, but most you expect. So you've got to make your $2 million back in less than 10 years. And yeah, so 30 minutes of downtime is very expensive for your cm
Rob:Yeah. Yeah.
Chris:and not being prompt with a response is super painful.
Rob:Yeah. I mean, there, there's plenty of CMs out there they're working on 2, 3, 4 day turns as well. So
Chris:Right.
Rob:circuit hub, for an example, your BOM comes in and we've got to water the bomb on day one, pretty much. If we want to, if we want to match that turnaround time, we have to be ordering the BOM on day one. And
Chris:that's assuming the parts are actually in stock somewhere.
Rob:So if, if we can't get the parts then the customer needs to be on the ball pretty much after he's placed his order, he needs to then be checking his emails because we're likely to be reaching out to him. You know, we can't get this part. It needs to be on order today. Do you have a substitute, for example? So again, it all contributes to this chip shortage. Like maybe three years ago, even we probably that circuit hub, we wouldn't have had that problem as such, you know, customer places his BOM we buy it, but now it's. It's not like that at all anymore. So having, having the customer be able to be reachable, pretty much instantly is a massive win for any, any contract manufacturer.
Chris:And I, and I understand many CircuitHub customers are not providing their cell phone numbers, right. Or, or any kind of phone number for an engineer. And I get the sort of sentimentality of like, oh, it's a website. And I don't want to be data mined for my cell phone number and have that sold to some telemarketing agents. We're not doing that. We have engineers that need to speak to engineers. That's why we need your phone number because we're going to be like, Hey, we got a QFN 48 here and a footprint, a QFN 24. What do we do? You know? Yeah. I have seen this a few times now where you were mentioning a consigned part or any part in general, really, not fitting the footprint. What what's your experience been with? Is it more often the part number was wrong or was it that the design of the footprint was wrong for the part, like they needed that part, but then they design the w where do you see
Rob:Yeah. Good question. It's I'm gonna, I'm gonna take the easy route out and I'm going to say it's probably about 50, 50, I would say it's like,
Chris:going to punt it. Aren't
Rob:yeah. It's it, yeah, I mean, We see designs and they are, they are based completely around one particular IC, for example, you know, they do, they do everything on that board. And then all of a sudden we can't get that part anymore and you can't actually sub it because it's so critical to their design it's then like, okay, well, we will now just have to, you either respin your board with a different component or, you know, we're going to have to say, we can't make it at the moment. I mean, you can, we can put it on hold for nine months, 12 months, whatever, but I'm guessing as a, as the customer, they want their boards as soon as possible. So that's not really an option. So, yeah, it's difficult because we generally do have some pretty good board design. I mean, that is also critical for getting boards after surface mountain, kind of, you kind of expect to have some rework. You know, that's just going to happen with surface Mount. You're dealing with such small components all the
Chris:And we're only building, you know, we might only be building 10 pieces. It's not like we're reaching six Sigma with a a hundred thousand boards,
Rob:Yeah. Correct. Yeah. And
Chris:a little rework on 10.
Rob:yeah, so you know that it can just help if the footprint is correct for a start. So we're not dealing with tombstone, resistors and tombstone capacitors, that's just like such an easy thing to avoid. Just making sure that the footprint is correct on the design. And it just takes a lot of work just to fix, you know, 10 tombstone resistors, for example, like it's just totally not needed. There is such an easy fix for it. So it's just for, for an engineer just to spend that little bit extra time on his footprints to make sure. You know, it makes it for us. It makes the difference between sometimes being able to ship the job on time and being a day late because you know, we're having to rework boards, which no one wants to do. Their parts are tiny as it is. So it's like making extra work. We have a surface Mount machine to place those parts. And then if you're using a person to do them, it's like, well, like what's gone wrong.
Chris:This, this is such a, you, you mentioned tombstone parts. This is a shockingly shockingly pervasive problem. And it, and, and correct me if I'm wrong, Rob, do you mostly see it on 0402?
Rob:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, as, as the part gets bigger, you know, you have a lot more tolerance for it being slightly incorrect. I mean, the difficulty also increases as the parts get smaller. You know, if you'll rework in 10 0201s or smaller, for example, it's almost impossible for a human to be doing that. You have to be so skilled to be able to rework 0201 and smaller, even 0402.
Chris:Our experience has been that we see more tombstoning on 0402 than we do on 0201. Interestingly enough. And that's mostly down to not our process, but a footprint issue. I wrote an article about the perfect 0402 footprint in which I totally just stole the footprint from one of our customers with permission, by the way, with permission, I went to them and I said, I go, we build thousands of boards for you. You have tons of 0402 is on all these boards. We never get one tombstone. Can I please just use your footprint as a reference? He said, no problem. So I wrote this article, I don't know. Gosh, it had to been eight plus years ago. Now it is still to this day, the number one most visited page on our website. Even more than our home page, which is usually the number one most visited page on most company's websites, this 0402 footprint page, because it's such a pervasive problem. And people run into this all the time where their cm goes, Hey, we're having all kinds of problems. You know, we're, we're tombstone, rework these all the time and then they go, they go, oh, what, what did I do wrong? And then they find, they find this page and they fix their footprint. We still, I mean, even after all this time in all of this effort to educate customers, we still get these terrible 0402 footprints.
Rob:Totally agree with you, 0402 is a troublesome, I mean, we, we also have problems with some through whole parts, so just yeah. Believe it or not. Yeah. Well, not that not the actual leads
Chris:sarcasm listeners that was sarcasm in case he didn't pick
Rob:it's more like the, the body of parts which are not
Chris:The body of parts. What do you mean? Oh, okay.
Rob:so just, just thinking off the top of my head, we've definitely seen the footprint is correct. You know, it's a three pin connector, for example,
Chris:So the holes are the right size or right pitch
Rob:but the body is way bigger than what the, what the design is allowed for. So then you
Chris:Oh, so you're like sitting on 0402s or something. Yeah.
Rob:Your end up sitting on, on top of surface Mount components, but then. We want to check that that's actually expected. So then it goes back to, you know, we're in an email in the customer and saying, is this correct? Did you intend to have this connector sat over a load of resistance, for example?
Chris:Do you ever get like, we've seen this where we had this customer who wants. They specified an led, a through hole led at, you know, D1 or whatever. But then they didn't give us the specifics of how they wanted that led pop through hole through a led populated. They wanted it bent at like a 90 degree angle and lined up with this other. And we just stuffed them all flat because that's what it looked like your design was calling for. And we didn't get any drawings or anything telling us otherwise it's heartbreaking. I want to go back to the customer and be like, well, that's your fault because you didn't tell me what, but I don't want to do that. I don't want to be that guy. I want to build it. Right. I don't want to make that mistake.
Rob:We see the same thing, like please bend these leads at 45 degrees for example, but we've no problem doing that. We just need to know
Chris:What direction
Rob:Yeah, exactly. Yeah,
Chris:45 and they're hanging off the board and they need them in the middle or something. Yeah. Yeah, totally.
Rob:And then the other thing that strikes me at the moment is we have a real need for, obviously we want to have the best finish of solder fit that we can. So having good thermal relief on a board as well it stops us having to do rework essentially. So we don't have cold, solder joints
Chris:talking about through hole
Rob:we don't need to touch them up with an iron, for
Chris:yeah.
Rob:So, yeah. Good board design is really critical to being able to get a job out on time because you just, if the board is designed correctly, chances are you have no rework and then you'll be able to ship the job on time.
Chris:Do you ever have this experience, Rob, where you look at like the Gerber files or you look at the preview page on our website on circuit Hub's website and you look at the, you look at the layout of things and you go, oh, this is going to be a nightmare job. And it has nothing to do with the part selection. You can just tell this sort of like it's, it's just not cohesive. There's there's exposed vias right next to fine pitch parts. And like, you just get this sort of like a [shiver sound], this is going to be trouble.
Rob:We have a set deadline for each day, so we want to, we want to get as much out as we can. So sometimes we might end up spending, you know, half a day on one job just because of design problems. And then you think, well, we could have done four or five jobs of, of really suitable PCB design or, you know, some simple PCB components, for example. So it's like, as the production manager you just want to, well, if we can even spend a lot of time doing one job or we can spend a lot of time doing multiple jobs, We, we enjoy a challenge. Don't get me wrong. Like we were seeing new componentry every day. Just stuff that we never thought. Yeah, it would be put on a surface Mount machine, for example. And then next week you've just got like this completely bespoke part and it's, you know, you check the date sheet and it's like, yeah, you can surface Mount. It's not a problem. You know, this is, this is your footprint and this is your, your pay stencil so yeah, so it's, it's always a learning curve and, you know, hopefully most engineers, they are pretty receptive to some like DFM review. So
Chris:Most are
Rob:again, we have a, we have a great set of engineers and they're very much like we'll do it this time, but please consider in future revising your footprint, for example. So, you know, it works both ways. Like we'll obviously do the job, but we would love it. If the engineer, if the customer would then update his design for future orders because as you know, we're working together basically. So
Chris:had this exact experience recently with a customer who they had all these 0201 size diodes right next to their through hole pins. And so we had to hand solder everything and we're like, look, if you could just move these diodes away. And they're like, absolutely. And the next spin of them, they flew through the factory. So not only, you know, the cost savings was significant because now we could robotically, solder these the the lead time was reduced because we could robotically solder them. The quality was increased because we could robotically solder them. I mean, it was just win, win, win. I mean, you could just stack them up all these reasons that it was worthwhile to do exactly what Rob was just saying. You know, get some feedback from the manufacturer, find out the pain points, make the revisions. That'd be great. I want to circle back to something you were saying earlier about thermal relief. And if, if you're not familiar, just listener for what we mean by thermal relief. We're talking about the, if you have a copper pour you have like a polygon you know, every, every. EDA tool uses a different term, some calls at polygon, some calls it pour basically a large area of copper on the PCB connected directly to a soldering point, whether it's surface Mount or through hole, if it's, if it's a hundred percent surrounded by that copper. And it's just all one plane of copper with no separation in between that is no thermal relief. There's zero thermal relief whatsoever. I, my experience has been, and, and tell me, Rob, if you, if you have the same experience, that's not really an issue for surface Mount, because it's all going into the reflow oven. It's all getting up to temperature. Yeah.
Rob:Yeah, yeah, yeah. Surface Mount is not as bad. You know, you can, you can adjust your reflow oven to suit those. Generally we see them on like big inductors or big Bluetooth modules, for example, you know, they need a lot of heat to reflow anyway, so you can tweak your profile to suit that. But as you, as you say, with these through hole parts, you're, you know, you're just using a solar in iron. So if you can't get the heat into the board to reflow that joint, it's a, it's a real struggle. And then you end up with like this ugly looking solder joint as well, which everyone wants like a great looking circuit board, but sometimes you just, you just, you can't achieve that because you cannot get the heat into the board.
Chris:Well, even with a robotic soldering machine, some people might say like, oh, okay. If you're using a soldering iron, why, why don't you use a the robotics soldering machine, even with these things, you know, physics is physics man, and there's so many, so much heat you can put inside these things. We had one customer who had a they had a CR 2 32, you know, the classic or 23, whatever the classic battery, you know that you see on coin cell batteries that you see on computers. And anyway there was a socket for this battery. So the socket itself was pretty beefy, had a pretty serious thermal mass. And then there was no thermal relief on the ground pin. And it was like, it was like a four layer board. And he did like copper pours of ground on every layer. And it was like, we would sit there with, we would preheat the board. Before selective soldering, and then we sit there and we let the nozzle just dwell on this joint and just, just for like 15 seconds to get this thing full, we'd get there. But that's absurd. No most solder joints with proper thermal relief. You've just kiss him for half a second. And they, they fill right up. You, you shouldn't have to preheat it and then sit there for 15 seconds trying to fill the hole
Rob:yeah. We we've had a job this week actually. And you know, we've got it on a heated plate, bottom side, heated, and then we're soldering in the top side, we've two irons to try and get enough heat into this, into this solder joint, you know, just to get the to reflow in this, because again, we've like you're through hole parts. You could end up with a pretty wide diameter lead as well. So you're then got to heat up this thick lead as well as a big board.
Chris:And then if the, and then if that lead is, is, is on its way to some other thermal mass that other thermal mass is going to absorb, because a lot of like aluminum capacitors inside that can, it's just a lot more aluminum or copper or whatever the material is. And it's just, that's just soaking up heat. If you look at your EDA tool, if you're not familiar with what we're talking about, you know, do some Googling for thermal relief, Eagle, thermal relief, Altium thermal relief, kicad whatever tool it is that you're using. You'll find it there. There's usually a checkbox where you can say, add thermal relief and it'll add this little, like crosshair looking thing that where, you know, it's not connecting 360 degrees around the whole, it's connecting at like four points around the hole. And that is just enough. To, you know, let the heat in without getting absorbed into the rest of the PCB. The important thing to note here is that we build everything to IPC class two. And, and if you're not familiar with IPC class two, it's far beyond the scope of today's show, but basically it's a standard of how we're going to build everything. It's what specs are going to meet when there is a thermal plane, like a ground plane, or maybe you have, maybe it's a positive voltage, plane, whatever, whatever it might be. If you have a large copper area, IPC lets us fill that hole up to 50%. And that's where we're going to stop. Because if we can't get on any more full than that, then that's what you're going to receive because it meets the spec. So if you want nice looking joints,
Rob:Hmm.
Chris:give that thermal relief and then maybe we can reach the a hundred percent whole fill.
Rob:As a person as well. You know, I'd just like to see a decent solder joint across the board surface, Mount and through hole. So
Chris:Everybody wants to do a great job.
Rob:know, the guys, the guys down there in finishing, they all want to do the best of their ability as well. They, they want to have some pride in their work. So being able to just. You know, have a nicesolder joint is, it looks good. So,
Chris:yes. Now I I'm looking over our show notes here, Rob, and I added one thing that I think you'll agree with me on we experience we experienced this a lot where we were talking to engineers and, you know, they, they may have a request for us to do something a particular way or change a part number or do something and rather than say I need such and such kind of a solder joint, or I need, you know, the, the, the parts need to be baked. They'll say like, you know, the optical isolator and you're like yeah, I don't know what the opto isolator, what location we talking about here. And the reason that becomes important and becomes a showstopper is because now I have to do the research to figure out, wait, what are they talking about? What location? Like, and then, okay, now I got to ask another question, right? Okay. What do you mean by the optical isolator? Are you talking about U4, I think you're talking about U4 and now there's another 30 minutes waiting to hear back from the engineer, whether yes U4 is what I'm talking about.
Rob:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you can go even, even further than that. So we have definitely seen. References that are duplicated on the same board as well. So you've got, you've got two U4s for example, but there'll be U4_1 and underscore two, for example. But if you, if, if an engineer can just make that U4 & U5, it way easier to reference throughout the process. You know, if I, if I go, if I go to the engineers and go you know, the, the pace doesn't look very good on, on new for U4hat can we do to make that better? If I'm, then if we've got five different U4s on the board is then like, well, what U4, are you talking about so, yeah. I mean, references are the easiest way of being completely unambiguous about what component you're talking about. Yeah.
Chris:I have sympathy for the engineers here. I know why they do it because they just, they copy and paste the circuits and like the EDA tool, it just makes it super easy. It just adds an underscore one or an underscore a like, I get it, like I get why it happens. And, and, and it's like, yeah, That's fine. Like, I'm glad you saved 60 seconds, but you're better off just taking the time to go in and change it to U5 or whatever it is. Or maybe, hopefully there's a setting in your tool that says when I copy and paste, you know, don't just give it an underscore a, you know, give it, give it a proper new number. It's, it's worth noting too that some some machines don't like certain characters in references operators like software, sometimes chokes on this. We, we have an AOI machine that will literally crash. Like the software will crash and we have to restart the whole thing when we're giving, when we're given a weird reference designator. Like if it's longer, I think it only accepts it like up to eight characters. Just, this is just a limitation of the software. It's like, yeah. Could I go to the AI vendor and be like, Hey guys, you gotta be able to accept 64 characters in your, of course, of course. But am I going to. A, you know, a hundred million dollar machine company to change their software because I have one engineer who decided to name his reference designator, you know, my dog Brutus is the best and it's like, but so we actually have to, we have a tool now that we run, we wrote our own software to to run on that and basically say, you know, look for you know, any characters longer than this and warn us that it's going to be an issue or that software doesn't exist. But that software intending on writing because we were sick and tired of crashing our AOI machine.
Rob:Yeah. In fact, one one of our machine limits is also, we see it quite often with crystals. So as you guys probably know, like a crystal can have a super long part number for some reason, you know, like it can be a 24 megahertz, but it can be called 24.000..., like
Chris:yes. There'll be 16 zeros in it. Yeah.
Rob:And I mean, it is not unreasonable to expect the machine to crash with that kind of info. So. Yeah. The things like that as well, there is a, that's not necessarily a customer or an engineer problem, but it's definitely something we see in the factory ourselves. Like we can't even fit this part on the machine because the character limit on the machine is too, or is too short for the part number. So,
Chris:I've seen that too. It's so straight. Or like, okay. If you, if it does accept the whole string, it like won't display the whole string because it gets cut off in the UI. The UI literally can't show you the whole string of part
Rob:you can almost guarantee that the, the, the numbers and the letters, those cut off are the critical letters that you need, you
Chris:Yeah. Right. Exactly.
Rob:like a 24 point something megahertz and those last three digits. So all the ones you need, but you can't see them. So.
Chris:You know, my favorite thing, I forget who does it? Oh, It's not TI it might be NXP. There's somebody that we're getting off on a total tangent here, but there's some, there's some manufacturer that puts commas in their part number and it's like, look, do you not know what a comma separated value file is? Like, do you not realize that everything in the world operates on CSVs? Why are you putting commas in your part numbering system? You're just asking for trouble. So we did, we had to write software to detect commas in part numbers and put proper quote brackets around it so that it gets exported with the comma and doesn't get broken up in our files. It's like, oh my goodness, who puts commas in a part number?
Rob:Yeah, yeah. I totally agree with you. He's a, it's a minefield
Chris:it's a minefield.
Rob:It can be certainly helped with a good component reference in on a PCB that's half of the battle, I think.
Chris:Well, I think we've, I think we've successfully broken into our pet peeves here. What do you think, Rob? Are you ready? You ready to share? We properly prepared Rob this time for pet peeves,
Rob:yeah, so I would imagine that most of your listeners are going to agree with me, or I would hope so because I'm, I'm sure that I'm not the only one, but,
Chris:of sore necks. You're saying with everybody nodding along as they listen to
Rob:I would hope so because my, my work-related pet peeve at least is surface Mount LEDs because there is just no standard to a surface Mount led. And I have no idea why. And I've always said, if, you know, if things don't ever work out at circuit hub, I will standardize LEDs. They annoy me that much.
Chris:I'm right behind you. I'm right behind you.
Rob:it is, it is crazy. I mean, there's so many things wrong with a surface Mount led, like why for the start is why is the polarity on the bottom side of an LED. You know, once it's placed on the, on the board, you're not, you don't want to be picking it off to make sure. So in, in manufacturer's defense, yes, you do start seeing, you know, like a dot on the top or you know, just like
Chris:The green line.
Rob:a green line on it, something. So they are improving on that, but there is there's companies that will mark, you know, a green dot for the anode and then a green dot for the cathode and they're the same company,
Chris:Yes.
Rob:same led even just a different color. It just might, it just makes no sense. I don't know what that they do it on purpose. I'm sure. Just to, just to keep people on their toes in the factory, I'm sure of it. It
Chris:And then, and then it's the best when the datasheet is like ambiguous about it too. Like we've seen it where the data sheet says, rather than say anode cathode. It says like one, two, and you're like, what? Well, which one is one? And which one is two? Because the engineer defined it as cathode. They didn't define it as two. And then you got to go look it up. Or the best is when the engineer defines it as one two, and they don't define cathode anode. You're like, well, wait, what does the led manufacturer call it? Do they call it the anode one? Or they call it two
Rob:Yeah. Led choices is actually quite it's quite important for surface mountain because we, we see it all all the time. I mean, everyone puts LEDs on their boards. That's fine. We deal with them really well at CircuitHub like we rarely get them wrong, because of the way we're checking schematics and we're always checking data sheets, for example, but it's just, there, there is certain types of LEDs that I would say a hobbyist and we have to pre-bake them, or, you know, we have to use like a temp solder for example, we deal with it, that is kind of outside of our process. And that adds an extra It adds an extra process. Basically.
Chris:I'll name names. Rob. Adafruit. I'll name them. Adafruit WS2812. Now it's not actually Adafruit. Adafruit imports the world's semi WS2812B. And I think they, I forget they call it the Neo pixel. They, they sort of branded the Neo pixel, but it's the world semi Ws. They, they are insanely hydroscopic. They just like, you show them a picture of moist air and they absorb water. It's unbelievable. And I'm going to say, you got to bake these things before you reflow them. Uh they're they're such a pain. They're awesome. Cause they're super cheap. You can get them for like 10 cents a piece versus like the equivalent dilate one is like 40 something cents. So I get it. I get why people use them, but yeah, they are a pain to deal with and they do slow everything down.
Rob:I think the thing that also tops those off is, you know, we deal with them is fine. You know, we're not going to say don't use them because sometimes that's, that's
Chris:Yeah. We know how to handle them.
Rob:but you know, you check the data sheet and the chamfered edge, for example, is pin three, for example, why there's no reason for that? Like why isn't the chamfered edge pin one yeah
Chris:yeah. And then, and then, and then what did the engineer do? Did they put a marking on pin one or they put a market on pin three?
Rob:Exactly. And this just goes back to what we said, right at the beginning of the show. You then have to reach out to the customer and be like, are aware that pin three is actually the cathode on these parts or is that what you intended? It's just a vicious cycle of, and it all boils down to LEDs.
Chris:You know, it's so funny. I've I think I've mentioned on the show before that I had you know, what we should, while I'm thinking about it, I'll, I'll pull this up and we'll include it in the show notes. But I did a talk at Kicon a couple of years ago called your manufacturer is stupid. And the, the concept is because we have to play stupid, right? We have to like, kind of pretend like, we don't know what we're doing, because if we just make assumptions we're going to be in big trouble and we're going to make lots of mistakes. It's make the, make the polarity indicator visible. Right. Like make your player polarity indicators, crystal clear and visible after placement. That's the big one, because then once it's on the board, you can look at the polarity indicator of the component and you can look at the player, the indicator on the board and you go, it's done perfectly, no questions, no nerves, you know? And, and yeah, that's and, and LEDs suffer more than most components here because everybody puts a polarity indicator right in the center, you know, in the middle of that. So once you place the led, you don't see it anymore. And it's like, We can't see it. W I, you know, and we'll get it, we'll get it. Right. Don't worry. We'll get it right. But it just, it's this lingering sort of like, wait, did we do it right? Is it definitely right? And then every step after that, so after placement pre reflow, after reflow in the AOI programming everywhere down the line is like, is it right? Is it right? Is it right? Is it right? And if we can see the indicator, there we go. Yes, it's right, right then. And there, we don't have to go do the research all over again, or ask the inspector who did the first article is this definitely right? You know, all that kind of
Rob:Yeah, it is. I mean, the other thing as well for us is we have definitely seen silkscreens wrong in the past as well. You know, like we read the
Chris:What are you talking about?
Rob:Yeah, we read the schematic and it says cathode to pin two for example, but then the silkscreen will be showing pin one. And then it's like, where was your silk screen intended for the anode? Or is it intended for the cathode? But if you can make it completely unambiguous is, is perfect for us, you know? There's
Chris:So I,
Rob:about it.
Chris:that is something that is unique to us, because most CMs never see your schematic. You're not sending your cm, the schematic. So whatever you put on your silk screen, that's what they're going to do. So you better get that, right?
Rob:Yeah, that's
Chris:Yeah. It's rare. It's rare for a cm to have access to the schematic in the first place. It's even more rare that the cm actually looks at it.'cause most CMs don't have an engineer on staff who knows how to read a schematic, you know, or if they do, it's like, it's like just one or two people in a team of 50 that know how to read it. And they're not going to spend the time to go read it. They're just, you know, we're looking at the silk screen. We're not looking at this schematic. So, so to speak, you know, we are unique in that sense that we, we, we take the extra step to look at it.
Rob:Hmm. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, LEDs off my work related pet peeve, they
Chris:Well, I'll tell you what, Rob, I'm going gonna, I'm going to throw you a bone here. In a few short weeks, we are going to have on a couple of members of the IPC organization and these members are responsible for the panel discussions about standards. And I mean, not just them, but this is what IPC does in general. They, they have, they get everybody in the room and they say, okay, let's set the standard for how these things are done. I'm going to put in a word for you, Rob. It's going to be,
Rob:Thank you.
Chris:it's going to be,
Rob:great
Chris:we're going to get on the horn with these guys. And we're going to be like, what do we need to do to get a panel together? We need apple in the room. We need dilate in the room. We need Cree in the room. We need everybody in the room and we all have to agree how we're identifying these things enough is enough.
Rob:Yeah. If my, if my legacy is that my name is mentioned on an IPC document for led standards, although I'll be all good. Yes, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, aside from work, I mean, I'll just being from the UK where we're very driven by recycling these days
Chris:Oh, this is your next pet peeve.
Rob:it is an
Chris:right into it.
Rob:and yeah, we were just, I mean, recently we we've had in Scotland, so. I'm from just outside of London, but up north in Scotland, we've had a real big global climate summit. Yeah. So it's been everywhere across the UK recently . A lot of people are now very, they're very cautious about, you know, what they do with their, with their rubbish or their trash and you know, how do they recycle it? So my work, my non-work-related pet peeve is, you know, going to the supermarket or going into the grocery store and seeing fruit skin fruit, which has this, you know, this natural protective shell that stops the actual insides from being damaged,
Chris:we're talking like orange oranges and
Rob:Yeah. You know, banana orange in a plastic bag, like there is no need for that. They have their own natural shell. So yeah. I mean, in the UK, like there's this real drive for being sustainable and environmentally friendly and recycling as much as you can. And then you just see, see things like that. And you're just like, like, you know, everyone has to do their bit, like, that's all you can do. Really. You can only do your bit, but when you see things like that, it's just like, you know, what chance have I got to make a difference?
Chris:Right. I know. Well, it's, you know, at the end of the day, a lot of the climate impact comes from industry and business. So we, as an industry, we, as a business need to do our part for, for reducing our carbon footprint and, and, and the fruit companies need to figure out how
Rob:yeah,
Chris:deal with their packaging so that they don't, you know, need them all on these plastic bags. You know what bugs me about fruit when they put the stick, do you guys have stickers on your fruit?
Rob:yeah, we do. Yeah, of course. Yeah.
Chris:you know, it's like, okay. I used to work at a grocery store as, as a a teller. What would you call it? Not a teller. That's at a bank, a, a clerk. Right.
Melissa:Yeah.
Chris:And and I get it. I to this day I know the PLU number for bananas 4, 0 1, 1, like I, I used to have like a hundred different fruits and vegetables memorized and and it's because that, that clerk needs to see, it needs to be able to identify what that product is. And that's why they put the PLU stickers on there. Like I get why they do it, but there's gotta be a better way. I can't stand those stupid stickers because especially it's not such a big deal on a banana, right. Because it's a skinned fruit, you just peel it off done. But when it's on an apple,
Melissa:Oh, you, you know what I saw the other day, I saw this poor girl in the supermarket. She was adding PLU stickers to every single individual crab apple.
Chris:No
Melissa:Oh, gosh.
Rob:Yeah.
Chris:Well, now there's, there's an opportunity for a bag because you just put one label on a bag of 30 crab apples, and it's less plastic than a 30 sticker,
Rob:there is definitely a time and a place for, you know, bagging skin fruits up, but you know, if they, if they're loose, there, there is no need for it.
Chris:and there's nothing you can do with those bags. Can you recycle those bags? I don't think you
Rob:I don't think you can like know that, I guess most places, you know, there are plastics now that you can recycle, or at least they're biodegradable, but there is some particularly what in the UK, what we would call like a carrier bag. It's just, you cannot recycle them. I don't think at the moment.
Chris:This is what Americans might call a grocery bag, I think
Rob:Yeah, that's right.
Chris:yeah, yeah. Yeah. Mo a lot of grocery bags are no longer. They're either no longer available at stores here in the United States, or they there's a charge for them. So, a lot of us, we, we bring our own bags like these reusable cotton bags. Now speaking of differences between Americans and Brits, you all use the phrase rather than trashcan, you use a rubbish bin right
Rob:That's it. Yeah.
Chris:Now that's, it's great. Like, that's cool, but you have the best phrase ever when, like you're mad at somebody you tell them to get in the bin. That is the best phrase ever. Like we don't have any, like, do we tell anybody to get in the trash? Like, no, I don't think we use that ever. Do Americans have anything like that? No.
Rob:no. We have a get in the bed. And also one that my wife uses often is your on the list, which I don't know what, I'm not sure what lists that is, but you're on
Chris:enough to make it nervous.
Rob:That's right. Yeah. You don't want to be on that list.
Chris:Probably isn't a good list. Yeah. I mean, if you're making a list, it's usually not, you know, it's like, these are things I have to deal with. It's not like, like how often times do you sit down and make a list of things that you have to accomplish? And you're like, oh gosh, I got to do all these things. You know what I mean? Like lists are inherently problems. You don't sit down and be like, like my dog, my wife, my home, like you don't sit down and list the things that bring you joy and happiness. You know, you, you sit down and you list things that you have to get them. And you're on, you're on her list of things that I've got to deal with.
Rob:Yeah. You're you're on the naughty list. That's
Chris:I like it.
Rob:Yeah,
Chris:all right. Beautiful. I hope she, I hope she tells you to get in the bin. I hope when I come to visit someday, I get to hear Brits telling me to get in the bed. I want to do something that forces them to tell me to get in the bin. And I'm just going to give him a big old hug. And it's going to thank you for telling me to get in the bed.
Rob:Brilliant.
Chris:That's fantastic. Anything else to get off your chest there, Rob?
Rob:I don't think so. It's been great talking to you, so yeah.
Chris:having you.
Rob:Thank you. Yeah, I've really enjoyed it. Been good.
Chris:I hope you make some delicious fluffernutter sandwiches for your compatriots when you
Rob:Oh, well, I'll be sending you some photos of it.
Chris:Now for, for the for the, for the listeners who are familiar with fluff, we need to hear Twitter messages. Do you prefer a fluffer Nutter, or do you prefer a peanut butter jelly and fluff, which is better? I personally am in the fluffer Nutter camp. I love me some peanut butter, jelly and fluffed don't get me wrong, but my preference is fluffer Nutter. And if you prefer a peanut butter and jelly and fluff, that's perfectly fine. You're just wrong. That's all there is to it at me. They, the little inside joke for the listeners is that one of the other guys that CircuitHub made him a peanut butter and jelly and fluff sandwich after I made him a fluffing under sandwich. And now it's on it's the war has begun.
Rob:It has. Yeah. Well, when I, when I'm back next door, we'll I'll treat you both to my British version of a fluffing up peanut butter jelly sandwich and fluff sandwich.
Chris:Don't put Vegemite on it or whatever you call that
Rob:Well, yeah, that's right.
Chris:No, no. I don't want any of that yeasty stuff on my fluff. I'll put it on toast with butter, but not on my fluffernutter sandwich. Thank you very much.
Rob:Maybe I'll invent that. I'll I'll give it a
Chris:Could you imagine, could you imagine Rob Rob invents, like, some Marmite and a peanut butter and fluff sandwich and, and, and just becomes a billionaire. And in his spare time, he makes an effort to convince IPC to change the standards on
Rob:right. Yeah.
Chris:I have, I finally have the free time and money to convince the world to change their LED's standards.
Rob:Yeah. And you can guarantee when I sell them, it will be in a recyclable packaging
Chris:There you go. Perfect. Perfect. I think that's a great way to end the show. Thanks so much for being on Rob loved it as always. If you want to hear from us, or if you want to get in touch with Rob, you're welcome to email us at contact@pickplacepodcast.com or you can tweet at us. Melissa can chat with you at CircuitHub and you can message me w assembly. If you think that peanut butter jelly and fluff is better than fluffernutter even though you're wrong.
Melissa:Thanks for listening to the pig 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 for joining us, Rob.
Chris:Thanks Rob. Thanks everybody.