Wednesday, March 17, 2021

Prep work while waiting three or more weeks for the new PCBs to arrive

 HARVESTING USABLE PARTS FROM THE CURRENT PCBS

I used my hot air rework tool to carefully remove all the triacs from the three existing boards, since these add up to a bit of money for 170 positions. In addition, of course, I unplugged all the socketed light bulbs and saved them.

Triacs on the bottom after removal from the PCB above

I made no attempt to save the header pins, sockets nor the 6.8K 0603 sized resistors as these amount to pocket change worth less than the time to remove them and clean them up for reuse.

IMAGINING HOW THE NEW PCB WILL LOOK

Colored image of the left side of the board

I took the image from the PCB design tool and filled some sections with colors to approximate what my board will look like when it arrives. The resist layer is white and the text is black, so I didn't get this fully correct (the text in the image is brown). 

The grey areas represent the tinned surface where the Triac will be mounted. The black squares are the header pins where the signal wired plug in.  Smaller black rectangles show where the 6.8K resistors will be visible after soldering. The blue blocks are the beefy terminal blocks where I attach the power, ground and lamp test wiring for the entire board. 

The sockets for the lamps are mounted on the back side, seen here as yellowish white rectangles near each triac. If I had good 3D models of all the components, I could have used the tool to produce a 3D rendering of the board with parts mounted, but I don't have such files for the triac nor the wiring terminal blocks. 

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