I've decided to drop the weekly wrapup and just go back to calling this the status update. I found that I was basically just reporting the software status anyways, with an additional side of regurgitating the news that happened that week. Basically, WSN news doesn't move fast enough to support a weekly summary. Ha ha ha.

I'm a bit disappointed to say that software is moving slowly right now. There were so many things going on that I've been struggling to find time to work on it. I got hit with a double whammy where both my new PC and my 'pick and place' machine arrived. Yep, you heard right. I bought a pick and place machine for automated PCB assembly and had it installed in my apartment. If you can imagine what a room in a Tokyo apartment is like, imagine one with a pick and place machine sitting next to a CNC machine and the walls lined with steel racks and shelving. I basically had to tear down everything in my room and reorganize it around the two machines. It felt like an exercise in packing algorithms, or real-life tetris. I must have one of the highest room space utilization percentages in Tokyo.

The reason I decided to purchase a pick an place machine is because I want to try and support the project by selling development boards and modules. I've already had a couple of requests for a development board to test out the FreakZ stack, but realistically, I'd be making them in low volume batches of something like 50 or a 100. At those volumes, the outsourced assembly cost is greater than the cost of all the components and PCB. That's why you see such a big price difference between companies that send their boards out for assembly versus ones like Sparkfun and Arduino that do their own assembly in-house. It's also evident in the variety of boards you can produce. You need to do batches of something like 500 to a 1000 pieces to make the board cost effective for outside assembly which means that you can only target areas that have enough demand to support selling boards in that amount. However if I don't need to worry about volume pricing, I can make specialty boards that might not appeal to everyone, but are interesting. My personal fascination is with sensors and automation, so you'll probably be seeing a lot of those types of boards. Unfortunately, it's a bit niche-y so I doubt I could sell a whole lot of boards that sense and report soil moisture and pH for agricultural tech development, but it'd be pretty damn interesting :)

Anyways, the reason I'm mentioning all of this is because recently I've been busy developing a hardware platform for the FreakZ stack. I'm actually collaborating with a friend in France on the board design where I design the AVR boards, he designs the ARM boards, and we share the gerbers. It's a good way to speed up support for different architectures and peripheral boards. All the boards will be using the same connector interface so the sensor and radio peripherals can be moved around from MCU board to MCU board. I'll also be working on radio peripheral boards that support different chips and configurations, ie: 2.4 GHz and 900 MHz 802.15.4 radios and some with RF amps and LNAs on the front end. 

Since I'm on my excuse train, might as well say that I had a really tough time migrating to the new PC. I'm surprised that it took about two and a half days to get stabilized on it. There were battles against driver problems, data migration, and then just loading all the programs that I use and tweaking them. However once everything was set up, it felt really nice to be on a powerful machine with scads of RAM. I finally ended up taking the stock Dell machine with the 3 GHz Core2Duo and upgrading it to 4 GB RAM and 1-TB hard disk. I did it myself because Dell overcharges for the parts. I was shocked that 4GB of RAM only cost me $50 and the 1TB hard drive was about $70. I remember my first 1 GB hard disk and it cost me an arm and a leg. I also added three external 1-TB mirrored RAIDs for reliable storage of important documents, designs, software, etc. The source code working repository for FreakZ, FreakUSB, and past software projects are now kept there as well as old board designs, some ASIC and FPGA stuff, and of course my *ahem* anime collection. Also upgraded to a dual-HDMI video card and two 24-inch monitors. I am happy to report that I now have a workstation class machine sitting on (or under) my desk. Yay! :)

So finally, I'm hoping that things will stabilize enough this week that I can get back to testing the source code and moving it into hardware. Apologies for all the delays. I know a lot of people are waiting for the working code. It seems that as I get deeper into the project, I need to juggle more tasks. However it's probably one of the most fun (and intense) projects I've ever worked on :) 

Here's a couple of shots of the new PC setup and the pick and place machine. My apartment is turning into quite a nice little factory. Now I need to buy a fire extinguisher...

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Rearranging
written by Robert Cragie, April 22, 2009

I guess you had to rearrange the wife and dog as well?

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written by Akiba, April 22, 2009

Ha ha ha. Very funny. I'm still trying to explain things to my wife. She says that if I have enough money to buy those kinds of things, that I should be able to buy her some nice jewelry too. Ahhh...women just don't understand these kinds of things.

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Cool
written by Bart Tormans, April 22, 2009

Hey,

Ik recently stumbled upon your project. Very nice work you are doing.
Congratulations.

I'm looking forward to the hardware you'll be selling.

I'm more of MSP430 guy myself though .

One question : how did you setup the external raid? Is it true hardware raid, or are you doing software raid with normal external usb drives? I would like to do something like that also. Recently, one of my internal disks died . Lukily, not really much important was on it.

Anyways, keep up the good work.

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written by Akiba, April 22, 2009

MSP430 is next on the list since it's such a low power chip. But right now, I already have the AVR driver working and you gotta support ARM.

For the storage, I'm running the drives in RAID1 (mirroring mode) and the mirroring is done in hardware. I actually used to work for the company that makes the chips (Oxford Semiconductor) and helped out with the RAID management firmware and USB interface which is why I got the drives. One of them is actually the cheap non-RAID 2-disk drive (the one with no red stripe) and I upgraded the firmware myself to support mirroring (heh heh). All the drives have a USB interface and when you plug them into a PC, they show up as a single drive with their own drive letter. Most of the major storage manufacturers sell cheap 2-disk RAIDs now like Western Digital, Lacie, Buffalo, etc... and I'd definitely recommend it. With 1-TB disks, you stand to lose a lot if a drive goes down.

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pick and place machine
written by Bert Vermeulen, April 22, 2009

Hi,

What sort of pick and place machine did you get? I don't know anything about these, and I'm curious what they're capable of, what they cost etc.

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written by Akiba, April 22, 2009

Yeah, pick and place machines isn't exactly a topic that's covered well in school

I got the machine from a Japanese company called MDC. I spent a lot of time looking for benchtop pick and place machines and narrowed it down to two companies: MDC and Madell. I actually went to California to check out Madell, but was kind of disappointed in the quality of the machines and decided to go with MDC, even though their machines are more expensive. I actually checked eBay a lot as well, but a used machine is tough to justify for this kind of money, especially because the machines are fairly complicated and require compatible feeders, training, and support.

My machine is the smallest (read cheapest) and is a benchtop model which has a limited workspace. It also has a small footprint which is the reason why I had to choose this over a model with a larger workspace. It's a good size for the small amount of space in my room. It cost me $18k including feeders, but it's a bit on the low side because I took their demo unit which has a bit of mileage on it. The price you'll pay depends on what kind of feeders you get and how many, as well as the options that you want on the machine. It's a lot like buying a car.

However MDC is a good company and the president helped me out a lot. He's an old guy that's been designing pick and place machines for the past 30 years. He was suprised that I was buying a machine, and it was the first time they installed one in an apartment. I told him that he should check out the US and European market because there are probably a lot of people similar to me and are interested in something like this. I'd recommend the company to anyone, and the website is http://www.mdc-smt.co.jp. The website needs some work. If you talk to them, tell them the guy with the machine in his apartment sent you

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Mr.
written by hisitepu, April 24, 2009

Akiba,
this is a dummy question i guess. how about soldering? How do you do that? is this pick and place machine can do tsop packages?

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written by Akiba, April 24, 2009

Actually, it's a pretty good question because you need to have a whole process for SMT assembly and the pick and place is just part of it. Along with the PCB fabrication, you also need to get a solder paste mask created. You can get cheap masks made of plastic from places like Pololu.com for about $25-50. The paste mask goes on top of the PCB, you add some solder paste on top of the mask, and then roll a squeegee across it. It's kind of like silkscreening a t-shirt. The solder paste gets smeared through the holes on the mask which align with the pads on the PCB. When you remove the mask, then your PCB has solder paste on its pads and it's ready to go to the pick and place.

The pick and place shoots the chips on to the pads and the chips stay there because of the tacky solder paste. Once the chips are placed, then you need to reflow it.

Reflow is going to be a bit of a challenge because traditional reflow machines are conveyor based and are big. You can find some oven-based reflowers as well, but they are still pretty large. I'm going to attempt to initially do the reflow in toaster ovens or electric skillets. This of course limits me to lead-based solder because the consumer ovens and skillets can't get past about 250 deg C which is needed for lead-free soldering.

Anyways, the reflower is just a heat source that heats the solder paste past it's melting temperature. When it melts, it will form the solder bond between the chip leads and the PCB pads. An additional benefit is it will pull ICs towards the center of a pad which is an equilibrium point for the surface tension of the solder. That's why people that hand place components are better off using solder paste because they don't have to spend as much time centering things.

Once the paste is melted, then you cool the boards and you should have your finished PCBs. Like baking a cake...

Perhaps if things go well, I can try and rent some external space and have a real workshop with a multi-zone conveyor reflower. That way, I can do lead free designs and RoHS compliant boards.

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Niche boards
written by Bruce Cannon, April 26, 2009

Congrats on your complex and expensive tools. I think you might reconsider the opportunities making niche boards. First, Sparkfun proved that you can make a lot of money selling the oddest ideas. They make everything they think of, and people buy them. Second, I suspect agricultural monitoring example probably has a bigger market than you imagine. If you hadn't just dropped 20k on equipment I'd suggest just bringing your designs to Sparkfun and having them make them for you, and share the profits. I know other people who do ok doing that.

Have been reading your blog since you started writing, love your energy.

--Bruce

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written by Akiba, April 26, 2009

Thanks for the kind words, although the energy is running a bit low recently

Yeah, actually I wanted a pick and place of my own for a while. I wouldn't mind working with Sparkfun, since I'm a big fan of what they're doing. However, they only take some designs for their shop, and rightly so since they're probably limited on their resources and supporting so many designs must already be hell on them.

I'm planning on making my own boards and hopefully selling them through my shop as well as having other shops distribute them, like Sparkfun or Adafruit if they're interested. The main difference is that I'm hoping to focus more on WSN type of applications, and the audience I'll be catering to will probably be slightly more advanced in electronics and programming (read maniac geeks) than the Arduino crowd. This market is smaller, but should be fun.

Having my own equipment will also allow me to put together boards that target open source embedded projects, especially Contiki. In my opinion, the available hardware targeting Contiki is almost non-existent, and I suspect that I can put together a low cost board that caters to its strengths since the memory footprint is tiny.

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written by Akiba, April 26, 2009

@Bruce:
I think I was a bit confused on your post, but it suddenly hit me when I was walking the dog. Actually, I think you might have things reversed. The reason I bought the pick and place machine was so that I could focus on niche boards without getting penalized by making low board volumes. Assembly houses charge a lot for the setup of the pick and place and assembly line so making boards in volumes of 50-100 pieces is prohibitively expensive.

And yes, I will definitely be doing things like agricultural tech, low cost medical monitoring, and disaster relief. Those are the fun things

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