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| Written by Akiba | |
| Monday, 18 February 2008 | |
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Welcome to my site. My name is Chris and I am living in Tokyo with my wife and my dog. I’m a hopeless geek that makes frequent trips to Akihabara (a.k.a. Electric City) to check out the latest microcontrollers and sensors, and purchase reels of resistors and capacitors for $3-5 from the junk parts stores there. My room contains four computers (all but one are hopelessly outdated), a shelf of books that I never read, a logic analyzer, an oscilloscope, a combined logic analyzer and oscilloscope (they’re deceptively called mixed signal scopes instead of the more fitting logic-anal-scope), a cheap SMT reflow oven that I bought off of a vendor in China advertising on eBay, a soldering iron, two hot air reflow units (basically a hair dryer that can go up to 700 deg F), multiple reels of resistors, capacitors, and LEDs that I never use, a large collection of sensors, ICs, discretes, connectors, and various things that should be categorized and tracked because I can never find anything when I want it even though I know I have it, and a bunch of dog toys that my dog keeps on bringing into my room and leaving there. I guess I should also mention the unused weight bench and weights that now double as a place to put my dirty clothes. If you can tell a person by the things they keep, then that should be pretty revealing of how I am. My wife basically stopped asking me what I do and just considers it a mystery. Otherwise, when I try to explain it to her, her eyes just glaze over and she starts to play with the dog. Here's some pics of my lab equipment that I keep in my room. It's getting a little out of control...
          
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Comments (9)
  written by Akiba, July 01, 2009
The desktop pick and place cost about $20k and its manufactured by a local company in Japan that is luckily near my apartment. Hence I got a lot of training and free shipping and installation. The company is called MDC and its website is here. It's a bit ugly tho...
http://www.mdc-smt.co.jp/ The network analyzer was a used machine I picked up off of ebay and it cost about $6k including the s-parameter test set. You'll also need to spend an additional $1-2k to pick up a calibration kit since you'll need to calibrate the system before you run any testing on your RF circuit. I guess this kind of takes things out of the realm of hobbyist design... report abuse
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written by Akiba, August 11, 2009
Damn...somebody gave me a negative vote on my comments...
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 written by Christian, August 13, 2009
Hi Akiba,
thank you for your reply. I wonder how I could ever afford those machines. Did you buy all this stuff as a hobbyist or do you run a small company? I hope that can at least afford a few things when I am a retired person in 30 years. ;-) Best Regards, Christian report abuse
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written by Akiba, August 14, 2009
Ha ha ha...I don't recommend buying them all at once. What you're seeing is an accumulation of effort over a few years. I'd suggest buying things slowly and looking for bargains on ebay or other used equipment sites. The pick and place isn't needed unless you're planning on making and selling boards. In that case, you'd be better of buying a small reflow oven which is much cheaper and getting solder paste stencils made. Assembling by hand is not too bad and if things start going well, you'll know that its time to buy a pick and place. Otherwise, if you have about $10k burning your pocket and you want to make wireless devices, I'd recommend the network analyzer. The CNC machine is really handy, but you can survive by just having your boards fabbed at Olimex or GoldPhoenix. The only exception is for RF boards where there's a lot of trial and error involved on the hardware side.
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 written by Ady, October 20, 2009
Anything and everything you do seems to be very very interesting. I'm an electronics engineer (from India) working in Japan. Good to know people like you exist in this country.
While in college I used to do a lot of weird stuff with Atmel microcontrollers. e.g. http://www.fuzakeruna.com/blog...ing-robot/ If you're ever hiring lemme know. Would love to help out if I can find some free time. Ady report abuse
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written by Akiba, October 24, 2009
Nice blog. If you're in Tokyo and into hardware hacking, you should check out Tokyo Hackerspace (www.tokyohackerspace.org). Good fun for geeks.
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 written by Lawrence Curtin, November 03, 2009
We have a Pick n Place for sale. It comes with a 4 foot indexer table that is anodized Al. It is Wiess equipment. It is all brand new. It also has a 400 KiloHertz 5000 watt RF generator with a Thermo Fischer chiller. This is also brand new. We built it to make solar cells in a high speed process. It is all located in Ft. Pierce Florida. Pictures are on our web site.
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how much does the pick-n-place machine cost? What brand is it?
How much does the network analyzer cost?
Thanks,
Christian