CircuitCo has recently uploaded an interesting “Make of the BeagleBone Black” video showing how the BeagleBone Black is manufactured in their facilities in Richardson, Texas, USA.
The main steps are as follows:
- A machine applies solder paste to the PCB
- Pick and place components
- Reflow soldering for SMT components
- Hand placement of through hole components such as the Ethernet connector
- Selective soldering
- PCB washing
- Optical inspection via an automatic optical inspection (AOI) machine
- Manual inspection
- Burn-in tests after flashing the board with factory firmware
- Functional testing
- Packing and shipping
Beside the overall process, one interesting point is that human hands are only involved with through-hole components placement, functional testing and packing & shipping. Even those steps may eventually be automatized in the future with robots such as Baxter.
Watch the video, it’s worth a look.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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good to see something not produced in Asia
“Did you hear sound? Press 1 if ok press 0 if bad”
Come on we are in 2013…
@renw0rp
<anti stupid patriot minute>
Most of the population of the earth is born and leave outside of the USA, so don’t care if that’s done in USA or Asia. Probably also because big USA company, in lot of countries, ask for low tax to pay workers, make big money, kill still taxed little local companies with their poor quality low price products, and go away in Asia.
For lot of people, today, USA means : Junk food (Coca-Cola, McDo etc…) hormonal grew beef (forbidden in Europe and probably lot of Asian countries), Mosanto GMO crops (more and more forbidden in European countries and at least totally ban in Thailand), Hollywood stupid film industry, and today first weapon producer and war exporter. (I prefer to buy peacefull country product, like Iran natural growing tasting pistachio (the only war they made was to defend against invasion from US backed Irak) than USA one with opposites adjectives).
Anyway most of electronics components of this PCB are still made in Asia, probably China, Thailand, Malaisya or philippins and will not be used to pay tax to buy weapon to make another war.
Hope PRISM will help you love your freedom (and peacfull) country 😉
</anti stupid patriot minute>