Ok, finally got around to building a bunch of JeeNodes for all those room boards I had waiting:
Just for the heck of it, I decided to leave the boards joined together, as they come from the pcb manufacturer. This picture was taken just before separating these final units.
Small detail: on the left the original 10 µF capacitors, lying down, and on the right the new ones I will be using from now on, which are much smaller and leave the battery connection pads exposed.
The good news is that these units all worked out of the box. Great, eight of ’em will go straight to their room :)
I’m not having quite as much luck so far with the assembly of JeeLink and JeeNode USB boards, both using SMT parts. There, I often have to debug 2 or 3 out of 10 boards before they work. Occasionally, even that doesn’t solve it so once in while a board gets set aside, awaiting further debugging some other time.
It’s called “production yield”, I think, and I’m not quite there yet… oh, well.
How do you cut nodes apart?
Ah, the boards have “v-scoring”, i.e. deep cuts on both sides of the board – so they come apart by just bending the board a little. It’s a bit like a chocolate bar – sweet, eh? :)
For surface-mount boards, doing many of them at once is a big time-saver. For the above through-hole less so, because when you populate the board with lots of components and turn it around to solder them, then you end up having to navigate the soldering iron between all those wires. Still, it does help when adding components a row at a time.