Pikkolo Assembly

Low-volume PCB fab and assembly in the US - at a fair price

[Pikkolo Assembly @pikkoloassembly]

360 AOI system

[Pikkolo Assembly @pikkoloassembly]

Work coming together on the beautiful new 360 degree AOI system.

[Pikkolo Assembly @pikkoloassembly]

Job with 36 unique cut tape parts, out of bags, loaded, aligned, coded, oriented, and ready to run in 28 minutes.

Our goal by December is to get that down to 10 minutes

[Pikkolo Assembly @pikkoloassembly]

Part rotation is super confusing. There are like four different rotations in play and error prone.

https://t.co/afPPdIM7tn

To reduce mistakes, operators get quick rotation sanity check after loading parts.

[Pikkolo Assembly @pikkoloassembly]

Tested out magnets for holding 0402 in cut tapes steady and boy does it just make everything worse.

[Pikkolo Assembly @pikkoloassembly]

From a customer call this morning, "rubidium atomic vapor cell" is probably the coolest combination of words I've heard in a long time.

[Pikkolo Assembly @pikkoloassembly]

@realwillreil Opening a cut tape without it scattering everywhere is currently like our top priority eng project.

[Pikkolo Assembly @pikkoloassembly]

Ugh 0402 is like glitter

[Pikkolo Assembly @pikkoloassembly]

@timbot Yep. Hit a wall with OpenPnP early on.

Our thesis is a system simple and robust enough that someone can run it with minimal training, and likely distributing jobs across multiple machines. So a bigger focus on setup time vs CPH.

[Pikkolo Assembly @pikkoloassembly]

Continuing work to productionize on our board auto-alignment.

An operator should be able place a PCB on the pick-and-place at an angle, hit a button, and align perfectly in a few seconds.

[Pikkolo Assembly @pikkoloassembly]

Look I've spent a lot of time drawing bounding boxes.

[Pikkolo Assembly @pikkoloassembly]

@kanwisher Trying to raise the money...

[Pikkolo Assembly @pikkoloassembly]

@BackwoodsEnginr Feel free to DM if you want some help. The machine is solid but software takes some work.

Our whole thesis is distributing low volume jobs across many pnp machines without concern for each machine's CPH, so we're off OpenPnP to a custom stack.

[Pikkolo Assembly @pikkoloassembly]

Wrapped up with @Techstars Mentor Madness!

About 80 meetings in two weeks with some super helpful people. Some directly relevant and in industry, but you never know where great advice will come from.

Time to get back to the shop!

[Pikkolo Assembly @pikkoloassembly]

As we grow our engineering team, the biggest issue my monorepo.

Look, I'm not going to die on this hill, but I will fake a coma on this hill.

[Pikkolo Assembly @pikkoloassembly]

Saturday night, building tables.

[Pikkolo Assembly @pikkoloassembly]

The hardest part of embedded is figuring out which of these USB-C cables have data lines.