Electronics Lab

Soldering Stations

The soldering stations are located in the downstairs Electronics Lab of the OEDK and features a microscope, heated tweezers, soldering station, solder, flux, fine tipped soldering irons, and 2-propanol for cleanup. This station is specially designed to help with the soldering of circuit boards. Ask OEDK Technicians for assistance.

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Circuit Board Milling Machine

The T-Tech Quick Circuit QCJ5 circuit board printer is a machine capable of milling custom printed circuit boards (PCBs). It will take a sheet with a layer of copper on top and on the bottom and cut the traces. It is ideal for quick and inexpensive prototyping of circuit boards. It is located in the downstairs Electronics Lab of the OEDK.

To print using this milling machine, you will need to create a gerber file from a circuit board plotting program. You can find these tools on campus (Orcad), or you can download free programs for academic use - Eagle is one example. Eagle is installed on the OEDK computers. After you have created the gerber files, you need to save them to a flash drive and use them at the PCB mill to create your circuit board. OEDK Lab Technicians can guide you in the proper use of the PCB mill. After you have created the PCB, you can then solder in the components at the soldering station.

Some things to keep in mind when designing your board

Package type: A component is packaged a certain way to be soldered into a circuit board. This is called the package. There are many different types: DIP(dual inline package) is what you will have seen in most of your labs for integrated circuits, SOIC (small-outline integrated circuit) is a smaller surface mount package, etc. You can find a guide here.

Integration with the rest of your components: If you will be connecting your PCB to other components, it is recommended that you spend a great deal of time planning how you will connect the PCB to those components. There are connectors designed specifically for this purpose. The effort you put into the initial design will save you a lot of headache later. Think about the inputs and outputs for your circuit, and ask Carlos Amaro about your design before you mill it or have it sent off for milling.

Outside PCB Manufacturers

The OEDK PCB milling machine does not however make through holes in the PCB, and if you require a very fine circuit board, you may want to use an outside vendor.

Some examples of outside vendors are: 

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Reflow Oven

The AS-5060 IR Lead Free Reflow Oven is equipment that used for electron production and maintain of SMT technique. The product adopts the far-infrared heating components and excellent sense temperature materials. Through the precise control of the microcomputer, make the temperature control curve match to the request of the SMT production technique completely. The "temperature control curve" of the equipment can be adjusted accurately, so it can satisfy the request of many kinds of soldering paste which are different material parameters. It can shut down and alarm the faults automatically. Also it has many functions, such as soldering, maintenance and drying. The structural performance and operation has been upgraded and improved. Using Chinese-English bilingual operating system and efficient and convenient power switch.

Reflow Oven Owner's Manual