It has just dawned on me to ask this because I’m looking at getting a reflow oven: Can I reflow the G120 module, or do I need to hand solder it into place?
@ Mr. John Smith - Have you checked the manual? “10.1 Oven Reflow”
When in doubt. read the manual.
How many boards are you making? For small runs just hand solder them.
Hand soldering the G120/E is dead easy with tacky flux and a large soldering bit (4mm at least)
I just built 3 prototype boards with the G120 and hand soldered them all and they are good to go.
Well it’s for mass production so, I want to be able to scale up without too much fuss. Even for the first few boards I would much prefer to re flow. It would take far to much time to hand solder those components for each machine.
I have recently done a reflow of 30 board with G120… No issue’s
Sweet.
The hard part about reflow with the G120 is to correctly place it without smudging the solder paste everywhere. Its pretty heavy to lift with tweezers or a suction thingy.
@ hagster - So there is no flat spot where the center of gravity is. So I’d have to 3d print some sort of plastic holder if I’m doing pick and placing.
A plastic holder could realy help speed up manual placement. You could add x small holes in the main PCB to position the holder. I have thought about this idea too, not for the G120 but more for fine pitch SOMS’s or BGA’s
Exactly the problem.
How would you attach the 3d printed part to the g120?. It needs to easily release without nudging the module in the process. Unless you can make something that withstands the temp of the oven.
I tried designing my PCB with a small hole in the same location as the hole in the G120 board. My idea was that i could use a reusable locating pin that went throught both the board and the g120 so the g120 could only be wrong in rotation not translation. This seemed like a good idea, but in practice it didnt help much. Its a while since i did this so i cant remember the exact problems.
@ hagster - I’m thinking that, there would be some sort of hole pattern in the part so that ejector pins can be put in to hold the g120 down and in place while the plastic is being pulled upward. It could work. When I do it (which will be months) I’ll circle back to this.