Amy! (imp003)

I received my stencil for the Amy reference design today and built a board. Blinked up right away and connected! Can’t wait to start developing products with this little guy!

Very cool Joel … nice work!

Should have my stencil and parts in a day or two, but the boards just went to fab, so are likely a couple weeks out. Hoping for similar success as you :). Good job!

Larry

BTW, what exactly are the XW’s … circuit trace, or 0 ohm parts? Haven’t quite figured that out yet.

The XW’s are pads with a connecting trace. Someone will have to fill us in on the intent. I can only assume that you could cut them and then either easily re-close them or add an 0402 part.

Thanks. I thought this was likely the case, but wanted to confirm to make sure I hadn’t overlooked any parts.

Pretty typical to have dni’s and/or traces like this on an early rev eval board. They’d appear to be just residual configuration jumpers where the decision on a particular board configuration firmed up sufficiently to just short 'em out (but, as you mention, still leave that option to cut a trace in an obvious spot if desired).

How did you place the parts?

Very carefully I’d imagine :smiley:

Seriously though, good question … especially the -003. (Planning to just do mine by hand/tweezers … prior to the morning coffee!)

Yes, just tweezers. I think the most important part is that the stencil can give you a proper amount of paste on each pad. The imp should settle into place when the solder melts. As long as you can’t see any paste when looking down on over the placed chip, you are probably ok.

The only other amateur advice I can give is keep your stencil pressed against the pcb, and squeegie the paste in gently, so you don’t get any paste bleeding under the stencil. I taped everything to my desk with painters tape to keep it from moving.

Good advice. Yes, I’ve found the painters tape works well in holding the stencil down as well as keeping it registered.

Got my stencil back from Osh yesterday. Haven’t looked at it carefully under the microscope yet, but at first glance it looks every bit as good as the higher priced ones I had been getting. Was a good recommendation by @MikeyDK on the earlier other thread to check them out.

I am quite happy with my stencil too. So far I only had one made, but will definitely get more! I love smd, but I really hate putting the solder paste on the pcb, stencil took care of that perfectly! :slight_smile: