The first batch is 95% shipped (5% of you are on holiday, apparently).
Motherboard, Lime and Breakout boards went easy. Granita was an absolute nightmare.
Don’t let your PCB manufacturer decide on soldermask thickness?
Well, not really. The heading should be more like “don’t use a bad PCB manufacturer”. Multi-CB striked again. Let’s simply take a look at what they did:
Only half of the PCBs were like that, meaning a micro-batch ran on the first half of the PCBs didn’t reveal the error until it was time to dig deeper into the PCB box.
An uneven, thick soldermask translated in uneven solder paste deposition in the stencil printing process, that meant close to 70% of the boards failed testing. The component that failed was a nasty one, a NSMD LGA (non solder mask defined and reliant on proper soldermask deposition for solderability). We had a few of those:
And reworking was a gigantic pain. Every yellow or purple dot in this video is a reworked component:
And reworking a component didn’t guarantee success. So yeah. What a pain.
Because of this, we only shipped one Granita per motherboard to our backers, with the second Granita being turning into a preorder. The only thing that saved the Lime board from the same faith was the use of a solder mask printing machine, a MY700. Truly a lifesaver.
However, we shipped to our backers.
🥳