Day 6: Visit of a PCB factory and of Huaqiangbei

By Dina Elikan July 15, 2015 Edition CHIC 2014-2015Discover Vesta project

After a great evening of networking and fun at the Hilton, we woke up on Tuesday to visit a PCB factory near Shenzhen. We had the great pleasure of being accompanied by Pascal Marmier and Li Jun from swissnex China.

The PCB factory is one of the PCB suppliers of Seeedstudio – the visit was organised by Ivy (thank you Ivy ;)). So, how does it work ?

First, there is the raw material, in which the machines will makes holes (it is a CNC drilling machine that makes the holes) to create the vias. The via will allow us to have connections between the top and the bottom layers.

IMG_9860 Then, there is an ultrasonic dip to clean the mess made by the making of holes.

After that, they put the photoresist on the plaque and attack it with acid.

Here you can see us visiting one of the room, the ones where they add the paint on the PCB.

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When the boards have been printed, they cut them with a CNC (picture below).

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After that they will test the electronics connectics of the PCB, either with a small “press” for the big PCBs or with a computer for the smaller ones.

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Quality control

After the visit of the PCB factory, we went to Huaqiangbei , which is a huge (emphasis on HUGE!!) supermarket for electronics. It is impressive. Everyone has its stands where they sell electronic components, as well as built devices. The prices are also crazy. The Vesta team, bought some LEDs, and it cost us less than 1 CHF.

Here are some pictures, but they don’t translate well in the size and how impressed we were by the market.

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Huaqiangbei

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To end the day, we went back to Seeedstudio, to work a bit more on our projects and were lucky to catch Eric Pan (founder of Seeedstudio).

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And some of us ended up working until very very very late.