In my most recent (but far too long ago) post I shared the news that I have been working hard all year on the design of a new product called “Power Hub” for one of my clients.  I’m thrilled to report that the first batch of production units has now shipped.  The above photo is actually just an accessory for the product, the power cable.  I selected it as the featured image here just because it’s an attractive image.  What you are seeing here is 2 stacks of red and black cables on a glass table top, lit by a setting Sun.  Each stack is 50 cables.  Below is the main part of the shipment, 100 circuit boards:

Unlike my earlier electronic designs, these boards were assembled by a contract manufacturer using automated assembly equipment, rather than the hand assembly I’ve always done for my other electronic products.  Both the volume and complexity of the Power Hub design required this.

But I didn’t have time to put together a proper test fixture for the board on this first run, so had to test each unit by hand.  Power Hub has a lot of features, and a total of 21 connectors to external devices, so just connecting and disconnecting these for each unit was time consuming.  After a bit of practice I got the test time down to 7 minutes, so it took well over 700 minutes (11 hours and 40 minutes) to test them all.

And before even giving the components to the contract manufacturer, I had to program 2 different parts.  It was my intention to have these parts programmed by the supplier, but there were some problems with that and I ran out of time, so I put together a temporary fixture to program them:

The “raw” parts are in a tray on the left (this is roughly half way through them).  Each part gets picked up (using what’s called “vacuum tweezers” so that you don’t actually touch them) and placed in the black socket on the right.  A computer then “burns” the program into each part, and the part is removed from the socket and placed in a separate tray.  While rather inefficient, this worked perfectly – every piece programmed correctly and worked properly after being soldered to the circuit board.

This project is still consuming much of my time, as there are always software improvements to be made, not to mention documentation that must be written.  But I’m starting to get back to other things, including a project for another client that has been waiting for months.  Maybe I’ll even get a chance to do some astrophotography before the year is over!