My Authors
Read all threads
Picture thread! We had a massive sweatshop yesterday because we messed up the design and had to rework 350 badges for @HotelHacker . A story in a bunch of pictures. All shots by Noor, our newest badge.team member and proud owner of an actual camera!
First step was cutting off 350 x 5 mosfets. Since we reversed the LEDs by accident, sinking to GND wouldn't work. We cut the mosfets, as this was doable without training and a lot faster than using hot air. Some traces were damaged (1% of the boards) but those were fixed easily!
A side project was prepping the battery boxes for next week. The leads were long and sharp, so we trimmed them down. People had to wear eye-protection, these pins were really on the attack! 700x 2 pins were cut. Bandaids for the blisters from the cutting were handed out.
After the mosfets 'went', we also removed the diodes in both the boostconverter and the programmer. We used hot air because here the pads absolutely had to survive. Next up was soldering in a diode in the correct orientation.
With the programmer and boost circuit complete, we could now test all the boards for basic (minimum viable badge) functionality: CPU, serial comms. So we programmed all badges with a basic test code. This way we could filter out any duds so we wouldnt waste time on them.
All badges are now ready for the final modification and testing. But a lot more happened. Stickers were made for our official nickname: bodge.team . We had great emotional support on site (very important stuff on a stressful project) from BLAHÅJ and SMOLHÅJ!
Our volunteers are incredibly important to us. We always keep everyone hydrated and if needed: fed. This day we had a sponsor for the volunteer drinks and food! Thanks for that! (insert mandatory hackathon Pizza for work joke here, but we had GOOD pizza and a lot of fun!)
Another bit of prep: we needed 350x 5 2,5cm bits of laquered wire. So a few people made that happen.
Finally we were ready for the main event. We had to add in 5 bits of wire to replace the mosfets. Turns out the ATTiny is good enough to go a little bit out of spec and have the LEDs bright enough without a mosfet! On the sheet is the plan marked in the five red lines.
We first pre-tinned all the pads to make the job of soldering in the wire a lot faster. And then it was 'just' a matter of soldering in 350 x 5 = 1750 wires and cutting them.
Those went directly back to our testing station were we powered up at 1 volt (to test the boost circuit) and then we had a lot of happy badges!
Those that failed here (or earlier) were removed from the line and were visually inspected to get a diagnosis for what needed to be reworked. Nearly all were simple fixes, some needed more work. We don't have a lot of spares (10%) so we need to get as many working as we can!
We take the broken badges out of the process as early as we can to avoid getting sucked into repairing 1 difficult badge while we could easily fix 10 simple problems first. But we had time and energy to repair all but 4 badges.
This was one of the more difficult ones. During cutting we ripped up the one trace we needed. Luckily scraping the via clean of soldermask provided enough contact surface for the bodge-wire to hold.
At the end of the day even the BLAHÅJ was beat. But we had done all badges except for four special cases which proved too difficult to fix now.
We ended up with 327 working units here and another 10 are at Tkkrlab for the 'purist edition' which have the LEDs flipped.
Key tips for badge sweatshops: make tasks as simple as they can be. One chore, not two or five. If you can break it in smaller steps, it will greatly improve the speed and quality of the work. Thats why we tin pads in one step, and attach wire in another.
Any fixes or steps in the process should be designed to be accomplishable by the greatest amount of team members on your crew. Not everyone does 0201 fixes daily, so design repairability/hackability into your board and design your bodges to be as easy as they can be.
Also take into account the amount of tools you have or can cheaply get. 4 heatguns are no match for 8 simple cutters to get rid of SOT23 mosfets. And heatguns can burn boards or parts, cutters do not, if you're careful. We only damaged 1% of the boards! All those were fixed!
For this repair we came up with 4 different fixes for our problem. We chose this route because it was the easiest to do with the largest crew. It was not the BEST fix, or the prettiest fix, but the one which had the largest production volume per unit of time.
Another tip is having a LOT of 'fastfood trays'. They are absolutely invaluable to move stuff around, resupply, and to keep stuff tracked in progress.
To close off, here's another gratuitous BLAHÅJ picture! Please join us for another @HotelHacker sweatshop saturday 8 of february!
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh.

Enjoying this thread?

Keep Current with Badge.team

Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

Twitter may remove this content at anytime, convert it as a PDF, save and print for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video

1) Follow Thread Reader App on Twitter so you can easily mention us!

2) Go to a Twitter thread (series of Tweets by the same owner) and mention us with a keyword "unroll" @threadreaderapp unroll

You can practice here first or read more on our help page!

Follow Us on Twitter!

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3.00/month or $30.00/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Too expensive? Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal Become our Patreon

Thank you for your support!