This week we're joined by fellow podcast host Aaron Moncur who runs the Being an  Engineer Podcast and is also the founder of Pipeline Design and Engineering.  We had a fun discussion on the soft skills of engineering, including how to have systems in place that align with/support your goals, time management, and productivity hacks you might find useful for managing yourself and your team. Pipeline partners with medical & other device engineering teams who need turnkey equipment such as cycle test machines, custom test fixtures, automation equipment, assembly jigs, inspection s ..read more

How do smaller manufacturers like Worthington and CircuitHub manage larger volume orders? Recently we've seen a big increase in these types of orders so it only seemed fitting to have a discussion abouut it. We briefly touch on the financial and negotiation side of things before getting to the logistics of how we handle large-volume orders.  This includes how we decide if we're going to build and/or ship in batches, how large orders change how we buy parts, and why building this was can be a very successful way of producing boards ..read more

We're back after a bit of a break! In this episode, we're excited to welcome David Shield from the Printed Circuit Board Associated of America (PCBAA) to talk about how their work is influencing the US Congress to bring electronics manufacturing back to America.  The Printed Circuit Board Association of America is the sole association of U.S. domestic printed circuit board manufacturers and suppliers. PCBAA was established in 2021 by PCB manufacturers and other industry stakeholders amid rising geopolitical challenges. PCBAA seeks to promote an environment in which U.S.-based printed cir ..read more

We're very excited to have Mike Konrad, founder of Aqueous Technologies as well as host of his own podcast, Reliability Matters, back on the show. We first had Mike on the show to discuss the history of board cleaning, the electronics the industry's transition to primarily using no-clean flux, and why more and more companies are reintroducing board cleaning back into their assembly process. Mike recently reached out to us and offered to talk about the 2018 changes to the IPC cleanliness standards and why adoption of the new standard has been slow at best due to the lack of understanding of t ..read more

This week we are joined by Valentina Ratner and Kyle Dumont, co-founders of AllSpice.io. Valentina and Kyle met while doing an MBA program at Harvard and realized they both shared a common frustration - the lack of asynchronous design review tools available for electrical engineers despite such tools being readily available for other engineering fields like mechanical and software.  Thus they joined forces to create AllSpice. AllSpice is a git platform for hardware engineers that helps them to accelerate their time to market by enabling modern revision control and collaboration for nativ ..read more

CircuitHub CAM engineer, Dave Wilcox is back on the show to teach us more about the PCB fabrication process. In our last episode with Dave, we went into the fine details of drilling a PCB. Today we move on to the next step Outer Layer Imaging.  ..read more

We apologize for our extended break! Chris has been hard at work from morning til late at night every day setting up Worthington's two new Fuji pick and place machines. Now that some of the dust has settled we hope to get back on a more regular recording schedule. We've had several requests from our listeners to have an episode on on impedance control, which is unfortunately a topic Chris and Melissa have little expertise on. Fortunately we were able to connect with Ryan Miller from NCAB group who specializes in the subject and kindly agreed to come on the show to give  us a le ..read more

In episode 19, we focused on the different types of depanelization methods that can be used during assembly. In this episode, we take a deeper dive into panelization, how we decide what panelization methods and sizes to use, and how this informs depanelization.  ..read more

In this episode, which might just be our nerdiest one yet, we are joined by Sam Feller, aka The Awkward Engineer.  First and foremost he would like everyone to know that he is the awkward one, the engineering is top notch. Sam is a long time Worthington/CircuitHub customer, product manager at Tulip, former engineer at Amazon, and founder of the Awkward Engineer where he works on quirky hardware project and now does consulting!  It was a pleasure to have Sam on the show. Some of the topics we touch on include:  Why having common stock parts set up on reels is not actually the ..read more

We're back! In this episode we talk about what we were busy doing on our "break", the different types and formats that solder comes in, and some unfortunate consequences that sometimes occur while eating chips.  ..read more