You never understand what you may discover in an arts as well as craft store. A fairly recent addition to crafting is automatic cutting machines like the Cricut as well as Cameo cutters. These are normally utilized to cut out shapes for scrapbooking, although they will cut or engrave nearly anything thin. You can believe of them as a printer with a cutting blade in location of the print head. [Mikeselectricstuff] made a decision to try a Cameo cutter to create SMD stencils. The result, as you can see in the video below, is rather impressive.
If you’ve ever wished to do SMD soldering with a reflow oven, stencils are vital for putting solder paste on the board where you want it quickly. The board [Mike] has consists of a boat-load (over 2,000) of LEDs as well as dropping solder on each pad with a syringe would be extremely time consuming (although he did do some touch up with a syringe).
The board he’s utilizing doesn’t have any type of extreme fine-pitched parts. However, he did some test patterns as well as made a decision he might get down to a finer pitch, particularly with a bit tweaking. However, the stencil he utilized didn’t requirement any type of changes. All he did was export the solder paste layer as a DXF as well as bring it directly into the Cameo software.
This isn’t the very first time we’ve seen one of these cutters pressed into stencil service. You can likewise get some utilize out of your 3D printer.