Step 6a: Building the CubeSatSim Solar SMT PCB

These are the instructions for building the Solar board with SMT Components.

Here is the Solar PCB v1.3.2:

Here is the schematic:

https://github.com/alanbjohnston/CubeSatSim/blob/beta-v1.3.1/hardware/beta-v1.3.2/cubesatsim-solar-b1.3.2_schematic.pdf

You will need these tools:

• Safety glasses (to protect eyes while soldering or trimming leads)
• Soldering iron and solder (I use lead-free solder, but leaded solder is easier to work with)
• Needle nose pliers (to bend leads and hold parts)
• Side cutters (to trim leads)
• glue, such as super glue gel to attach the JST connectors to the PCB

Other tools that are helpful:

• Blue mounting putty(to hold components in place while soldering)

SMT Assembly

The best way to do SMT soldering is to use solder paste with a stencil and run the board through a reflow oven. The instructions here will cover this approach.

Start with the stencil and apply solder paste:

Note that the rest of the photos show the v0.3s version of the PCB, which is slightly different.

Here's how the board looks with solder paste applied:

Resistors and capacitors on the board do not have any polarity.

The diodes have a bar to indicate polarity:

Here's how they look installed with correct polarity:

The INA219 ICs have a bar to indicate the side with pin 1:

The PCB also has a bar to indicate pin 1, and all the ICs face the same way with the bar at the top.

Here's how all the ICs look installed:

The PCB is ready for the reflow oven.

After the reflow oven, the board is ready to have the Through Hole components installed

The next step is the Solar PCB Through Hole Instructions V2 Solar 2