Shree Kumar

India's upcoming semiconductor ecosystem has an extensive focus on manufacturing. Comparatively, less is happening on the design side. Companies on the hardware side are adopting open standards, primarily RISC-V. Building a successful ecosystem in a capital efficient manner is a key challenge for the new players. To be successful in hardware requires building large communities of adopters. The more closed the approach, the harder it gets, which is unfortunately the way things are at the moment.

In this talk, I will show how an open source approach can benefit Indian players. To illustrate the benefits, we will look at Thejas32 - CDAC's RISC-V SoC, and compare it with the RP2040/Raspberry Pi Pico. Thejas32 is the first designed-in-India microcontroller that anyone can buy in single quantity. The lack of documentation and design resources holds users back and makes it hard to use it beyond some simple use cases. In comparison, the community based open approach and excellent documentation makes the RP2040/Pico a winner. We will then look at a demo of a low cost open source reference board featuring both the Thejas32 and the Pico and discuss the novel applications this unlocks. We will also look at the documentation and software being developed under this project, and discuss the value it can bring to the fledgling Indian hardware scene.

Most electronic circuits now-a-days include a lot of SMD components. That said, through hole (TH) components are still widely used. Soldering TH components onto PCBs requires holding them in place in the right position and orientation. This is a skill by itself. Done wrong, this can result both in ugly looking products (e.g. angled connectors), even leading to product rejections. This is something that every every hobbyist, electronics enthusiast, and even professional ends up dealing with at one time or the other.

One way of dealing with this is to build a jig specific to the PCB to hold the electronics components in place. Using such a jig simplifies the soldering process. The user only needs to make the soldering joint, without worrying about keeping the component in place. Such a jig can be 3D printed, making it widely accessible. However, designing and tuning such jigs requires CAD design expertise. It can take many painstaking trials and prints to get this right. Such skills don't transfer easily across engineers.

JigIta is a software tool that generates a 3D printable jig from any PCB design in minutes in one single step. With the jig in hand, soldering becomes as easy as 1-2-3

1. Insert components into the jig

2. Slide in PCB into place

3. Solder away for perfect results

(Here's an example of the workflow for a Raspberry Pi Pico)

JigIt is parametric. It allows complete control over fitting tolerances, while offers a range of component fitting structures tailored to real world usage. JigIt cuts hours of work into minutes. JigIt can also create designs that need less material for 3D printing, compared to hand made designs. All these make JigIt suitable for individuals, instructors as well as in industrial applications.

This talk will illustrate how you can use JigIt to simplify your own soldering workflows. We'll step through concepts, build a jig to solder headers onto a Rasperry Pi Pico, and then move look advanced examples using various open source boards (many examples are shown on the main project page also).

One of hidden gems in JigIt is a novel technique, called "corner avoidance", that leads to 3D models which can tightly fit small components. This technique is generically applicable to various designs, and will be covered in this talk.