Must Have Rapid Prototyping Tools

Suppose your job involves rapidly iterating designs or creating a wide variety of products for clients. In that case, there are some essential tools available that can save you a tremendous amount of time, bringing high engineering risk devices to completion successfully. Whether you’re working on internal projects or developing high mix devices for clients as a consulting or freelance firm, these indispensable tools will help you ship a higher quality product in less time. 

The tools on this list target those who are not afraid to get their hands dirty and populate a PCB themselves. When you’re rapidly prototyping devices to get the design finalized, it can be tough to wait for a contract manufacturer to fit you into their schedule. Even if you use a contract manufacturer to assemble your board initially, you are still likely to swap components on the circuit board to optimize a design. So, these tools are always great to have, even if you have someone else doing the initial assembly.

I regularly use every product on this list for rapidly prototyping designs for my project articles on this blog. These are the essential items I use in every job, and the list is trimmed down to specific brands and products after trying multiple options until I settle on the ones that just work for me without hassle or frustration.

Voltera V-One

One of the most versatile tools in my rapid prototyping arsenal is the Voltera V-One. The V-One is a deposition system, which can print conductive circuits using a silver ink paste or print solder paste directly on a board. It can do with a reasonably high resolution allowing down to 0.5 mm pitch components to be prototyped directly. 

You can also build double-sided boards with the drilling attachment using rivets for vias. I don’t see this so much as a tool for building whole circuit boards. Instead, for me, it’s always been a way to make a prototype of a high-risk section of schematic rapidly or to evaluate a range of devices that don’t have development kits available or where the development kits are highly priced or hard to source.

With the paste deposition, you can quickly prototype boards that fill in the printing area without the need of a stencil – you just load your paste layer into the control software, and a minute or so later, you have a board ready for the components. With its built-in heat bed, you can reflow the board directly using the V-One without needing to worry about an oven or any other reflow system. This can allow you to utilize local following-day board services so you can prototype with multi-layer boards that have impedance control and all the other bells and whistles you need for high-speed interconnects or other complex requirements. 

For me, the V-One quickly pays for itself when compared to the time wasted etching simple breakout boards myself, the exorbitant prices charged for following day board services, or the project delays waiting for low-cost boards to come in from overseas.

Soldering Station - JBC CD-2BE with T245 handpiece

For many years now, I’ve been a big fan of Weller stations. The WD1 series of stations were fantastic - however, for the past few years, I’ve been using the WT series ever since the WD stations were discontinued. The WT series has not had the same quality of life experience for me as the WD1 did - the station regularly goes to sleep when I’m in the middle of using it, and it just doesn’t seem to be able to smash heat into a big ground plane as I would expect it to.

After my Altium community got sick of me complaining about it every time I used it, many people highly recommended that I try the JBC soldering stations. So, I contacted them and found my local distributor. The pricing is almost the same as the Weller WT series; however, my experience of using it is vastly different. I’ve been highly impressed with the stations on each board I’ve used it with.

I’ve mentioned before in articles that I’m not a fan of thermal reliefs on any component pad. There was a discussion recently about thermal relief in my community. Many people said they are still living in thermal reliefs to making the hand assembly work for a technician easier. With the JBC station, I do not notice any differences between significant ground pours with many thermal vias and pads connected to a 0.2mm track. Soldering through-hole, grounded mounting tabs on a USB Type-A connector into a large multi-layer ground plane tool takes under a second per tab without having to preheat the board.

The Weller WT series continuously goes to sleep in the middle of soldering something; the JBC stations are far more intelligent. The station always puts the handpiece to a standby temperature when you place it in the cradle. With its rapid heat-up times, it recovers to maximum soldering temperature by the time you retrieve it from the cradle and get it to the workpiece. If you leave it for too long, it goes into a hibernation mode, ready to come back to life if you remove it from the cradle but sitting at room temperature, which only adds another 1.5 seconds or so to the heat up time. This is spectacular for conserving the tip life and saves me from going insane as the station does not shut down just as I’m about to finish soldering a component onto the board.

As a final set of satisfying bonuses when using the JBC, you can pull the soldering tip out of the pen without touching it, as the base has a point for grabbing a hot tip to allow rapid switching. If you’re clearing excess solder off your tip or getting rid of tarnished solder/crusty flux residue, then the station offers several methods. The traditional wet sponge has a home in the station, plus it has a high-temperature-resistant rubber lip for tapping excess solder off. Also, a brass wool sponge artfully hiding behind a rubber flap saves you from having specs of molten solder flying all over your bench.

Low-Cost Hot Air Rework - 858D Station

When it comes to reworking boards or reflowing solder paste, nothing beats hot air for versatility. It can melt the solder itself or just add a bit of extra heat if you need it. I’ve used the 858D type hot air station for a decade or so now, sourced from several different brands. They are incredibly cheap and highly effective. You can reflow entire boards, no matter the size, with just this hot air station without any need for a preheater. It’s also perfect for using with heat shrink and clearing away hot glue cobwebs.

The hot air unit automatically cools down and goes to sleep when mounted on its rest (which I have attached to extrusion on my test equipment rack). This means you can leave the station permanently switched on without the risk of setting fire to your wall while you’re not using the unit.

Quality Tweezers - Swanstrom 7-SAH

You can buy kits with a vast range of ESD tweezers in all sorts of shapes and sizes from online marketplaces very cheaply, but unfortunately, the metals used in their construction are magnetic and not much stiffer than butter. They don’t spring well, their sharp tips bend with very little force, and are just not finished very well.

The Swanstrom 7-SAH has none of these shortcomings; they are not particularly expensive and offer good value for money. You won’t bend the tips just by jamming them into cut tape when you attempt to pull the cover tape off. They are also non-magnetic, so you won’t have to worry about components attaching themselves at the most inconvenient moment. Finally, all the metal is ground down to a smooth finish making them comfy to use and aesthetically pleasing.

As someone who can spend hours hand assembling boards, the large soft handle is a dream to use. The handles are also slightly textured, making them much more comfortable to grip than your typical epoxy-coated metal tweezers.

ESD Mat

If you’re working with electronics and don’t have an ESD workstation, then you will want an ESD mat on your desk or work area. An ESD mat will help equalize potentials between you, objects on your desk, and the circuit you’re working on. So, as you generate a static charge, it will be grounded away from you. My desks feature relatively low-cost “house brand” vinyl mats from local electronics distributors, but I’m not typically working with high-cost, highly sensitive devices. As with all things, ESD mats and other ESD treatments for a lab come in a range of performance categories and price points depending on what level of ESD protection you require.

ESD mat, available from Amazon.

Autofocus Microscope

This is a tool I do not own, but it comes highly recommended from several reliable sources. I had discussed the possibility of adding a Vision Mantis scope to this list, but it’s an expensive piece of equipment that is not as versatile as other expensive items on this list. Several people suggested an autofocusing microscope from Aliexpress; there are quite a few on offer. However, one from Eakins Micscope Store was explicitly recommended by someone who has owned one. They said that it’s fantastic when mounted to a large screen for doing board assembly and rework, allowing you to work with small components much more efficiently without suffering eye fatigue.

I find these devices that have the autofocus unit in the camera body, moving the sensor rather than the lens up and down, really interesting. It allows many different lens options to be used - with an industry-standard C mount, the possibilities for using different lenses are endless.