Raspberry Pi’s fancy new soldering tech cuts product returns in half

If you’re making a pc recognized for being super-cheap, each penny counts—and that additionally applies if you’re counting what number of returns it’s important to cope with. Raspberry Pi says that due to some fancy new soldering methods and somewhat assist from Sony, they’ve managed to chop costly returns by a whopping 50 %.

To get technical, the brand new Raspberry Pi 5 eliminates through-hole soldering connectors through the use of reflow soldering. It’s a way that makes use of a form of “oven” to connect elements to a number of factors without delay, and it’s a lot sooner than doing particular person solder factors both by hand or with robotics. Along with eliminating errors and returns, it speeds issues up—apparently by 15 % for the Pi. Right here’s an instance of the method, although this isn’t the particular {hardware}:

Nevertheless it’s additionally extra complicated from an industrial standpoint since you want some complicated tools to automate it, so Raspberry Pi labored with Sony’s UK Expertise Centre to improve its manufacturing programs.

In line with Raspberry Pi’s weblog publish, the method is being utilized to older fashions and different merchandise as properly. The corporate additionally claims that eliminating a few of its manufacturing steps and tools will save 43 tons of CO₂ output per yr.