FOSSMeet'25

FOSSMeet'25

Open Mind. Open Source.

Shree Kumar

@shreekumar

Easy Electronics Assembly with 3D Printed Jigs

Submitted Jan 31, 2025

Easy Electronics Assembly with 3D Printed Jigs

Over the past past, the maker revolution has seen a significant leap in terms of the number of people building DIY electronics projects. Open source tools (notably KiCAD) have made it easy to design electronics. Rolling out an electronic board requires you to solder components, which remains a significant hurdle for students, DIY crowd and even professionals trying to prototype designs. The alternate path involves requesting services from a factory, which can be expensive and thus inaccessible to many.

In this talk, we’lll look at a new project, JigIt, that significantly reduces the skill level required to achieve good soldering results. Jigit takes an electronic board design (KiCAD board design) and creates a 3D printable model - typically called a “jig”. The jig hold electronic components and the PCB (printed circuit board) in place with perfect alignment. This allows anyone with basic soldering skills to assemble the PCB. Roughly this is how it works:

Soldering made easy

(The board design in the picture above corresponds to AtiVEGA, an open source board built around THEJAS32, which the only Indian RISC-V chip that you can buy as of now. The project was born out of the frustration of me trying to solder this board, and it was then obvious that this may be useful for many others)

Simple jigs have earlier been built in the past manually by skilled practitioners. Designing a jig manually requires many hours of work and multiple iterations to achieve proper mechanical tolerances. This work needs to be repeated for every board design, and even if the board changes significantly. Jigit works with generic board designs (not just AtiVEGA - it has been tested with many community electronic designs), and generates close to perfect results in seconds. This is great for people to assemble their own designs, DIY kit assembly as well as industrial use.

Using this tool thus makes it much more easier to roll out your own designs, reducing barriers to creation of new designs.

In this talk, we’ll go through the process of using JigIt and show it in action. Practical considerations will be mentioned as well. We’ll have a sneak peek at the way the 3D structures are created as well.

The project is licensed under the AGPL 3.0. However, users are required to compensate the developer fairly. Apart from technical novelty, Jigit also introduces an idea of “equal opportunity” as a way to monetize the project.In short - it is “free” in terms of preserving developer freedoms, but not in terms of “cost”. The complete details are here.

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