MR30 Wire Harness Soldering Machine
The purchased soldering machine scrapped more than 70% of our MR30 wire harnesses. I rebuilt the process around the hardware that worked and built a working prototype in a weekend. Scrap fell to 10-20%, at one harness every 12 seconds.
I reverse-engineered the tip-down mechanism and designed the fixtures in Onshape parametric part studios. An X-Y optics table allows alignment adjustments down to 0.01 mm to accommodate part tolerances. Two pneumatic actuators move the iron tip and solder needles.
Operators set temperature, dwell, needle timing, and extrusion length on an ESP32 Cheap Yellow Display board. I handled all mechanical design and built the fixtures. A collaborator wrote most of the software; I set up SSH, improved calibration, and flashed stall protection and CoolStep onto the stepper driver board.
