Custom Teensy Board, Manufacturing Defects

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vince.cimo

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Hi guys; I've gone through the process of designing a custom Teensy board for a low volume product (200 units) and have sold almost all of the units I've produced. The boards integrate a Teensy LC and among other things, 12 WS2812b LEDs. During assembly, I found that on a small percentage of the boards, some of the WS2812b LEDs would not light up. Upon testing, I confirmed that in these cases, there was no electrical connection, seemingly caused by a cold solder joint between the PCB pad and the WS2812b connection. Most of these boards were easily repaired by re-flowing a bit of solder on the joint, although on 2 boards, one of the LEDs was seemingly DOA.

I did not ship out any of the boards that I repaired; rather I kept them for further testing. Meanwhile, a few of my customers have reported that they are experiencing this same LED issue. One of the customers was a well versed electrical engineer and confirmed that it was the same cold solder joint problem. These boards, while testing positive during assembly, failed soon after being received by the customer.

I know this is not a specifically teensy related inquiry, but you guys have been extremely helpful throughout the design process and I appreciate this communities feedback.

My questions:

1. Considering the nature of the problem, I think it's safe to assume the PCBA house is responsible for this mistake. To what extent do I request compensation from them? Should I be asking them to remake all the boards (200) and pay for all the components and shipping?

2. I'm not sure how widespread this problem is; so far, I've only found 9/200 boards to have these issues, but I'm concerned that they may all be affected but just haven't failed yet. I've notified all of my customers of this issue and will hopefully have more info on this soon.

3. In this situation, if the PCBA house rectifies the problem, would you trust them to produce another batch?

4. From a customer relations standpoint; if customers are experiencing this issue, who covers shipping costs to handle PCB replacement/repair? I'm not sure what's expected or correct in this situation.
 
I find the EEVblog forum is really good for questions like this. Plenty of knowledgeable people ready to help. Do a search as it probably has been asked already.

Also out of curiosity was they any special requirements for your board? Lead-free or super fine BGA stuff?

For QFN and BGA components they should really be doing x-ray inspection for you. I like the Chinese shops (PCBWAY, SEEED) for the big stuff but for little fine components use someone more like Bittele Electronics.
 
Thanks for the heads up I'll check there! Nothing super crazy on this board. Pretty basic stuff...LEDs, memory chip, microcontroller, bout it.
 
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