Your brand-new PCBs just showed up, as well as this time around you even kept in mind to order a stencil. You lay the stencil on one of the boards, hold it down with one hand, as well as utilize the other to wipe some solder paste across…. as well as the stencil shifts, making a mess as well as smearing paste across the board. Wash, rinse (with some IPA, of course), repeat, as well as hope it’ll work much better on the next try.

A PCB jig produced by OpenSCAD
Maybe it’s time to try Stencilframer, a 3D-printable jig generator produced by [Igor]. This incredibly useful tool takes either a set of gerbers or a KiCad PCB data as well as produces 3D designs of a jig as well as a frame to securely hold the board as well as associated stencil. The tool itself is a Python script that utilizes OpenSCAD for all 3D geometry generation. From there, it’s a simple matter to throw the jig as well as frame designs on a 3D printer as well as voilà!– perfectly-aligned stencils, every time.

This is a seriously brilliant script. anyone whose gone with the irritation of trying to line up a stencil by hand should be jumping at the chance to try this out on their next build. It might even be paired with an open Reflow hot plate for a completely open-source PCB assembly workflow.