In this video I’m down in Woking with the team at Faradite to see, properly behind the scenes, how the electronic side of their motion sensors is actually made. We use Faradite sensors in loads of our Control4 projects because they integrate really nicely and give you a huge amount of triggers for automation, so I wanted to show the bit most people never see: the manufacturing process that makes these devices reliable in the first place. We walk through the full SMT line step-by-step. First up is the screen printer, which is basically “screen printing” but with metallic solder paste—alignment is everything because some components are only 4–5mm across, and being a tiny fraction off means the paste won’t land on the pads correctly. Then we move to the pick-and-place machine, pulling parts from feeders, vision-checking them on camera, and placing them on the board—this one board is around 8,000 parts, which is mad. After that it’s into the reflow oven with multiple heat zones and a cooling zone so the solder melts, self-centres, and then solidifies. Finally, there’s automated optical inspection to check orientation and placement (and catch issues like tombstoning) before and after the oven, plus further programming and functional testing later in the process.