ATech Training and Rose-Hulman Ventures Team Up to Innovate Circuit Board Manufacturing

ATech Training creates a wide range of products to help instructors deliver hands-on learning in such technology-heavy areas as diagnosing and repairing vehicles. Among other things, delivering its products requires creating circuit boards.

“We needed to introduce new board technologies to make manufacturing more efficient and allow us to use more automated processes,” says Steve O’Neal, director of operations at ATech Training. Many of its circuit boards were using through-hole components that were hand-soldered, he says, and they needed to be upgraded to surface-mount technology allowing pick-and-place work with automated soldering.
The problem, he says, is that “we did not have capacity in-house to do this upgrade for the products while also working on new products.” So O’Neal placed a call to Rose-Hulman Ventures.

“We put together a specification, a general set of guidelines that we wanted to follow to convert boards from through-hole to surface mount,” he says. Among other technical specifications, “we wanted to make sure they used well-established parts that have been on the market for a long time but are not nearing end-of-life and obsolescence.”

With that in hand, the Rose-Hulman Ventures team was off and running, he says. Senior engineers selected engineering students to assist and set up weekly discussions with the client. O’Neal was impressed by how the work ensued, as the Rose-Hulman Ventures team dove into the first of eight boards to upgrade.

Completing the first board was an exercise in ensuring that the Rose-Hulman Ventures team was on the same page with ATech Training. “We taught them how we design, our preferences and best practices,” O’Neal says. It took about a month to align all parties and finish the first board, but “after the first, the others went quickly. The other seven took less than three weeks for all of them,” he says.

“We were very pleased with the result,” he continues. Not only did the collaborative work proceed smoothly and quickly, “they finished the first eight boards in under what we had budgeted.”

O’Neal says Rose-Hulman Ventures is well-suited for involving students in these kinds of pursuits. “Students are new to the engineering in the industry, so there’s always a little learning curve,” he notes.

But he adds that it was a quick learning curve, thanks to the leadership of Rose-Hulman Ventures’ project manager Zhan Chen and engineering manager Jonathan Labayo. “They did a great job mentoring the two students. Every industry has a different lexicon, and Zhan and Jonathon were very good at working with the students offline. That shortened the learning curve.”

O’Neal also found it rewarding to be able to offer the students a great learning opportunity. “I spent time in college in a couple of internships, and they were of immeasurable value to me. So I appreciate the opportunity to participate with this.”