skill

Solder Jet Sizer

Public Made by Adom

by adom

Interactive widget that visualizes how solder jet paste dots (250-800 um) pack into footprint pads. Real-time sliders for dot diameter and spacing, with coverage stats and per-pad tooltips.

Overview Files Skills Packages Releases Dependencies Issues1 Breadcrumbs Pull Requests Activity
skill / solder-jet-sizer

Install

Interactive widget that visualizes how solder jet paste dots (250-800 um) pack into footprint pads. Real-time sliders for dot diameter and spacing, with coverage stats and per-pad tooltips.

adom-wiki pkg install adom/solder-jet-sizer

Latest: v1.0.0, published

Contents

Solder Jet Sizer

Interactive widget for visualizing solder jet paste dot packing on footprint pads. Designed for solder jet printers that deposit individual paste dots (250-800 µm diameter) onto SMD pads.

What It Does

Given a KiCad footprint (.kicad_mod), the Solder Jet Sizer:

  1. Parses pad geometry — extracts all SMD pads with position, size, shape, and rotation
  2. Renders pads as 2D SVG — supports rect, roundrect, oval, and circle pad shapes
  3. Overlays solder jet dots — packs dots into each pad using a grid algorithm
  4. Real-time sliders — adjust dot diameter (250-800 µm) and inter-dot spacing (0-200 µm)
  5. Stats dashboard — total dots, avg per pad, area coverage %, center-to-center spacing
  6. Per-pad tooltips — hover any pad to see its dot layout (cols × rows) and individual coverage

Key Insight

The widget immediately reveals the maximum usable dot size for any footprint. For example, SOT-23 pads are 0.6mm tall — so any dot larger than 600µm won't fit. Drag the slider past this point and dots simply disappear, making the constraint viscerally obvious.

Coverage Thresholds

Coverage Color Meaning
≥ 60% Green Good paste coverage
≥ 35% Yellow Marginal — may need optimization
< 35% Red Insufficient paste for reliable joints

Dot Packing Algorithm

For each SMD pad:

  1. Inset by dot radius from all edges (dots stay within pad boundary)
  2. Compute available width/height after inset
  3. Calculate grid: nCols = floor(availW / spacing) + 1, same for rows
  4. Center the grid on the pad
  5. Apply pad rotation to dot positions
  6. If dot diameter > min(pad width, pad height) → 0 dots fit

Usage

Ask Claude: "Run the solder jet sizer on my footprint" with any .kicad_mod file. Or select Manufacturing → JetSizer from the AV dropdown for a demo.

Results auto-save to project-content/solder-jet-sizer/ with both interactive HTML and JSON metadata (including the computed maxDotForFit value).

Interactive Controls

  • Dot diameter slider — 250 to 800 µm in 10 µm steps
  • Spacing slider — 0 to 200 µm gap between dots
  • Labels toggle — show/hide pad numbers
  • Grid toggle — show/hide 0.5mm background grid
  • Zoom/pan — mouse wheel + drag
  • Pad tooltips — hover for per-pad dot count and coverage

Printer Specs

  • Minimum dot: 250 µm (0.25mm)
  • Maximum dot: 800 µm (0.80mm)
  • These match typical solder jet printer capabilities