skill

Solder Jet Sizer

Unreviewed

by Kyle Bergstedt

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.

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skill / solder-jet-sizer
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Not installable via adompkg

This skill has no published release. adompkg install kyle/solder-jet-sizer will not work until a maintainer publishes a tarball with install.sh and uninstall.sh.

See the publishing docs for the package.json schema and tarball layout required to ship this skill.

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