Hardware Manufacture Begins! Part 2: emonTx V3 and emonTx Arduino Shield SMT

This morning I visited Kaizen Technology in Royston near Cambridge. They're manufacturing the emonTx V3 and emonTx Arduino Shield SMT energy monitoring nodes. We choose Kaizen since we have worked with them before to supply us with components and as far as manufacture goes that have very good capabilities. They are able to perform wave soldering to automate the soldering of thru-hole components. This keeps the cost down on a board like the emonTx V3 where there are many thru-hole connectors. 

Since the emonTx Arduino Shield has got thru-hole components which are inserted from the rear of the board this could not be wave soldered. To keep cost down we will be shipping the emonTx Shield with only the SMT components placed and the thru-hole components supplies as a kit. The emonTx V3 will be fully assembled (SMT + thru-hole), apart from the RFu328 to retain user flexibility as some users might want to use an SRF instead of the RFM12B or even use a different MCU in place of ATmega328.