So after much back and forth and testing and trying different things, I’m just not comfortable with including the LED nails in any flex product at this time… the resin approach to stabilize the passive components on the board seems to risk ripping them from the board when curing and the thermal changes during biopoly coating… it is just not worth it for anyone to include them in anything at this point.
i’m now thinking up plans to bring them back… but it’s low priority of course…
I can keep up with reviews on the nail flexes I got, though. (even if only for education purposes)
So far everything seems good.
Even the nail that failed once is back on track working fine.
Although, given that none of mine are halfway between hard and flexible surfaces (like on most of the known failed cases), then perhaps this might be the difference?
Anyway, within a couple more months we’ll have better data from these installs too.
Hmm, may I ask you to stick two blinkies on my upcoming flexMN anyway? As-is, no reinforcement or anything. I’ll take my chances. I’m okay to forego the warranty on em. And possibly if you’re okay with it, I’ll select the location exactly, so that they’re placed as my hunches about fatigue failure tell me they should be placed.
I have these projects that involve those blinkies and I don’t really want to give up on em.
for orders already placed with blinkies i am willing to make that accommodation, but the problem is we have already had failures on the flexMN and I have no extra chips to spare… i currently have two flexMN with green LEDs with a single LED not working… the other LED works… on each… so unless you want one of those… it’ll have to wait a while as I round up another order of magic ntag chips.
that is a nfc nail . same thing… i’ve just been using nails in all these things so far… but they just really really suck for this… so i’m scheming something for the Apex Jumbo and if it works then we’ll explore making it for other chip types too including flexMN and flexMT… i’m thinking 4 LEDs not 3…
Ah okay. I thought it was a real LED with a copper antenna.
Well alrighty then. Scheme away If you come up with something before springtime (Finnish spring that is, April/May) that’ll be good. If you don’t, I might just go blinkie-less and rethink my projects. Or I’ll think of something after I’m done processing the ethanol in my system.
it was bandied about elsewhere in the forum but basically there is an idea that Apex could come in a Jumbo form factor like flexMN and flexMT without too much fuss… so as long as we are exploring that option we are also going to explore the idea of adding LEDs to this design… and if that works then we can expand the idea of adding LEDs back into other flex products too.
Did those went to the processing with the new “extra resin backing” feature you mentioned on the FlexNExT thread? or were they just “regular”? (like in my Wedge)
Did anyone ever tried to use a flexible PCB which is made for this purpose? You could have the antenna be a part of the PCB, solder the NFC chip and the LED on it. The LED could be as small as 0201 or 0402 and the board could hold multiple chips.
yeah and i think this is the reason they borked… the resin shrinks a little during curing and then we thermocycle it … so i think it’s ripping passives from the flexpcb
yeah this is part of “plan #2” haha … but the important thing is to not be shitty like the NFC nails… those are small passives soldered to a flex PCB and they suck.