Smart (Solder) Sense Design Challenge

The Smart Sense Design Challenge, an important ESG-driven initiative around Air Quality, asked: ‘How do we offer a smarter solution for customers that utilises technology to tell them when to change the filter in their Solder Extraction unit?’

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In November 2021, RS set its global business an exciting challenge called ‘Innovate for Change’. The competition was to find the next big idea that unlocked the value of our products and service propositions that could be prototyped and taken to real-world applications.

The winning submission was a German idea around ‘Clean Air in the Workplace’— the idea, to alert customers when the filters on their solder fume extraction unit needed changing.  The initial solution was an app that reminded customers to purchase a new filter based on the time frame of their last purchase. A customer must ensure filters are replaced at the correct time. It might be the case that they are using a soldering station where gas is being emitted that is undetectable to them, which can harm their health. The right solution could also enable more efficient inventory management with a “just-in-time approach” to ordering and delivering a new filter. The result, saving money, causing less environmental impact, and a more positive effect on health and safety.

An important ESG-driven initiative around air quality

For RS, the idea of the Smart Sense design challenge was an important ESG-driven initiative around Air Quality, a focus area that presents an opportunity to help our customers. It also relates to DesignSpark’s “Mission Responsible”, which sets out to educate, influence, promote and practise engineering responsibility to all generations of engineers around the world. The challenge also presented an opportunity to bring together a small group of engineers to take this idea one step further and design and create prototypes and concepts that offered a practical solution that relates to the usage of the filter, so they are changed based on actual filter media ‘consumption’,  rather than the time of purchase. 

Day one

The design challenge took place over a week, starting on 16 May. Day 1 involved the ideation session, based in the RS London office. It was the first time some of the team had met. They were made up of two of our young engineers from the RS GrassRoots Fab15 and two of our seasoned engineers from the DesignSpark community. They were presented with the brief with the problem statement: How do we offer a smarter solution for customers that utilises technology to tell them when to change the filter in their Solder Extraction unit based on usage? The team got together to draw up ideas and designs. They then met together digitally over the next week, to share conversations, ideas, and exchange snippets of code.

Day two

On 23 May - day 2, they re-joined in the RS PRO lab in Corby to prototype their ideas – a logger and hub solution. Solder filtration units usually get contaminated with the fumes from the soldering process, so the team explained how their idea was to use development boards using an array of incorporated sensors, to extract several readings to measure the air quality index: pressure, environmental - for VOC approximation, magnetometers, and IMU’s. These sensors would allow them to extract small packets of air quality data and talk to a monitoring hub. A simple traffic light system: red, orange, and green, would be incorporated into the hub to indicate when the filter needed changing.  This gives flexibility to develop not only a smart solder station but also a smart monitoring solution for any industrial equipment which needs to be maintained better through the use of smart technology.

With a working prototype now created, the next steps are the testing and consideration phase. This will involve testing different states of the filter to identify the normal state versus when the filter needs to be changed.

Team photo:

Pete Milne - Systems Integration Specialist, SBC guru and Coder 

Natalia Ibagon Sanchez - RS GrassRoots FAB 15 member 

Simon Desir - RS GrassRoots FAB 15 member - Engineering Intern at Siemens Mobility 

Pete Wood - Head of DesignSpark Community  

Jude Pullen - Creative Technologist & Physical Prototyping Expert

Alasdair Osborn - RS PRO Compliance Engineer