Egocentric Soldering and PCB Rework Video Data

Egocentric soldering and PCB rework video data is first-person video of a person doing soldering work on a circuit board, recorded from the contributor’s own point of view with synchronized sensor streams alongside. The camera sits on the head, close to what a robot’s onboard camera would see at the bench, so the frames show what the hands are doing at the board rather than a distant view of someone seated at a desk.

The catalog describes the tasks in its own words, for example "Solder components to the board with an iron and solder wire, trim leads and inspect joints." This page repeats those descriptions as written and adds nothing to them. Rework, in the sense of removing a joint or replacing a part on a populated board, is not a row in the catalog, so this page does not claim it as one. It is a step you would describe in a skill spec. The data is human capture: a paid, consented contributor wears the rig and performs the task. It is not robot or teleoperation data, and it is not a fixed corpus you download.

People reach this topic through several phrasings: soldering robot training data, a PCB rework video dataset, egocentric electronics bench data, or custom electronics task data collection. They describe one request from different angles. Under each of them the work is the same: write down the task, collect it on demand, and receive validated episodes with the labels a training pipeline expects. The broadest of those phrasings is custom egocentric data collection, which is how Firsthand describes the service: collected on demand to your written spec rather than picked from a fixed library.

Two rows of the site’s commercial task catalog describe soldering electronics. The first table below reproduces them exactly as the catalog states them. Both are rated Hard, which is the top of the catalog’s three levels, and both are listed as Available on request. Both sit in the Manufacturing & Workshops sector. One is in the Electronics Manufacturing & E-Waste environment, with the capture setup "Phone (head-mounted) / multiview rig". The other is in the Precision Assembly Bench (electronics) environment, with the capture setup "Multiview rig + handheld grippers".

The first row, "Component soldering", is described as "Solder components to the board with an iron and solder wire, trim leads and inspect joints." The second row, "Solder through-hole", is described as "Solder through-hole components to a board." This page quotes them and says no more. The first row names three steps inside one description: solder, trim and inspect. The site does not say how many joints make up a task, which boards or components appear, or how long a task takes.

The rows around them are worth reading alongside. "Circuit board assembly" is rated Medium and reads "Place components on the board, seat connectors and secure parts before soldering." In the catalog’s own wording it is the step that comes before soldering, and it belongs with the electronics assembly page. The Precision Assembly Bench (electronics) environment lists fifteen rows in all: ten rated Medium, three Hard and two Easy, every one Available on request. The Electronics Manufacturing & E-Waste environment lists four rows: three Medium and one Hard.

The site defines Available on request as a task that is scoped and recruited to spec when a buyer asks for it. Both soldering rows have that status, so each is scoped against your spec before capture begins.

The catalog is a list of what is captured or available, not a ceiling on what can be briefed. A step outside these two rows is a skill-spec question to settle in a Spec Pilot rather than an assumption. That includes removing a joint, replacing a part on a populated board, or any named joint type. The site lists none of those as rows, so none is claimed here. Two other rows mention soldering in a different trade, and the second table below shows why they are not treated as electronics soldering.

The site already has pages for the work on either side of soldering. The electronics assembly page covers board, connector, housing and harness work as the catalog lists it. The electronics and device repair page covers fault-driven work on devices that already exist: working out what is wrong, opening the housing, replacing a part and testing the result. This page is narrower than both. It covers the two catalog rows that are about soldering, and it keeps their wording.

The practical difference is the unit of work. An assembly episode follows a build sequence and a repair episode starts from a fault. A soldering episode is one step at a board: make the joint, trim the lead, inspect the result. If your program needs soldering inside a longer build, the skill spec can carry it as its own labeled segment.

Each attempt is delivered as one episode. For the instrumented tier the site describes a head-mounted stereo rig that records first-person RGB, with a metric depth stream recovered from the calibrated stereo rig rather than from a standalone depth sensor, and 6-DoF IMU data at 200 Hz from head- and wrist-mounted sensors. The wider stack is ten streams: a 4K head camera, two wrist cameras, depth, IMU, 3D hand and body pose, instance segmentation and action labels, synced under 2 ms.

Hand pose is delivered for both hands as 21 joints per hand in three dimensions, with a per-joint visibility flag for occluded fingers. Soldering puts the fingers close to the work and to each other, and a hand closing around a part hides finger joints. The flag marks the joints that were not visible instead of presenting a guess as a measurement. Contact events mark when a hand meets the board or a part.

Every stream is hardware-triggered onto one PTP clock domain, so depth, motion and hand pose line up with the same video frame. An episode is accepted only if RMS reprojection stays under 0.28 px. The only language field the site ties to Firsthand capture is one task instruction per episode. The site does not list a force or tactile stream for these rows, and it does not list a temperature or heat measurement, a joint-quality score or an inspection result.

Inside each episode, action segments divide the timeline into spans, each carrying start_ns, end_ns, verb and noun. For this task family a segment can be one step as written in the skill spec, so one piece of work becomes a sequence of labeled steps rather than one long clip. The other standard fields are hand_joints and hand_visible for 3D hand pose, contact_events, objects, and per-frame instance masks where the spec calls for them.

Delivery is in the format your stack already reads: RLDS, LeRobot, WebDataset, HDF5, zarr or Rerun .rrd, or raw streams with metadata. The delivery formats table below gives the official description of the three that have an official source. In the HDF5 layout the site documents, hand pose sits at annotations/hand_joints and action segments at annotations/action_segments.

The site does not list labels for the quality of a solder joint. There is no stated label for a pass or fail result, a defect class, a joint count or whether a board is finished. The verb and noun on each action segment is the vocabulary the skill spec defines with you, and anything beyond it is a scoping conversation, not a delivered field.

The GR00T N1 paper structures its training corpora as a data pyramid. In its words: "large quantities of web data and human videos lay the base of the pyramid; synthetic data generated with physics simulations and/or augmented by off-the-shelf neural models form the middle layer, and real-world data collected on the physical robot hardware complete the top." In that framing, first-person human video of soldering sits at the base, the layer that gives broad behavioral priors, and it does not replace real robot data at the top.

The same paper says of the human video datasets it used: "These do not include explicit action labels but contain extensive sequences of human-object interactions." That is a statement about those datasets, not about this one. A Firsthand episode carries labeled action segments, 3D hand pose and contact events, so the structure of the step is explicit in the data. No model named on this page was trained on Firsthand data, and this page makes no claim about how any model would perform on it.

Soldering is a useful family to specify when your model needs close-range hand work at a board. The catalog rates both rows Hard. This page does not claim that any robot solders, that any model improves from this data, or any result. For neighbouring first-person bench work, the site has its own pages on electronics assembly, electronics and device repair, tool use and dexterous manipulation, linked at the end of this page.

The two rows sit in two environments, and the site defines two capture modes. A head-mounted phone records the first-person view of real work. A multiview rig with handheld grippers records a staged working set. "Component soldering" lists "Phone (head-mounted) / multiview rig" and does not say which applies, so the site does not settle whether a given batch is real work or a staged set. "Solder through-hole" lists "Multiview rig + handheld grippers", which is the mode the site describes as a staged working set.

Every contributor signs a written release before capture, and each delivered episode links to that record through consent artefact IDs in the batch data card. At ingest, automated detection finds faces, plates and screens and blurs them irreversibly, and speech is scrubbed of names, addresses and card numbers. A human reviewer confirms that no un-consented person is identifiable in any frame.

If your program needs terms about premises, access or who may be in frame, raise them when you scope it. The site states nothing about safety, compliance or certification for these rows, and this page makes no such claim. None of this is legal advice, and the executed agreement controls.

From signed spec to first validated batch, the site states a median of 48 hours where coverage is deep and three to four weeks where it is thin and contributors need to be recruited first. The site does not state which of those applies to the soldering rows, so that is settled in your quote. Both rows are Available on request, which the site defines as scoped and recruited to spec when a buyer asks for it, so the timeline is quoted against your spec.

Validation runs against signed accept criteria written into the spec before capture. An episode is rejected, among other criteria, when the manipulated object is out of frame for more than 15 percent of the episode, when more than 35 percent of depth pixels in the manipulation region are invalid, or when an undocumented bystander appears. A human reviewer then checks each episode against the task spec. A rejected item is handled under the rework terms the site describes for custom collection, and those are agreed before capture, not after.

The license is perpetual, irrevocable and worldwide, with the data buyer-owned and non-exclusive by default. Training, evaluating, fine-tuning and deploying models, including commercial ones, is permitted, and exclusivity is available as a separate term. The executed agreement controls. The site does not publish a price list, a minimum order or a batch size for this task family, so those are set in your quote.

Describe the soldering steps, the setting and the variation cases your pipeline is missing. That becomes a written skill spec, quoted for reach, timeline and price before any capture begins, and most programs run a Spec Pilot first: a small, fast first batch that proves the spec and the accept criteria on real footage before volume scales. The sample data outputs page shows what a delivered recording contains.

Three choices matter most for this family. Name the step and the item rather than a broad activity, using catalog wording such as "solder components to the board" or "solder through-hole components to a board", because that is what lets each step become one action segment. Name the setting and the capture tier, since "Component soldering" lists a head-mounted phone or a multiview rig and the choice between them is yours to settle. And write the reject rule and the acceptance test before capture, so the pilot proves terms you have already agreed.

Where this site does not state something, this page says "Not stated" rather than filling the gap. The final table lists each item: no rework or joint-removal row, no solder-joint quality or pass-fail label, no force, tactile or thermal stream, no safety or compliance position, and no board, component or joint type. The tradeoff to plan for is the embodiment gap between a human hand and a robot end-effector, which retargeting or pairing with robot data has to close.