Pixel Pump: Open-source vacuum pickup tool | Hacker News Reader

Pixel Pump: Open-source vacuum pickup tool

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125 pointsTomte27 comments

Looks absolutely amazing, just the pricetag of 500$ seems a bit steep. To be fair though, people buying this probably assemble/sell a ton of PCBs so they can recoup that cost fairly easily. As a hobbyist it's sadly too expensive.

Yep, way out of my budget and I would probably get quite a bit of use out of it.

It is probably a very fair price for what you are getting and the work that's gone into the R&D.

Looks like I'll be investigating DIY options...

You can make it yourself - all the parts and boards are on GitHub (so also a group buy for assembled boards is an option). I couldn't find a BOM cost estimate though and I guess it'd be $1-200 from scratch, plus things like custom buttons.

Probably a lot less. One can effectively use a small aquarium blowing pump by connecting the sucking tube to the air intake instead of the output, and they're cheap, like 10 bucks each. The electronics would be trivial, and the switch could either act on a solenoid valve (less than 10 quid) or be a small hole in the side of the tube so that closing it with a finger would let all air in through the end of the tube.

> $1-200

This means "$1 to $200 dollars" to me, which is why the next comment, starting with "probably a lot less", surprised me at first.

American English gets so vague when it comes to thing like this. I would write it:

One- to two-hundred dollars

Using the hyphens to indicate that “one” and “two” modify “hundred”

That's what professional one costs, and there are cheaper ones. Kinda pointless project considering all it is is some basic controls over a pump.

Heh, looks better built than our "pyramid of power" professional SMT vacuum pick! I forget what the new price is but it had to have been close. To make it worse, when you order replacement tips there's a minimum of $100 on the order!

Just curious - what does one use this for? Assuming circuit assembly, but specifically was something like this not available?

I tried Aliexpress but all I get is "adult massage toys"

The phrase may be "pick and place" along with vacuum

This is used for circuit assembly indeed. The vaccum is used to pick a small component from a tray and place it on the PCB at the right place. As the components are so small nowadays the small tip of the nozzle helps where human hand would be to big.

Placing large chips with tons of pins on a circuit board that has had solder paste applied needs precision to get it in the exactly right place.

Can't do it with just forceps, which are fine for smaller parts.

Smaller parts are so much easier with a vacuum pen. You just need expensive tips for 0402 and smaller.

They tend to jump into place thanks to the soldier surface tensions so you don't need to be exactly right.

It's just more convenient using this.

It is less about them jumping and more about it even being possible to use forceps to begin with to place them without disturbing pins or paste.

For example TQFP-144 and fBGA256 parts are hard to place with forceps alone. Let alone larger parts.

The alternative is tweezers. There's a few really annoying problems:

It's very easy to squeeze a bit too hard or not quite get the grip right and the part will ping off and you'll never find it.

If the tweezers get a bit of solder paste on them the components start to stick so you can't let go of them.

It's really hard to get the components out of the tape - so you tend to have to tip them out and then they are upside down so you need to flip them over. Which is really hard with tiny components and again you often lose them.

For larger components (e.g. MCUs) its quite hard to pick them up in a way that is easy to place with tweezers.

To add a little to the existing replies. When you buy surface mount parts, they normally come on tapes - little plastic/cardboard strips with indents that the components sit in and a film over the top. These tapes are sold as reels if you need lots of units, but most hobbyists buy "cut tape" which the big distributors offer.

In a production setup, the pick and place machine accepts the reels and uses a vacuum tool to pick the parts up. It knows the orientation of the part in the tape (which is fixed) and where it needs to go on the board. Often components with irregular tops (usb connectors for example) will have small piece of kapton tape fixed to them to aid pickup. This is important: if you're doing this with tweezers, it's often annoying to pick the parts out of the tape and if you dump on the table you usually have to flip things the right way up, rotate them, etc. So a vacuum tool makes that a lot easier.

Small pens already exist and so do diy options like aquarium pumps, but this is a really polished looking project and great if it's open source too.

Got it. Thank you for the additional insight!

I once replaced a faulty SMD fuse on a laptop motherboard; I used tweezers and a microscope. Could I have done such a repair with a pick and place theoretically?

Nice. I have a manual tool for this, with a little squeeze bulb, but it's not reliable.[1] You'd think there would be some $5 tool that runs on an AAA battery, but apparently not.

[1] https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Vacuum-Sucking-Sucker...

There's fish tank pumps that can be easily adapted and work great. You use a luer fitting to attach the vacuum tips. From there you can add extras, like pass the tubing through a pen and epoxy the luer to the end of the pen. A foot pedal operated solenoid can be added that opens the line to ambient pressure to release vacuum and drop the part.

We use a three way hose connector and just block or open the 3rd side with a thumb to activate/deactivate the vacuum pressure at the tip.

The pump was $20 and the end is a 5cc syringe. All in, it was under $40 and works great!

I can’t even tell if you’re being sarcastic, but exactly what you describe does exist [1]. They work OK, but they are a little heavy in the hand for fine placement. The vacuum is quite weak, nowhere near as powerful as a basic converted aquarium pump, and that really limits its utility for me. It would only work well if I had just the right tip, and just the right suction cup for larger components.

My aquarium pump setup only needs two tips, one for 0603 sized components, and a slightly larger tip with a small suction cup that handles everything from 0805 to 14x14mm large ICs (when picked on centre of gravity).

[1] https://m.aliexpress.com/i/33005346611.html

archive link[1]

[1]https://web.archive.org/web/20230803040029/https://hackaday....

Sadly it won't be called SuckIt though.

A vacuum pen is $20 and works just as well. The relevant search is "Pick and Place Suction pen".

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