Pick-and-place machine
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
It worked alright, but took some considerable effort to get things working smoothly. (I wasn't the one doing that work, so I can't really comment intelligently about exactly what that means.)
Here's a little video about the badge, briefly showing the LumenPnP machine in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWZriUMNpLc
For 5-10 samples, doing it by hand is perfectly viable. For 100+ samples, the manual act of loading and unloading PCBs already takes so much time that you are probably better off outsourcing it to China. Companies like JLCPCB do it for prices which are so low it is basically free, order to delivery is four to six days - including the PCB which you already have to order, and quality control is going to be way better than you can do on your own.
It is cheap enough that buying one is very tempting, but I have a feeling it'll just be another toy that will end up sitting on a shelf unused.
With 3D printing, any company can just get one for a one-off $1000 and have a physical representation of their design in a few hours. That kind of innovation radically alters the entire industry.
I have a Manncorp 384v2. Entry level production machine for the most part. Works alright when everything is aligned. My main issue is not enough feeders.
https://youtu.be/GZK42Zaz8ek Slow motion video of it running. https://youtu.be/zfDncrgcK4Y Normal speed video.
I fully agree with others that we need more low end/low price PnP. They are cheap enough that if you have a single item say you are trying to sell on etsy that you could easily get a cheap PnP and a T-962 oven (hackable) and go into production from your garage.
My PnP requires a pallet jack and at least double doors to get in a building. Most of the openpnp based offerings you can carry in whole as one person. Seems there is plenty of room for a middle of the ground machine as well.
Yes. The Liteplacer [1] was promising. But they insist on selling it only as an incomplete kit. You have to make your own wooden baseplate. The baseplate should be a piece of metal with the holes accurately pre-drilled, because that's needed for precise positioning. The Liteplacer is for making prototypes; it's very slow. As a prototyping machine, it ought to have a solder paste dispenser, but it doesn't.
We need more low end PnP machines. Most American electronics hobbyists are still using through-hole, decades too late.
Placing SMT by hand is beyond many people. You have to be into using tweezers under a microscope. This is not really that difficult, especially with a cheap USB camera microscope, but it takes practice. I used to get angry emails from people who wanted to build an open source design of mine that had modern 0.5mm pitch SMT components.
https://www.liteplacer.com/shop20/index.php?route=product/pr...
I've had a bunch of (ex) collegues who seemed obsessed with using the smallest possible parts, even where totally unnecessary. My theory is that it's some weird kind of bragging like "look at me I can handsolder parts that are small enough to breathe in".
Not saying you did that in your designs, but just my general observation of people in the field :p
Larger parts can often easily be routed on a 2-layer board. Got a lot of tiny SMD stuff? Yeah, 4 layers it is.
For the latter, it's because many parts are only available that way, you can make PCBs much smaller (and PCBs' cost is based on area), and also reasonable-size SMT components are just a lot easier to work with, once you have proper equipment and enough practice.
Finally got a new T&R machine that has been an absolute blessing. No touching individual parts, it's 100% perfect with small parts, and we can bulk buy now to share reels with other projects.
1. Upload a BOM 2. Receive a DXF for laser cutting that arranged all my tapes (off Mouser/Digikey) in some rows or columns 3. Place my board in some spot on a Cartesian motion system 4. Peel open the tapes 5. Upload coordinates of each part 6. Press play
Does anyone know if such a thing exists?
Assuming you're not trying to do multiple spins of the same project per week and your parts are relatively common, outsourcing this to them seems entirely doable. (I only use them for hobby projects where I'm under no deadline at all, but with DHL I can get about one cycle per week.) If you're editing the PCB between revs, you're already paying almost all of that latency already.
If you can skip the "soldering by hand takes hours" step, you can get back a lot of time as you know; that might be enough to pay for the once-per-week cycle. This also gives you a very clear and fast path to go from "I had 1 unit that worked on my bench last week" to "I have 20 test units ready now" to "I can have 1000 for the Kickstarter in a month."
Last time I used their PCBA service, they had a terrible treatment of connectors, meaning I had to hand-solder those still. I understand that's improved, but not ordered in over a year.
No connection, other than satisfied customer: https://jlcpcb.com/smt-assembly
To minimise assembly time you need to keep the placement heads moving along the shortest paths in three dimensions. But you don't want them to collide with each other (I recall the machines I was concerned with had 2 (or maybe 4?) heads) or with components already placed. You also don't want a feeder to swap cartridges unnecessarily. Balancing all those concerns was very tricky.
On the occasions that I went to the assembly plant, watching the placement heads moving always reminder me of the knife-trick scene in Aliens.
I use it very manually, using the camera to make the PNP file for a single pcb and then have the machine calculate the panel.