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Everytime I see electronics like https://www.takeitapart.com/guide/81, I feel like "shit, how incredibly precise have robots become".

Those resistors on the last image, attached to the 3.5mm jack, are 0.3mm wide and 0.5mm high, and spaced together with next-to-zero distance. And yet, the pick+place process was exact enough that the components didn't just melt together.

Awesome.

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Most of the magic doesn't come from the robots, it comes from the soldermask. Surface tension from molten solder will move misaligned parts by a surprising amount:

http://youtu.be/N_195d7bP9M?t=3m10s

That solder mask is cool, but placing epoxy dots before placing the component works pretty good, especially if a reflow oven is used anyways. Misaligned components at high-tolerance has been an issue with solder masks, and not all silicon based solder masks are CE-compliant. The time it takes to drop epoxy dots is less than the time to retouch and realign the component.

I used to program PNP and CNC machines back in the heyday of Cray, then moved up to developing the software to program PNPs and CNCs (shit, I've come a long way since then but still miss the sweet smell of lead in the morning from the wave solderers) improving "fiduciary" operations and increasing speed, accuracy, and feeding.

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