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As a hobbyist, I'd like one. You could do projects using hundreds or thousands of devices that are -at the moment- out of reach not for reasons of price, but ra

As a hobbyist, I'd like one. You could do projects using hundreds or thousands of devices that are -at the moment- out of reach not for reasons of price, but rather because it would take too long to assemble the devices in question. For instance, tagging and tracking wild animals, or getting really granular local climate data. Electronics just gets more interesting the more it moves away from the monolithic device approach, for me.

HeyLaughingBoy 9y ago
Hundreds or thousands of something is typically not a hobbyist venture. Also remember that placing parts is only one step of the process. If you're going to automate assembly by purchasing a P&P, you should also be ready to do high-volume stenciling and have a fast oven. In any case, the time spent aligning the machine and setting up reels can be a significant fraction of the time to just place parts manually. In some cases, you could have placed parts for your entire run by hand before you finished setting up the machine! Depending on how complex your board is, building, say, 100 units by hand isn't time consuming. I've soldered literally thousands of through-hole boards and SMT is much faster and easier to do by hand.
- marshray 9y ago
  > Hundreds or thousands of something is typically not a hobbyist venture. But isn't this just begging the question? If hobbyists can make use of it, then by definition it's a hobbyist venture. Bringing down size, cost, and complexity is exactly the path by which so much has become available to hobbyists these days. Wasn't that long ago that a laser cutter, heaven forbid a 3d printer, was for pro shops only.
  - gh02t 9y ago
    Yeah but I think there is a fundamental difference here. A 3D printer enables you to do things you can't do otherwise (fabricate custom mechanical parts). A pick-and-place enables you to do stuff you can already do with tweezers except in the most extreme cases. And likely do it faster than with a pick-and-place, because they require quite a lot of work to configure. Edit: a good analogy is a homebrewer putting caps on beer bottles. You can do it by hand with a simple tool pretty easily - even capping 100 bottles at once is no sweat, really. It just doesn't make sense to have an automated bottle capping machine even if it was cheap, because it takes up space and ends up taking more effort to set up for a small run than it saves you. Pardon the pun, but the bottleneck lies elsewhere.
    - birdman3131 9y ago
      As far as bottle capping machines you end up having to make custom handling parts and those are not cheap. (The chucks alone run several hundred dollars each.) Then the parts to guide the bottles through the machine have to be made specific to the bottle diameter and height. this costs several grand. There is still a lot of adjustment even after this. And if you want to change bottles or caps then outlay a ton more cash. Capping them by hand despite the time and effort makes sense until you can afford a significant outlay in cost. (I work for a machine shop that makes handling parts and retrofits capping/filler machines for the bottling industry. I don't fully know our prices but most of them would be far outside the range of any hobbyist starting out.)
    - hobofan 9y ago
      > And likely do it faster than with a pick-and-place, because they require quite a lot of work to configure. So lets figure out ways to bring down the amount of work required to configure it! ;)
      - imtringued 9y ago
        A "reel" library (tape library) is going to be very expensive.
    - hoopladler 9y ago
      Well, you can actually do stuff a 3d printer does by other means. It just typically requires more skills, and often more equipment. I think your analogy falls down because an automatic bottlecapper does the same thing as you'd normally do by hand. The difference for me is that a pick-and-place machine is an enabler. It would enable hobbyists to take on large-scale, distributed electronics projects - for which, right now, assembly time is normally the bottleneck. If all hobbyists were solely interested in producing consumer-style devices, like bad versions of phones, or home-automation systems, then a pick-and-place machine wouldn't be a good idea for anyone. But there are actually lots of hobbyists that do stuff like data logging, where assembly time is a major problem.
      - 9y ago
  - HeyLaughingBoy 9y ago
    Not really. The tool isn't the issue. If a hobbyist wants to play with a Pick & Place, go for it. My point was that the typical hobbyist isn't going to be manufacturing 1,000 units of anything, no matter how cheap is to do. Once you get into those numbers, it's far more likely to be a (small) business venture.
- jabl 9y ago
  > I've soldered literally thousands of through-hole boards and SMT is much faster and easier to do by hand. Sorry for going off-topic, but do hobbyists actually solder SMT's manually nowadays? Or does everyone use some kind of off-the-shelf/DIY reflow oven? And if so, are stencils obligatory or is it feasible to just apply paste manually? I've been thinking of getting back (or well, properly starting if you will) my electronics hobby, but I've ever only done through-hole components. At least based on tutorials on the web, it's possible to hand-solder SMT's with some practice. But given how small e.g. 0603's are I guess that might involve an unhealthy amount of swearing..
  - iliis 9y ago
    We mainly do SMT at our hackerspace, as it is really is fast and easy to do by hand using a hot-air gun (e.g. [1]). Use a syringe to deposit solder paste (we have one which uses compressed air, very convenient! Something like [2]) and a binocular to see what you're doing and you will be golden. [1] http://www.aoyue.eu/aoyue-int998-smd-rework-station-hot-air-soldering-station-with-stand.html http://www.aoyue.eu/aoyue-int998-smd-rework-station-hot-air-... [2] https://www.aliexpress.com/item/220V-AD-982-Semi-Auto-Glue-Dispenser-PCB-Solder-Paste-Liquid-Controller-Dropper-Fluid-dispenser/32720970790.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/220V-AD-982-Semi-Auto-Glue-D...
    - hoopladler 9y ago
      How does this compare to doing it with a normal soldering iron? I just ordered a bunch of surface-mount components - just because they were so much cheaper, but I haven't really got any notion about good approaches yet.
      - HeyLaughingBoy 9y ago
        I'd recommend that a beginner go with the iron. It's all too easy to overheat components with a hot air gun, unless you have one with excellent temperature control. Even then, you need to be aware of accidentally desoldering nearby components.
gh02t 9y ago
You're not gonna be able to pick-and-place anything with hundreds/thousands of parts at a hobby price point. Those kinds of machines are massive by necessity and hugely complex; I just can't imagine it happening for the very small number of people who would want to do something like that. If it did happen by some miracle, it'd have to follow from some sort of major technical advance. If you're one of the handful of hobbyists that want to do such complex projects I think contract manufacturing is probably a more realistic option. Not sure if you've ever set up a PnP before but it's a huge pain in the ass. I'd rather stencil and tweezer as long it was remotely practical. They are utterly mesmerizing to watch work once they're set up however...
- CamperBob2 9y ago
  You're not gonna be able to pick-and-place anything with hundreds/thousands of parts at a hobby price point. LitePlacer is almost there. IMHO the key is recognizing that production-oriented machines need to be fast, while hobbyist/small-shop prototyping machines don't. If I need to stuff a complex prototype board with 500 parts, I literally don't care if it takes all day and all night as long as I don't have to do it. Obviously production shops don't have that luxury, but I do. Really, the only unsolved problem (at least at the 0402 and up level) is loose part pickup and orientation.
  - mng2 9y ago
    Agreed. Being a human pick and place for anything more than low tens of parts is incredibly unfun, and paying someone to manufacture one or two doesn't really make sense. I don't care if it takes a few days, I'd rather not be sitting for hours wearing down my fine motor skills and eyesight.
    - thesmok 9y ago
      If it takes more than an hour to place the components, your solder paste will likely flow all over the board and it will be pointless to reflow it.
      - 9y ago

HeyLaughingBoy 9y ago

Hundreds or thousands of something is typically not a hobbyist venture. Also remember that placing parts is only one step of the process. If you're going to automate assembly by purchasing a P&P, you should also be ready to do high-volume stenciling and have a fast oven. In any case, the time spent aligning the machine and setting up reels can be a significant fraction of the time to just place parts manually. In some cases, you could have placed parts for your entire run by hand before you finished setting up the machine! Depending on how complex your board is, building, say, 100 units by hand isn't time consuming. I've soldered literally thousands of through-hole boards and SMT is much faster and easier to do by hand.

marshray 9y ago
> Hundreds or thousands of something is typically not a hobbyist venture. But isn't this just begging the question? If hobbyists can make use of it, then by definition it's a hobbyist venture. Bringing down size, cost, and complexity is exactly the path by which so much has become available to hobbyists these days. Wasn't that long ago that a laser cutter, heaven forbid a 3d printer, was for pro shops only.
- gh02t 9y ago
  Yeah but I think there is a fundamental difference here. A 3D printer enables you to do things you can't do otherwise (fabricate custom mechanical parts). A pick-and-place enables you to do stuff you can already do with tweezers except in the most extreme cases. And likely do it faster than with a pick-and-place, because they require quite a lot of work to configure. Edit: a good analogy is a homebrewer putting caps on beer bottles. You can do it by hand with a simple tool pretty easily - even capping 100 bottles at once is no sweat, really. It just doesn't make sense to have an automated bottle capping machine even if it was cheap, because it takes up space and ends up taking more effort to set up for a small run than it saves you. Pardon the pun, but the bottleneck lies elsewhere.
  - birdman3131 9y ago
    As far as bottle capping machines you end up having to make custom handling parts and those are not cheap. (The chucks alone run several hundred dollars each.) Then the parts to guide the bottles through the machine have to be made specific to the bottle diameter and height. this costs several grand. There is still a lot of adjustment even after this. And if you want to change bottles or caps then outlay a ton more cash. Capping them by hand despite the time and effort makes sense until you can afford a significant outlay in cost. (I work for a machine shop that makes handling parts and retrofits capping/filler machines for the bottling industry. I don't fully know our prices but most of them would be far outside the range of any hobbyist starting out.)
  - hobofan 9y ago
    > And likely do it faster than with a pick-and-place, because they require quite a lot of work to configure. So lets figure out ways to bring down the amount of work required to configure it! ;)
    - imtringued 9y ago
      A "reel" library (tape library) is going to be very expensive.
  - hoopladler 9y ago
    Well, you can actually do stuff a 3d printer does by other means. It just typically requires more skills, and often more equipment. I think your analogy falls down because an automatic bottlecapper does the same thing as you'd normally do by hand. The difference for me is that a pick-and-place machine is an enabler. It would enable hobbyists to take on large-scale, distributed electronics projects - for which, right now, assembly time is normally the bottleneck. If all hobbyists were solely interested in producing consumer-style devices, like bad versions of phones, or home-automation systems, then a pick-and-place machine wouldn't be a good idea for anyone. But there are actually lots of hobbyists that do stuff like data logging, where assembly time is a major problem.
    - 9y ago
- HeyLaughingBoy 9y ago
  Not really. The tool isn't the issue. If a hobbyist wants to play with a Pick & Place, go for it. My point was that the typical hobbyist isn't going to be manufacturing 1,000 units of anything, no matter how cheap is to do. Once you get into those numbers, it's far more likely to be a (small) business venture.
jabl 9y ago
> I've soldered literally thousands of through-hole boards and SMT is much faster and easier to do by hand. Sorry for going off-topic, but do hobbyists actually solder SMT's manually nowadays? Or does everyone use some kind of off-the-shelf/DIY reflow oven? And if so, are stencils obligatory or is it feasible to just apply paste manually? I've been thinking of getting back (or well, properly starting if you will) my electronics hobby, but I've ever only done through-hole components. At least based on tutorials on the web, it's possible to hand-solder SMT's with some practice. But given how small e.g. 0603's are I guess that might involve an unhealthy amount of swearing..
- iliis 9y ago
  We mainly do SMT at our hackerspace, as it is really is fast and easy to do by hand using a hot-air gun (e.g. [1]). Use a syringe to deposit solder paste (we have one which uses compressed air, very convenient! Something like [2]) and a binocular to see what you're doing and you will be golden. [1] http://www.aoyue.eu/aoyue-int998-smd-rework-station-hot-air-soldering-station-with-stand.html http://www.aoyue.eu/aoyue-int998-smd-rework-station-hot-air-... [2] https://www.aliexpress.com/item/220V-AD-982-Semi-Auto-Glue-Dispenser-PCB-Solder-Paste-Liquid-Controller-Dropper-Fluid-dispenser/32720970790.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/220V-AD-982-Semi-Auto-Glue-D...
  - hoopladler 9y ago
    How does this compare to doing it with a normal soldering iron? I just ordered a bunch of surface-mount components - just because they were so much cheaper, but I haven't really got any notion about good approaches yet.
    - HeyLaughingBoy 9y ago
      I'd recommend that a beginner go with the iron. It's all too easy to overheat components with a hot air gun, unless you have one with excellent temperature control. Even then, you need to be aware of accidentally desoldering nearby components.

gh02t 9y ago

You're not gonna be able to pick-and-place anything with hundreds/thousands of parts at a hobby price point. Those kinds of machines are massive by necessity and hugely complex; I just can't imagine it happening for the very small number of people who would want to do something like that. If it did happen by some miracle, it'd have to follow from some sort of major technical advance. If you're one of the handful of hobbyists that want to do such complex projects I think contract manufacturing is probably a more realistic option. Not sure if you've ever set up a PnP before but it's a huge pain in the ass. I'd rather stencil and tweezer as long it was remotely practical. They are utterly mesmerizing to watch work once they're set up however...

CamperBob2 9y ago
You're not gonna be able to pick-and-place anything with hundreds/thousands of parts at a hobby price point. LitePlacer is almost there. IMHO the key is recognizing that production-oriented machines need to be fast, while hobbyist/small-shop prototyping machines don't. If I need to stuff a complex prototype board with 500 parts, I literally don't care if it takes all day and all night as long as I don't have to do it. Obviously production shops don't have that luxury, but I do. Really, the only unsolved problem (at least at the 0402 and up level) is loose part pickup and orientation.
- mng2 9y ago
  Agreed. Being a human pick and place for anything more than low tens of parts is incredibly unfun, and paying someone to manufacture one or two doesn't really make sense. I don't care if it takes a few days, I'd rather not be sitting for hours wearing down my fine motor skills and eyesight.
  - thesmok 9y ago
    If it takes more than an hour to place the components, your solder paste will likely flow all over the board and it will be pointless to reflow it.
    - 9y ago