4 ms·

Pick-and-place machine

aranaur 3y ago
I've been excitedly following the development of Opulo's LumenPnP for the last couple of years. An open-source PnP machine for small business PCB assembly. https://opulo.io/ https://opulo.io/
- junon 3y ago
  Same here, the YouTube series about its development is quite thorough and enjoyable to watch.
- sircastor 3y ago
  Me too. I got swept up into the project by the videos and it was the thing that finally got me into discord with the community. Additionally, it’s gotten me to look into OpenPnP in general and see if I can get it working for my personal projects.
- smcameron 3y ago
  We used this type of machine at HackRVA[1] to build ~350 electronic badges for RVASEC[2]. 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWZriUMNpLc [1] https://hackrva.org https://hackrva.org [2] https://rvasec.com/ https://rvasec.com/
- crote 3y ago
  It looks really cool, but in my opinion it tries to serve a market which does not really exist. 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.
  - Retric 3y ago
    The market for cheap 3D printers is mostly as a toy that sits on a shelf, it can still be quite profitable.
    - crote 3y ago
      Cheap 3D printers are actually really useful for prototyping. There isn't really an equivalent to hand-assembling a PCB in the 3D world. At best you're going to have a machinist spend a few dozen hours milling your object, that's going to set you back thousands. 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.
coggs 3y ago
I own a Manncorp MC-400 Pick and Place. Surprised wiki does not mention Manncorp or Autotronic or Quad. Seen many inidie DIY PnP projects come and go. The latest generation of low-end Chinese PnPs like Neoden have seen increased popularity for personal and small batch use.
- Animats 3y ago
  > Seen many inidie DIY PnP projects come and go. 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/product&product_id=64 https://www.liteplacer.com/shop20/index.php?route=product/pr...
  - bboygravity 3y ago
    What's with the urge to use very small (pitch) SMT components though? 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
    - Animats 3y ago
      Many modern parts only come in small-pitch SMT.
wildzzz 3y ago
We have an old PnP that is dogshit with small 0402 parts. Techs have to manually load carousels with parts (easy to misplace parts) and then the machine isn't so good with 0402 so sometimes will place them in the wrong spot or swap adjacent parts. Very frustrating and has cost us a bunch of time and money diagnosing issues that are mostly due to wrong value resistors or caps and resistors being swapped and either shorting out a signal or blocking it. Add to that the lost parts from techs handling them and it really stresses you out. 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.
Ccecil 3y ago
I see a few mentions of Lumenpnp and liteplacer. Be sure to not forget the project that they came from https://openpnp.org/ https://openpnp.org/ 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 https://youtu.be/GZK42Zaz8ek Slow motion video of it running. https://youtu.be/zfDncrgcK4Y 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.
- iamflimflam1 3y ago
  Some good discussion here on the T-962 https://www.eevblog.com/forum/manufacture/do-not-buy-ebay-ir-reflow-ovens-(t-962-etc-)/ https://www.eevblog.com/forum/manufacture/do-not-buy-ebay-ir...
move_the_sun 3y ago
I am a solo founder building a hardware startup and my least favorite thing to do is developing and prototyping a new PCB. Soldering by hand takes hours but I don't make enough of the same kind of board to justify getting any commercial PnP system. I wish there was a tool where I could: 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?
- sokoloff 3y ago
  I would look into JLCPCB's PCBA service. (PCBWay and others also offer similar.) 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 https://jlcpcb.com/smt-assembly
andyjohnson0 3y ago
My first job after university on the early 90s was working on an optimiser for through-hole p&p machines. It was an interesting problem. We took a gerber file and a BOM and generated (hopefully) optimal instructions for the machine. 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.
pcdoodle 3y ago
We have a neoden V3 with dual cameras, about 8K or so investment to setup a small production line. Pretty decent for down to 0402. Our PCBs typically have 10-30 components and we don't mind fiddling around with the unit to get good results. 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.

I've been excitedly following the development of Opulo's LumenPnP for the last couple of years. An open-source PnP machine for small business PCB assembly. https://opulo.io/ https://opulo.io/

junon 3y ago
Same here, the YouTube series about its development is quite thorough and enjoyable to watch.
sircastor 3y ago
Me too. I got swept up into the project by the videos and it was the thing that finally got me into discord with the community. Additionally, it’s gotten me to look into OpenPnP in general and see if I can get it working for my personal projects.
smcameron 3y ago
We used this type of machine at HackRVA[1] to build ~350 electronic badges for RVASEC[2]. 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWZriUMNpLc [1] https://hackrva.org https://hackrva.org [2] https://rvasec.com/ https://rvasec.com/
crote 3y ago
It looks really cool, but in my opinion it tries to serve a market which does not really exist. 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.
- Retric 3y ago
  The market for cheap 3D printers is mostly as a toy that sits on a shelf, it can still be quite profitable.
  - crote 3y ago
    Cheap 3D printers are actually really useful for prototyping. There isn't really an equivalent to hand-assembling a PCB in the 3D world. At best you're going to have a machinist spend a few dozen hours milling your object, that's going to set you back thousands. 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.

coggs 3y ago

I own a Manncorp MC-400 Pick and Place. Surprised wiki does not mention Manncorp or Autotronic or Quad. Seen many inidie DIY PnP projects come and go. The latest generation of low-end Chinese PnPs like Neoden have seen increased popularity for personal and small batch use.

Animats 3y ago
> Seen many inidie DIY PnP projects come and go. 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/product&product_id=64 https://www.liteplacer.com/shop20/index.php?route=product/pr...
- bboygravity 3y ago
  What's with the urge to use very small (pitch) SMT components though? 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
  - Animats 3y ago
    Many modern parts only come in small-pitch SMT.

wildzzz 3y ago

We have an old PnP that is dogshit with small 0402 parts. Techs have to manually load carousels with parts (easy to misplace parts) and then the machine isn't so good with 0402 so sometimes will place them in the wrong spot or swap adjacent parts. Very frustrating and has cost us a bunch of time and money diagnosing issues that are mostly due to wrong value resistors or caps and resistors being swapped and either shorting out a signal or blocking it. Add to that the lost parts from techs handling them and it really stresses you out. 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.

Ccecil 3y ago

I see a few mentions of Lumenpnp and liteplacer. Be sure to not forget the project that they came from https://openpnp.org/ https://openpnp.org/ 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 https://youtu.be/GZK42Zaz8ek Slow motion video of it running. https://youtu.be/zfDncrgcK4Y 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.

iamflimflam1 3y ago
Some good discussion here on the T-962 https://www.eevblog.com/forum/manufacture/do-not-buy-ebay-ir-reflow-ovens-(t-962-etc-)/ https://www.eevblog.com/forum/manufacture/do-not-buy-ebay-ir...

move_the_sun 3y ago

I am a solo founder building a hardware startup and my least favorite thing to do is developing and prototyping a new PCB. Soldering by hand takes hours but I don't make enough of the same kind of board to justify getting any commercial PnP system. I wish there was a tool where I could: 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?

sokoloff 3y ago
I would look into JLCPCB's PCBA service. (PCBWay and others also offer similar.) 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 https://jlcpcb.com/smt-assembly

andyjohnson0 3y ago

My first job after university on the early 90s was working on an optimiser for through-hole p&p machines. It was an interesting problem. We took a gerber file and a BOM and generated (hopefully) optimal instructions for the machine. 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.

pcdoodle 3y ago

We have a neoden V3 with dual cameras, about 8K or so investment to setup a small production line. Pretty decent for down to 0402. Our PCBs typically have 10-30 components and we don't mind fiddling around with the unit to get good results. 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.