Mechanics and speed look better than most of the lame efforts seen so far, but consequently probably not cheap. Still no sign of feeders, without which it is of minmal usefulness.
There is way more to p&p than a good x/y/z mechanism. I suspec he'll either get bored and give up, or spend not much less than a used commercial machine before it is any real use.
You miserable old cynic you!
Cynical, me..?
If people want to have a go at making a P+P machine themselves, let them!
Nobody is stopping them
If they want to try and sell a low-end one to a few customers, let them!
We should be enthusiastically encouraging these people.
Yes but encouraging them to think about how to make something that is actually useful and not just diving in with a half-arsed approach that will never be more than a toy. My fear is that some over-enthuisiastic DIYer will lauch a half-arsed attempt on kickstarter, get funded by fanboyz/girlz who don't understand the issues until it's too late. That then takes a way a lot of potential market for something that's been done properly.
Britain (and Hewlett Packard) was built by eccentrics in garden sheds.
Yes - totally agree IMO the UK designed Versatronics machine is probably the best effort anyone has ever made at making a small, cheap P&P - I think they just were a bit ahead of their time in the 1990s and ran out of cash. There are still plenty of these machines still going, and if you can find a good used one (typically £3-8K with feeders) it is definitely the smallest and probably the cheapest real P&P available.
Potential P&P builders could learn a lot by using one of these machines.
Bottom line is I'm just trying to share my experience and help people avoid wasting their time persuing dead ends.
I did look seriously at doing a DIY P&P a while ago based on a plotter before realising it was hopeless, and that, combined with experience of having a real one gives me insight into what is and is not important.
Seemingly small issues like parts bouncing out of plastic tapes are only apparent once you start using feeders, but could easily make some approaches to feeder design unviable. There are many other small issues like this that you only see with experience.
All I'm doing is trying to help & guide people but sometimes the truth hurts!
Nothing has dissuaded me from the opinion that a P&P without reasonable speed and a viable design for proper feeders is a dead end.
I believe that there is, now more than ever, a good opportunity to make a cheap (say $3-5K) very useable, and scaleble machine with economic tape feeders, but it will only be viable if it can perform well enough in terms of speed, setup time and component variety to cover a sufficiently wide range of jobs from 1-offs to small runs,to be genuinely useful to enough people.
It will need a lot of work and some clever design to minimise costs. I've yet to see anything that comes close to it. I hope this will change but am not holding my breath.
If people want serious suggestions on approaches that I think are worth persuing - I'm more than happy to contribute constructive ideas and share experience for free whan I have a little more time.