Better Pick And Place Machine DIY

[peter.mitchell]

Putting two heads on a low-end machine is awesome!

Not to mention 0402!

By vision do you mean vision for absolute positioning, or vision as in foresight (eg marketing/future support)?
As for tape width, yeah, very true, the look semi fixed.

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/677635/chinesepnp.zip is a zip of the videos from tudou.

Reading the translated description of features seems pretty cool:

multiple guarantees free logistics freight negotiation site commissioning, training the whole year warranty. - i wonder if this counts in the UK or Aus

exclusively developed feeder automatically, no need to spend money to buy enough. Configuration 8mm = 12 stations, 12mm = 2 stations, 16mm = 1 station;  - and or? eg does it have all those feeders or only one set at a time?

exclusive research and development of laser cross cursor coordinates acquisition, programming is more concise and precise; online visualization of fine-tuning each component.  - maybe this is to do with absolute positioning?

[mikeselectricstuff]

Putting two heads on a low-end machine is awesome!

By vision do you mean vision for absolute positioning,

Yes - what makes me suspicious is it looked like they were picking the QFP from a specially made tray, presumably to pre-align it.
Although you may be able to get away without vision for chips, once you get to smaller taped parts like TSOPs and MSOPs it's pretty much essential.

[mikeselectricstuff]

exclusively developed feeder automatically, no need to spend money to buy enough. Configuration 8mm = 12 stations, 12mm = 2 stations, 16mm = 1 station;  - and or? eg does it have all those feeders or only one set at a time?

Looking at the size that looks like a fixed set - If those are all fixed than that is an insane limitation.

[peter.mitchell]

Putting two heads on a low-end machine is awesome!

By vision do you mean vision for absolute positioning,

Yes - what makes me suspicious is it looked like they were picking the QFP from a specially made tray, presumably to pre-align it.
Although you may be able to get away without vision for chips, once you get to smaller taped parts like TSOPs and MSOPs it's pretty much essential.

alignment doesn't look too bad, in the zip, video 150540862.h264_1 shows it placing resistors in a circle shape with slight angle on each one, they look pretty decent.

[peter.mitchell]

Yes - what makes me suspicious is it looked like they were picking the QFP from a specially made tray, presumably to pre-align it.
Although you may be able to get away without vision for chips, once you get to smaller taped parts like TSOPs and MSOPs it's pretty much essential.

Ahh, just looking at the videos again, it seems they have different trays that you mount beside and populate for it to pick from for larger components,
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/677635/pnpmachine.jpg
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/677635/pnpmachine2.jpg
the trays that i saw had between 10 and 14 spaces which is pretty limited, I wonder if you could sacrifice some workspace for more trays to pick from? the trays don't seem to extend to the maximum range of the head either so that looks a bit wasted space...

the feeder config is pretty limited yeah, but it looks like it is limited because the way the tapes are held, the section that holds the tape in position seems fixed because its all machined out of the one piece of alu.

it seems like it would be pretty simple to customize so it isn't fixed thoguh, remove the fixed raised block that goes underneath either side of the tape and tap some threads into the base to mount new blocks, make up a bunch of blocks that have different spacings for different thickness tapes, you might need to make different tensioners too, i'm not sure, the wider tapes are always in the background, then reprogram

though, that does seem like a lot of work if you're buying a new, $3500 machine... although... for $3500, that's a pretty good deal still.