Pick and Place machine brainstorm

[Kjelt]

This is pretty good, 8 and 16 gattling heads they can interchange, they even can load the new reel when the old tape is still processed and the feeder automatically concatenates the new one, did not know that was possible , but then I am not into this business.

[rx8pilot]

I think that after hiring Industrial Light and Magic to produce that video - they spent the cost equivalent of 1,000 Neoden4 machines for a promo piece. That is big biz to justify that effort. Huge effort.

[mikeselectricstuff]

I think that after hiring Industrial Light and Magic to produce that video - they spent the cost equivalent of 1,000 Neoden4 machines for a promo piece. That is big biz to justify that effort. Huge effort.

Yes but just one of those machines with feeders is going to be many hundreds of thousand $, and they're aiming at people investing in multiple lines, so the cost of the video is small change.

[rx8pilot]

Agreed.... it is indeed big business that very much demands super slick marketing. If I was spending $millions, I would certainly expect an amazing presentation.

Sent from my horrible mobile....

[mikeselectricstuff]

This is pretty good, 8 and 16 gattling heads they can interchange, they even can load the new reel when the old tape is still processed and the feeder automatically concatenates the new one, did not know that was possible , but then I am not into this business.

Not at all clear how it handles the cover tape though... looked a little suspect to me.

[mikeselectricstuff]

Agreed.... it is indeed big business that very much demands super slick marketing. If I was spending $millions, I would certainly expect an amazing presentation.

And if you're only spending $thousands, this is what you can expect...

[mikeselectricstuff]

Nice example of a highly specialised pick/place setup :

[Chris Mr]

I have occasionally wondered about something that resembles a PEZ dispenser for chip parts.... 

a simple plate, just slightly thinner than the component, arrangement with a hole in it (fancy shapes allowed) sliding perpendicular to a tube of parts would be one way - a rubber bung (which is only for example, rubber has too much stiction) in the bottom of the tube and low pressure air keeping everything under slight compression would effectively "feed" the parts upwards.  Friction from one part to the next allows the (fancy shaped) hole to guarantee that one edge (possibly two if everything is at 45 degrees) are in a known position.  A lid over the top of the tube stops them all flying upwards so just a slot either side of the lid allows the plate to move in and out.

and it might be that there's a way of picking them straight out of the top of the tube - or rather feeding them upwards so there is always one at the top once one has been picked

Suppose you started 'tubing up' with resistors.  If the tape were laid upside down on a table and arranged to go into a tunnel so that you can use the cover tape as a means to unwind the reel, you could arrange the (slightly bigger profile than the component) tube under a hole in the table so that when a component is in place a simple punch pushes the part down.  Here, gravity is your friend and there is no where else for the component to go.  With a rubber bung (again, rubber for example) in the tube first, the punch only has to overcome the resistance of the rubber bung so it wouldn't be a punch, more of a push.  The punch doesn't even need to be the same size as the part; perhaps something more 'spikey' or 'knifey' so there are no paper / cardboard shavings clogging things up.

You could put as many components in the tube as you like.  0805 is about 0.5mm thick so a complete reel of 3,000 would be 1.5M long (too long) but 1/2 a reel would be ok at 750mm (goes under a table anyway).

It ought to be possible to do that really quickly - 10 per second? (de-bandoleers are that order so I would guess faster)  That would be 36000 per hour so it's getting there.

The point being that one 0805 resistor 'jig' could replace many 'feeders' and lower the floor plan of the pick and place machine.

An 0603 could be the same 'jig' with a different hole in the table - move everything over a bit or just a different die.

SOT23s are arranged with the legs pointing away from the direction of travel so they could be done similarly as one would slide onto the top of the previous one.


I can see TQFPs would be a challenge unless they can be picked right out of the top of the tube - and I can see that teeny parts (like 01005) would require a more specialised dooings but they are really special cases anyway.  Gaussian theory - 80:20

To put it another way, reels of components have poor packing density when it comes to how many are on a board vs the machine floor plan they take up (as the video mike added shows).

[Chris Mr]

Supposing the tube were 0.5mm wall thickness (which is an exaggeration) then a complete series of 0805 E96 (1%) series would measure a little over 25mm square.

Now, I don't know about anyone else, but as an amateur wanting to build a few boards, having a little box 25mm square by say 100mm long (with a lid of course!) that has the whole E96 series in it and 200 of each would be good for me.

If you did that with 0603 resistors, 0805 resistors, 0805 capacitors, 0603 capacitors diodes and so on, in an area no bigger than A4 that would be really useful.

The caveat being that one would need a way to push them up that stays where it is - which I'm thinking about.  Maybe an x,y over something that can move up one, like a screw thread; winds down to the bottom, you move the box over the screw thread, as you pick the part the screw thread winds up until the next component comes flush with the top (camera?).  Just a few thoughts, nothing fixed yet.

Actually, you could close the lid on the box and pressurise the underneath - everything would go to the top again.

Endless possibilities 

(Turn the box over and pressurise it to put it into 'filling mode')

[mikeselectricstuff]

I don't think floor footprint is a really major issue for anyone in the overall scheme of things - if you really wanted it to be compact you could move reels partially underneath, or maybe overhead

I think it would be really difficult in practice to handle loose parts - because they're hard ceramic they bounce like crazy. As you get to smaller sizes you start getting some electrostatic effects. Thicknesses vary, especially for capacitors, so any system would need to be adjustable for thickness.

There might be some very specialist cases where it would make sense to unload parts from tape into a loose-part PEZ stacker ( e.g. the LED example - transfer a stack from a tape feeder to to the head to reduce moves), but it's not going to be generally useful.

Multiple heads are the most obvious way to save move time, and has the advantage of scalability - most other solutions are going to be very niche and only worthwhile in a small market segment.

A lower-end approach to the Siplace bulk feeder would seem to be very viable, and especially applicable to low-end machines that will be used for smaller runs and prototyping.
Vision is cheap, so a system can be envisioned where you manually fill trays with loose parts, which are then located with vision, and the tray tapped/vibrated as required to shuffle them around, and the pick location signalled to the pick/place system.

[tooki]

Agreed.... it is indeed big business that very much demands super slick marketing. If I was spending $millions, I would certainly expect an amazing presentation.

And if you're only spending $thousands, this is what you can expect...

I assume you mean MX$thousands?