Hi, I'm the lead developer of FirePick Delta, I saw this post in my referrer logs and figured I'd chime in.
great. Now we can talk instead of rant-n-rave
About the jack of all trades master of none. I too get that feeling judging from the webpage.
It even mentions its usage as a rework machine placing and replacing BGA parts. Pardon me if i inject a mandatory eyeroll here. And i quote :
Rework: Our robotic machine will also function as a rework station, capable of replacing BGA's, QFN's, TQFP's, and any other common part available. This is a great thing for those for the electronics repair business, the video game modding community, and the smarter-than-average consumer with a broken consumer device that needs fixing.
You are creating great expectations... That aren't possible as it is only the placement step of a rework cycle , even the removal can't be done.
First of all rework implies desoldering and resoldering. Bring heat anywhere near that placement head and you end up with a puddle of goo..
Second. Bga ? With a dispenser needle as pickup and an aquarium pump that kicks in and out and creates a pulsed airflow ? I think not. Time to bring in compressed air and a venturi to create vacuum.
Third bga and tqfp need an upward looking camera to check pin alignment. These packages also require a matrix feeder (these parts come in standardized trays. So do a lot of packages like qfn son and others) i dont see that capability in the machine. The only way for those packages to identify pin 1 is using a bottum-up camera. Any part with occluded pins can not be handled unless you have this kind of camera.
Judging from you pictures you use a downward looking camera but i dont see an illuminator anywhere.
You mention paste dispensing. Are tou familiar with the concept of pullback ? To correctly dispense you need both compressed air and vacuum.
Some random thoughts : the machine is square. Can we have feeders on all sides ?
Tray feeders: Yes, although not the big JEDEC sizes.
Define big. Can you handle a tqfp100 ? What about a 144 ? Or a 208 ? To put it in arduio terms : i want the thing to be able to place the atmega2560. You do need the jedec trays as that is the standard. See my comment above. Lots of parts in qfn , son and other packages come in these trays.
For forks sake ..
Again, lots of misinformation here. Yes we forked OpenPnP, but we use Git, and can send pull requests back to Jason Von Nieda, who runs OpenPnP. What is the problem here? That's how software gets done these days. I have good communication with Jason, we're not doing a "hard fork", we've not come to philosophical differences on OpenPnP.
the. You are one of the few doing it right and i stand corrected. Too much stuff gets forked on philisophical differences and in the end both go nowhere. That seems not to be the case here. Good !
[/quote]Anyway, I could keep going, but not sure it'll really do much. This machine will work great for many. [/quote]
I will buy it if it can handle 0603 upward . Forget the big packages for now. Would be nice but i am good at handsoldering the big tqfps. It's the tedious placing of resistors and caps and small fry that bores me. But, i do want an up looking camera to handle qfn and son and real jedec trays. Too many parts these days use these packages (accelerometers, compass chips , bluetooth modules)
Another very important thing is the teach-in of the machine. Taking centroid data is not enough. Take an led for example. That is a polarised component. Having centroid data and rotational data is not enough. You need to know how the board sits in the machine and you need to know how the part sits in the machine.
What about flipped parts. Once in a while parts flip over as the tape progresses. This leads to a mispick. Mispick detection needs multiple things : vacuum integrity check to verify we did get a part on the nozzle. Sideview to verify the part didn't flip. I would at least expect vacuum check so the machine can do an in position retry , then progress the tape and try again.
I'll be keeping an eye on this ...i would even want to buy one , provided it is reliable and doesn't require constant futzing with the machine.
What i mean with that is : i was at techshop a few weeks ago where there was a gathering of 3d printing enthousiasts. I talked to a whole bunch of different machine owners. I asked them : are these machines turn-key ? The answer was unanimous : no. Everybody that has 3d printing hobby is more tinkering with the machine than actually creating parts with it. Half of them were printing 'calibration jigs' so they could make their life easier when they change materials... They all still struggled with peeling of parts during builds, sagging material, parts being too large or too small due to wrongly comle sated overprint and or material shrinkage.
If i send a file to a 3d systems machine i don't need to futz with anything. Push the button and it comes out perfect. Especially the SLS machines printing nylon.
3d printing in my hobby means : making things, not tinkering with the machine itself.
Likewise with a pick and place : shoot parts on a board. Not constantly futzing with the machine itself.
Pick and place machines can be moody little buggers. I had a juki for years in the lab to run prototypes. It ran great but it needed too much 'caring love' to my liking. ok, it was 10 years old already back in 2000...
But i will expect a machine that is at least on par with a 15 year old pick and place. Shove in reels, assign position and hit 'go' , not 'take out wrench and hammer and apply percussive maintenance to force it to behave'