Well..damn. I spent last week with $ calculation because that is important too. Otherwise, on the long run, I may just end up with a very expensive toy.
My main business works well at the moment, and taking into consideration current volume of sales and income, that will justify investment in a production line, even if my requirements are around 10-15% of its capacity. But some aspects of my business makes it quite unpredictable for a period of over 1-2 years.
For that reason I must take into consideration to use assembly line for PCBA in the prototyping and low volumes market. Initially I tried to avoid that, but apparently that's not wise. I know that's a different beast with its own quirks and for that I must deal among others with the optimization of the pnp machine setup, because (from what I understand from opinion of experienced people) that is the most time consuming part and is problematic because it keeps the machine stopped.
For the physical part, I will try to keep as many standard parts on feeders but for the machine programming part (teaching locations, etc) I really cannot evaluate anything because I only have seen in pictures/movies the software used by the machine.
Has anyone been able to obtain a copy of the software used by (chinese) machine manufacturers before actual buying the machine? These software have anything like 'demo' or 'offline' mode? I asked my contact person but this question was ignored. I will insist if there is any chance of success.