Well I worked with the machine a bit today and so far the software is a bit different than I expected. I wrote out a chip list for the machine as a CSV file, but the way the Neoden software configures the job seems strange to me, and so far I couldn't get it to work. If anyone has ideas on what I might be doing wrong please let me know... this is my first PNP machine.
- I tried setting up the rail feeder option which appears to detect the top edge of the board when bringing the PCB into the machine on the rail conveyor system. (the hardware is very smooth, btw!) But when I ran my job it never seemed to find the board. Either it would give a "PCB feed failure" or an error saying "coordinate movement range beyond the boundary" which I assume has to do with the edge not being detected correctly. In both cases the PCB appeared to be in more or less the right place inside the machine.
- The mark point (fiducial) setup seems odd to me as it needs to be done in the machine, and the coordinates appear to be absolute machine positions and not related to the PCB placement file. Wouldn't it make more sense to have these points linked to the placement file coordinates somehow? It was pretty easy to set these up and they don't have to be actual fiducials... some of my older boards don't have real fiducials but using mounting holes or other large holes seem to work fine! The camera realigns to the centre of the holes better than I could click with the mouse.
- The chiplist I loaded was relative to the board's bottom left corner, but I think the software expects absolute machine positions. There is no example in the manual PDF included with the machine on how to prepare the "chiplist". There doesn't seem to be any way to "offset" the X/Y positions to the actual loaded position of the board. I'm assuming I have to provide some kind of offset in my input data, but I'm not sure where to get this. The software knows nothing about the bottom corner of the board. It does know the mark points, the top edge (it's only Y though) and the centre position of the first part in the chip list. (you have to manually align this)
So, needless to say I'm not building boards just yet. I was hoping to try some tests with only a few components and no solder paste. But after failing to feed correctly it stops and won't continue. I've sent off email to Neoden and am hoping to learn what I'm doing wrong.
The good part is that overall I'm very happy with the build quality of the machine. There are a lot of hardware details that are clearly well thought out, and some ingenious design especially in the pickup head. I'm sure the software is actually useful because there are videos of it working on real boards. But the error messages are not very clear, and there is no help showing what to do if these errors occur.