Hello guys,
As another (proud) owner of Neoden4 I would like to share my experiences from this machine as this is the main goal of this thread.
We got the machine in February, 2016. Since then we have a few hundreds of PCBs already populated on it. Because this is our first machine I can’t compare it to any similar product but it looks suitable for the needs of our business – which is quite a niche one and the quantities are in the range of 5-10 boards up to 100-200 per order.
The problems we faced so far with ND4 are the following:
- Initially, after the installation we detected that two of the feeders don’t work – after opening them we found that the problem with the first one was mechanical – simply the upper part of the motor wasn’t put properly and there was a friction b/w both parts. With the second one there was a cable problem.
- After couple of weeks of exploitation two of the nozzles stopped working – by consulting with Neoden the problem was located in the control board which is on the top of the nozzle-head. It seems that the step-motor driver for this side was gone. We got very quickly a replacement of this board and the problem was solved. However we had some period when the machine was operating only with two of the nozzles – a little slower but still functional.
- Another issue we faced during the installation of few extra feeders which were purchased recently. All of them were supposed to come with address #50, however some of them came with different addresses (like 2,7,8.. etc.) which cost us some time to figure out what is going on. Talking to Neoden they told me that each feeder should come with a label with its address however our feeders were w/o such labels. So we need to ‘discover’ the address of each of them.
One point I can’t find in this thread – this is about the maintenance of the machine. I understand that just cleaning the axis from dust and putting some oil on them regularly is enough. Are there any other actions that need to be done?
BR,
George