@MTNELECTRONICS Post some finished board pictures if you don't mind.
How often does the whole job run without any intervention needed by you?
Also after you learn how to work around the software does it run pretty smoothly?
I'll take some pictures after my next run. Those ones are already all reflowed, and once reflowed you can't really tell how accurate it was because everything sucks into its proper place. I will say that for everything 0805 and above the placement has been visually very accurate and very repeatable across several boards using all four heads, and my farthest panel components are positioned about 250mm away from the camera.
The vision system was really useful on these boards because there are 32x SOT89 chips arranged in two rows fairly tight 360 degree circles---they are so tight that they nearly touch when installed. The components are actually quite loose in the tapes, so no matter how good your machine is there is a massive amount of variation in the pick rotational angle. I was using three heads for them and the placement was good enough for none of them to ever hit each other and for all to reflow without any issues. I had tried to do these on my Liteplacer PnP and gave up. Even at slow movement speeds there was just too much variation in the pickup for it to work without rotational correction after the pick.
After working out all of the initial bugs (feeder settings, pick height, placement height, etc.) it ran almost continuously without any issues. The machine has a very hard time with 0805 capacitors but I highly suspect it is because I do not have the proper nozzles (they shipped me two sets of the size bigger than what 0805 really needs instead of one set of each size) so I've had to baby it along with 0805 caps and deal with a lot of misfeeds and slow movement until I they send me the proper nozzles. I'll update this when I receive them.
I haven't tried any 0603 or 0402 yet because as I mentioned above, I don't have the proper nozzles at the moment. With the ones I have an 0603 would just get sucked inside! I am SOL for a few weeks as they are away on holiday. Very disappointing, but it is what it is at this point.
The software hasn't crashed on me or shown any glaring bugs, but it really does leave a lot to be desired. There are lots of functions that are not clear or require work arounds. The workflow is making some sense to me now, but it is convoluted. So far, once I get it going it works, but I question whether or not anyone who designed the software has actually used it on the actual machine, and if they have then their level of expectation for a $10K piece of hardware is very low.
Stupid stuff like having to always resize the columns just so you can see the information in the X and Y columns all adds up to a bit of frustration after a while (if you watch the "training videos" you'll see what I'm talking about).
I also wish that there was some more user configurable options such as a user-variable speed for pick and especially place; it is extremely fast and fairly smooth, but with some components a slower speed would be nice. Options for error handling during placement would also be nice. There needs to be an easier way offset fiducial to components without having to resort to a calculator or spreadsheet.
In the end it seems that if the machine keeps on working the way it has been I will be satisfied with it for what I am currently using it for. That said, it is definitely not a perfect machine and some of the lack of polish, especially with the user interface, is readily apparent (I knew this from watching the videos and reading the manual). While I hope that they make some improvements to the software, I did not buy the machine expecting it, and I do not advise anyone to purchase a machine like this hoping for anything more than what it does already at the time of purchase.
I have been following the SmallSMT thread and like what I see there as well. I think that if I had known more about that before I had committed to the NeoDen I would be seriously considering one of those machines as well. They seem well built, have more feeder options, higher maximum component height, and an owner/engineer who actually listens to customer requests and complaints and is capable of providing solutions---
which is perhaps the most valuable aspect of all.