NeoDen YY1 Pick And Place Machine With Under $3K Price for Hobbiest/Low vol Usag

[Guus]

I just open a new Discussion;

DreamPNP, based on YY1?

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/manufacture/dreampnp/

[BackFire]

Hi all,
I'm eager to see peoples experiences with this machine, as I'm hoping to be able to buy one later this year.

I've been obsessed with PnP's my whole life, and I'm frankly impressed with what Neoden can deliver for the price. That said, I have hands-on experience with a Neoden 4, and am aware that the machine has its 'quirks' to say the least. I'm hoping that Neoden continue to tweak this offering and providing at least some support to those that need it.

I'm hopeful this will be a perfect machine for R&D, my designs can typically be met by 0603 sized or larger devices, but I hope to produce in runs of the 100-200 units region, so any PnP that speeds up hand-placing is the dream!

Are there any UK-based operators of a YY1 hanging around in here? And if so, what was the process for ordering the machine itself? I know that 'AMS Electronics' (https://www.ams-electronics.co.uk/) are seemingly the main distro for Neoden in the UK, but no sign of the YY1 on their site at the time of writing.

Many thanks for everyone's input so far!

[dkonigs]

I've been obsessed with PnP's my whole life, and I'm frankly impressed with what Neoden can deliver for the price. That said, I have hands-on experience with a Neoden 4, and am aware that the machine has its 'quirks' to say the least. I'm hoping that Neoden continue to tweak this offering and providing at least some support to those that need it.

I hate to say it again, but the simple fact that a firmware update requires a board swap tells me everything I need to know about how worthless they expected their support to be.  There's absolutely no excuse for that sort of approach on any product of this nature.

Of course its entirely possible that the community could use this machine as a basis to reengineer all the parts that Neoden didn't expect to care about, and that might change things, at least if the mechanics are up to it.

[itsrealfast]

I pulled the trigger and bought one

Wish me luck 

[bugrobotics]

Good start.  The crate arrived Monday and it is built nicely.  I'll upload pics of the unboxing when I get around to it this weekend.

[drgerber]

Quick update from our end as well.
We are having the YY1 pretty much since the beginning.
Must have put around 100 boards through the machine so far. Many different designs and mostly 0402 passives and QFNs. Large BGAs we are always placing by hand for prototyping runs.
Really can't complain for that price. Does a solid job and ideal for prototyping and very small batch production.

Maybe a few more tips I can give.

Check the angle of your alignment bar (or whatever that aluminum bracket is called where you align the board) and adjust it if necessary. Check with the down looking camera when moving the head in the "manual" menu.
Ours came with a very slight angle. So the larger the boards were the more placement error there were. Strange choice only supporting one fiducial but you can work your way around it.

Second one is playing a little with the fiducial offset values in the fiducial menu. While it does say something like "not necessary" in the description it is indeed pretty important and may differ a little between different designs. Not sure why that is actually the case as we are always using the same fiducial type. Set up everything and go into the "mount" menu. Then click "step" until it reads "preview". Go through a few component positions and check the red hair cross for proper alignment. If it does not mach go back in the fiducial menu and change the offset coordinates.

We are setting the datum for every new batch of boards by manually calculating it. Pretty sure that is not really necessary as any offset here should be ruled out by the fiducial but anyway...
Moving the head to the center of a reference component and then subtracting the component coordinates from the machine bed coordinates. This is then what we enter in the parameter settings as the origin.

The pulley wheel on the X axis was of a really bad quality. The hole was not exactly in the center which made the belt "wiggle" a little. You could watch the tensioner move when the head was going from left to right. We replaced it with a high accuracy 3D printed version with a press-fit. Head moves much smoother now and I guess placement quality also got a little better.

[HallMark]

The pulley wheel on the X axis was of a really bad quality. The hole was not exactly in the center which made the belt "wiggle" a little. You could watch the tensioner move when the head was going from left to right. We replaced it with a high accuracy 3D printed version with a press-fit. Head moves much smoother now and I guess placement quality also got a little better.

Can share that model ? I think their part is not nicely made.

[HallMark]

Is there any 3D models available for different types of feeder for YY1?
They have cut tape space but I want to change it for all 16mm cut tape is there any 3D printable model available for YY1 Neoden?

[sinewave]

If anyone is going to Electronex on the 10th-11th of May, there will be a YY1 on display from Emlogic.

[EEVblog]

If anyone is going to Electronex on the 10th-11th of May, there will be a YY1 on display from Emlogic.

I was going to go, but unfortunately have a family commitment.

[nimish]

fyi there's a very prominent SWD header on the board, so anyone with a a $5 debugger could dump the firmware and/or update it easily. Or you could just tap the QFP lines and dump from there.

It basically looks like a proprietary version of any 3d printer board except with onboard drivers. STM32F407 is commonly used there. If you can figure out the camera protocol then connecting them to usb/gpio would be easy too. I suspect you could get klipper running on it easily, and klipper already supports streaming g-code.

I think someone on the openpnp list already has a BTT octopus working, so a simple $100 mobo swap would work assuming you can get the pins right.

A pnp is a XYZ+R kinematic system + some cameras and a vacuum switch or two, so I'd expect most everything to work. For $3000 it's quite expensive, given that 0.050 repeatability (Chinesium(tm) ball screw) kinematics are <$1000 and feeders should be adaptable. Seems like a good starting point to adapt to a generic corexy motion system. Even with belts you can get that level of precision.

[mikeselectricstuff]

A pnp is a XYZ+R kinematic system + some cameras and a vacuum switch or two,

And feeders. Feeders are the hardest part. The motion side of things is easy.

[nimish]

A pnp is a XYZ+R kinematic system + some cameras and a vacuum switch or two,

And feeders. Feeders are the hardest part. The motion side of things is easy.

Sure, but you can buy them off the shelf and adapt them to your motion system. I'd rather put the $2000 to decent feeders than overpaying for a fancy 3d printer chassis and head.

Or for sub-production volume, no need to worry about feeders there.

[2nOrderEDO]

Hello everybody,

I also pulled the trigger and purchased a NeoDen YY1. The payment went through today, so I guess it will be around in two or three weeks. I have the need to assemble around 50-60 PCBs annually for a client, and the machine can really help speed up the process. There is also a product I want to manufacture in house and sell, but I'm unsure about how demanded it will be.

I made de decision after reading through the forum and watching almost all available videos about it in YouTube. I have someone who will babysit the machine for me in the worst case it needs constant attention. Anyways, I will record the unboxing and after gathering some experience wit the machine I will document my experience and get back to you.

Kind regards,
Enrique

[coppice]

I also pulled the trigger and purchased a NeoDen YY1. The payment went through today, so I guess it will be around in two or three weeks. I have the need to assemble around 50-60 PCBs annually for a client, and the machine can really help speed up the process. There is also a product I want to manufacture in house and sell, but I'm unsure about how demanded it will be.

I love that optimism. I think you mean you hope it will really help speed up the process. Only time will tell.

[Kjelt]

Well only 50-60 pcbs per year come on that is a manual placing task.
But even if the YY1 would place 2% of the components a bit wrong and that pcb has 200 components he still only has to realign 200 to 240 components instead of 12000. Yes it will safe him a lot of time after he has gotten it running. The setup and first trial runs will be the hardest.

[nimish]

I love that optimism. I think you mean you hope it will really help speed up the process. Only time will tell.

I have someone who will babysit the machine for me in the worst case it needs constant attention.

This goes a long way, mind. Hiring someone for minimum wage to tend a pick and place for the day or two it'll need is cheap for small runs. It's not a complicated process.

There's a wild jump between prototyping/very small scale and 1k+ runs where you're buying reels of components and I think there's a significant different in market needs: I don't need reel feeders for the 5 board run but I need to place 0402/0201/WLCSP components and I physically cannot do that. The cost of a few bungled components is enough to pay for machine a few times over.

Someone making 500 boards to sell definitely needs reliable auto-feeding but maybe not ultra high precision positioning.

Anyway linear modules are dirt cheap from China these days. Even rolled ball screws linear modules can hit C5 precision which is trivially verifiable by a test indicator. At <$300 a pop who even cares? You need ~3-4 to make a highly precise H gantry that'll outdo your hand any day of the week. Closed loop steppers are <$50 all in. It's a good time to build mechatronics.

The YY1 seems like a solid deal. Assuming you can reverse the feeder protocol, replacing the mobo with an open source Klipper board looks viable. Lumenpnp feeders are nearly $100 each in 5-packs so them including a bunch is worth a lot I'd think.

[asmi]

I don't need reel feeders for the 5 board run but I need to place 0402/0201/WLCSP components and I physically cannot do that.

It depends on a board - my boards routinely contain 200+ 0402 components each, and about 50 of 0201 caps, so even 5 boards might be worth spinning pnp for. I can do manually one or two boards at a time, but even that takes several hours, and small parts are vast majority of components.

[2nOrderEDO]

Well only 50-60 pcbs per year come on that is a manual placing task.
But even if the YY1 would place 2% of the components a bit wrong and that pcb has 200 components he still only has to realign 200 to 240 components instead of 12000. Yes it will safe him a lot of time after he has gotten it running. The setup and first trial runs will be the hardest.

Yes, this amount I could do by hand (and I will even enjoy it hehe), but I'm quite busy working on other tasks only I can do, so wise time-management is a must. That is also why I would not want to babysit the machine myself.

I have someone who will babysit the machine for me in the worst case it needs constant attention.

This goes a long way, mind. Hiring someone for minimum wage to tend a pick and place for the day or two it'll need is cheap for small runs. It's not a complicated process.

I'm glad you also agree. That someone babysitting the machine would be my lovely wife. It's funny that someone in this thread had the same idea and implemented it with positive results. Being a PnP operator is definitely not the worst job someone can have, specially in europe (I would say it is pretty cool job btw, but I'm biased because I love electronics)

One can always start small with the YY1 and gradually grow to a point where a >5k machine would make sense.

[bugrobotics]

How are you guys saving the offsets?  I can put whatever I want in the offset and nothing seems to change.

[eflyersteve]

I haven't been keeping up with this thread so forgive me if this has been answered.  I've not used my YY1 for some time because it was just so bad at placing components accurately.  I should say that it is bad at placing 0402 components accurately enough.  Often they are 50-100% off the pads.  They also seem to be consistently off in one direction.  I've went back in to calibrate the up looking camera and noticed it was off significantly.  I repeated the calibration, placed a few sample components and noted they were still off.  Went back in to check the up looking camera calibration and noticed it was off in the same axis as before.  Checking repeatedly, I notice that the offset never seems to be saved.  I can repeat the up looking camera calibration, hitting 'save' after and each time I go back in is is off in the same axis.

Has anyone else run into this issue?  I'm hopeful that if I can get the offset to be saved the machine might be useful.

[sinewave]

I haven't been keeping up with this thread so forgive me if this has been answered.  I've not used my YY1 for some time because it was just so bad at placing components accurately.  I should say that it is bad at placing 0402 components accurately enough.  Often they are 50-100% off the pads.  They also seem to be consistently off in one direction.  I've went back in to calibrate the up looking camera and noticed it was off significantly.  I repeated the calibration, placed a few sample components and noted they were still off.  Went back in to check the up looking camera calibration and noticed it was off in the same axis as before.  Checking repeatedly, I notice that the offset never seems to be saved.  I can repeat the up looking camera calibration, hitting 'save' after and each time I go back in is is off in the same axis.

Has anyone else run into this issue?  I'm hopeful that if I can get the offset to be saved the machine might be useful.

Yes, I did. Do it a lot of times (10-20 times) and it seemed to fix it.

[eflyersteve]

I think I found at least the majority of my placement issues.  I swapped nozzles and used head #2 to place some small 0402 parts and the alignment turned out great.  I've always had the machine configured with head 1 for small chip parts and head 2 for tantalums, and small multi-leaded parts.  Turns out the linear bearing on head one has a fair amount of play in it.  Head 2 has no perceivable play at all.  It seems that when the head moves down to place the component, the hose, cable and spring pulls it out of alignment.  There isn't a way that I can see to adjust preload on the bearing (I've removed the head entirely and examined it) so I'm reaching out to Neoden to see if they can send both a new bearing and a new slide. 

Hopefully this resolves a lot of the issues I've had including inconsistent picking of parts.

[Smartbeedesigns]

i just posted a 6 month review video of my YY1. ive picked about 20,000 components on it thus far and the only real issue ive had is the tape advance needle was starting to not be reliable. but neoden sent a replacement asap and i installed it in this video.

[sinewave]

I thought NeoDen has a few spare needles provided?