Pick and Place Machine TVM802A / TVM802B

[ServoKit]

Hi ichan, we will have thicker tapes (SOT23 & tactile switch) later this month or in April, will then make tests. As long as we are under 5mm, I don't think there will be problems. I think that TM2xx or any other machine without vision don't make much sense anymore, given that they are not much cheaper; you need vision at least for fiducials.

@sergeil: Will post drawings of trays and everything during the next days.

Regard, Axel

[Royce]

Nice video Axel, i wonder why all of this kind machine manufacturer had no will to make video like this - the video of their own machine making real things.

I also find this puzzling. The vast majority of the videos merely place 2 pin passives, one of the most forgiving components. 

Anyway, yes thank you very much for the videos.

[thommo]

Yes - and only one component type/size/config.
None show the machine placing a wide variety of components across the entire work area either - it's always the minimum travel distance.

I'm not saying these machines are not capable, but it would do wonders for buyer confidence to show this in good quality videos - that's for sure.

Nice video Axel, i wonder why all of this kind machine manufacturer had no will to make video like this - the video of their own machine making real things.

I also find this puzzling. The vast majority of the videos merely place 2 pin passives, one of the most forgiving components. 

Anyway, yes thank you very much for the videos.

[thommo]

Axel, you say vision is not longer needed on these boards due to your custom trays, but have you considered what happens when the board profile is slightly incorrect?

The 2 two processes are independent of each in manufacturing - board profiling and pad construction.

What is the finest pitch component your loading on this board? Would be great to see a close up image.

Do you always only ever place 1 fiducial on your designs?

Congratulations on the successful build - it's great to see your success after that week of patience practising!

With the bespoke trays, vision is no longer needed (except for the fids). Huge speed-up. Missing at the moment are just three small parts (SOT size, 8mm tapes) which we don't have on reels yet and the TTH stuff, obviously. The machine table is now bolted to the (brick-)wall, so even at 100% nothing moves or shakes.

As for your boards, you might have to daisy chain machines; even the larger, still affordable, Mechatronikas only go to 64 feeders or so.

Regards, Axel

[ServoKit]

Here's a close-up from this morning's run. This time with solder paste and all smd components. Soldering went fine except for the 8266 and MOSFET; I think the solder paste was still too cold and didn't reflow properly. Could also be the surface finish, maybe the soldering profile wasn't correct.

@thommo: The PCBs have two fids in opposite corners but are so small that one is sufficient. Don't understand the question re. board profile. All the vision does is rectify and center the the chip, the tray takes care of that. Parts can move and skew much more in the tape than in the tray.

Regards, Axel

[mrpackethead]

Thanks for running this thread,  Its helping me make a choice on which machine to buy in Early April.   ITs a new year on 1 April for us.    I've been able to take my list from 3 potential's to 2 today,  The SmallSMT machines just dropped off the list for "non technical" reasons.

[protoneer]

What oven did you use? I have a few T962's and had the same issue... I solved it by doing a single empty warm up cycle before each run of boards.

Updating the firmware on these ovens also made a it run much better with very little to no cold spots.

[protoneer]

[quote ]
@thommo: The PCBs have two fids in opposite corners but are so small that one is sufficient. Don't understand the question re. board profile. All the vision does is rectify and center the the chip, the tray takes care of that. Parts can move and skew much more in the tape than in the tray.

Regards, Axel
[/quote]

How many Fids can be specified per sub panel? Would one need more than 2?

[mrpackethead]

Nice video Axel, i wonder why all of this kind machine manufacturer had no will to make video like this - the video of their own machine making real things.

And other weird things..  Its the first "Chinese" company I've had any dealings with that would make me to go Germany to see their machine.      It doestn make any sense at all.

[ServoKit]

@protoneer: You can specify two fids per PCB, don't know if more would be of any use. At least with our smallish boards using the opposite fid wouldn't improve placement. Obviously with large panels (like ichan's) YMMV. What I DID notice was that ENIG boards (like the one in the attachment) have faster fid recognition than HASL. The HASL fids are shiny and a bit uneven, the vision algo doesn't like that.

Re. soldering, it was the paste, 2nd run was perfect (I'm using a pizza oven with the beta layout controller).

My gut feeling says .5mm pitch would work with the machine, I would expect problems coming from other areas like stenceling.

Regards, Axel

[mrpackethead]

with the machine, I would expect problems coming from other areas like stenceling.
Regards, Axel

Never under estimate the importance of the solder paste, the solder stencils, getting your apatures right.. its the root of all evil.

[sparkswillfly]

Nice video.  What speed was that running?  Would be nice to be able to use two heads for all those passives then do a second job for just the modules, but changing the nozzle is too tedious?

Would really like to see how this does with qfn 0.5mm and such.  Seriously considering one.

[mikeselectricstuff]

2 fids are sufficient for alignment. Most subcontractors usually specify 3, the third being used to verify that the panel has been inserted the right way round. 
You sometimes see local fids around large fine-pitch parts, but not sure how common it is for these to be used

[ServoKit]

@sparkswillfly: 80% overall, the parts from the tapes are @100%, from trays @60%. In a real production environment you would place the 8266 by hand (the pitch is 2mm, don't even need tweezers for that)and use both nozzles for smaller parts but I was curious to see how the suction cup works.

Regards, Axel

[sparkswillfly]

@sparkswillfly: 80% overall, the parts from the tapes are @100%, from trays @60%. In a real production environment you would place the 8266 by hand (the pitch is 2mm, don't even need tweezers for that)and use both nozzles for smaller parts but I was curious to see how the suction cup works.

Regards, Axel

OK thanks.  My ocd would want to use machine placement for the modules anyway. 

[uncle_bob]

with the machine, I would expect problems coming from other areas like stenceling.
Regards, Axel

Never under estimate the importance of the solder paste, the solder stencils, getting your apatures right.. its the root of all evil.

Hi

I totally agree with that.

So ... just to hijack this poor thread once more ...

What is a "good enough" stencil printer to run 0.5 mm pitch parts? Consider that it will get used with the TVM802x so printers costing more than the pick and place are out of consideration. Same issue also applies to the size of the stencils and type of stencils. There is no need for 1 meter square steel frame stencils in this case. The 0.5 mm point seems to be about as far as this machine will get (which is fine by me). There is no need for a printer that does 0.35 mm just fine, if the rest of "the production line" will not support that.

Bob

[sergeil]

Regarding fiducials: the software supports one or two per PCB. They should be circles or squares, and should have good contrast. It has support for panelized PCB's but it's not exactly clear how that's supposed to work, since you can't specify which component belongs to which PCB (perhaps it uses the fiducials to set new offsets and repeats?).

Fun discovery: while the TVM802B officially supports 46 reels + 10 tray components, the software actually has the "left" and "back" stacks both defined up to #30. So you can define up to 30+30+10=70 places to pick up parts, though the left/back stacks will always go through a prick phase to try to feed tape.

Got to test out the camera alignment feature for simple SMT parts, seems to work well. That and pressure sensor makes a lot of sense, esp for poorly aligned 0402 parts.

Figured out a way to make a cut tape adapter work (it's basically a 3d printed slider with a mylar cover and an opening to pick up parts).. Working to modularize that to be able to quickly feed single parts.

Beginning to really like this machine. Nice touches like a cutout in the base plate for spent tape to go into. And it's pretty robust, so far.

[l0wside]

What is a "good enough" stencil printer to run 0.5 mm pitch parts?

My last run (manual placement) I did with a frameless 150u stencil from Elecrow, not even using a paste printer, just some leftover PCBs taped to a wooden panel to form a frame for the PCB. Squeegee was a putty knife.
Paste print was just perfect (checked under the microscope).

To make a long story short: The printer IMHO does not make much difference, provided the alignment between stencil and PCB is good.

[mikeselectricstuff]

What is a "good enough" stencil printer to run 0.5 mm pitch parts?

My last run (manual placement) I did with a frameless 150u stencil from Elecrow, not even using a paste printer, just some leftover PCBs taped to a wooden panel to form a frame for the PCB. Squeegee was a putty knife.
Paste print was just perfect (checked under the microscope).

To make a long story short: The printer IMHO does not make much difference, provided the alignment between stencil and PCB is good.

I think the issue here is having a printer that gets reliable results every time with minimal fiddling.
 Paste print quality is the biggest factor in getting good yield, so having a reliable pasting process is important.
 

[rwb]

Fun discovery: while the TVM802B officially supports 46 reels + 10 tray components, the software actually has the "left" and "back" stacks both defined up to #30. So you can define up to 30+30+10=70 places to pick up parts, though the left/back stacks will always go through a prick phase to try to feed tape.

Got to test out the camera alignment feature for simple SMT parts, seems to work well. That and pressure sensor makes a lot of sense, esp for poorly aligned 0402 parts.

Can you clarify on exactly how one would use up to 70 parts on this machine?   

I see this machine can hold up to 46 reels and I know you can make custom part trays like Axel did but Where are you getting the 30 + 30 + 10 parts locations from? The ad below shows the machine with 46 feeders on the left and back, which I assume is 23 parts on the left and 23 on the back.

http://www.aliexpress.com/item/Small-SMT-Machines-Pcb-Assembly-Small-SMT-Pick-and-Place-Machine-With-Camera-TVM802B/32499850720.html 

70 feeders sounds really good!

[protoneer]

I tried alignment pins the other day and that worked really well.

Basically I have a panel consisting out of 6 sub boards. The panel and SS stencil has alignment holes and I bought some alignment pins from Ali that I fixed to a flat plastic sheet. The pins were aligned and glued in place.

I do lots of small resistor arrays, this way of doing yielded a consistant and accurate result.

[rwb]

I tried alignment pins the other day and that worked really well.

Basically I have a panel consisting out of 6 sub boards. The panel and SS stencil has alignment holes and I bought some alignment pins from Ali that I fixed to a flat plastic sheet. The pins were aligned and glued in place.

I do lots of small resistor arrays, this way of doing yielded a consistant and accurate result.

Sounds nice. Do you have any pictures you can share of this setup?

[protoneer]

Sounds nice. Do you have any pictures you can share of this setup?

Attached are a few photo's. Next version will have shorter pins.

[ServoKit]

The issue with the extra feeder locations is that the pickup location is always the same, other with the trays where the location changes with each pick, depending on the tray layout. I'm not sure if that's really useful unless you can make the prick mechanism work for you.

Re. PCB layout: For multi PCBs the SW assumes that all PCBs get the same parts. This is what happens in the video: R1 goes to PCB1, then PCB2, then PCB3 etc. Then the same for R2. Only way around this would be to concatenate multiple part lists into one but that would require to offset the part coordinates accordingly because the SW expects all coordinates relative to the PCB origin.

Re. the stencil alignment pins, http://www.eurocircuits.com/ec-registration-system

Regards, Axel

[protoneer]

Re. the stencil alignment pins, http://www.eurocircuits.com/ec-registration-system

Two alignment pins should work better.

Have you considered laser cutting trays instead of 3D printing?