Hi, I'm the lead developer of FirePick Delta, I saw this post in my referrer logs and figured I'd chime in.
Wow, there's a lot of misinformation about what we are and aren't try to do. I'll try to explain our intentions here for anyone that cares. I'm not as worried about the snarky comments, I expect those here and on other sites like slashdot, they don't bother me at all.
Destined for failure right there. Jack of all trades, master of none.
This is a bit tricky for me to approach. We're entered in the Hackaday Contest, and currently doing quite well, yet you (Dave Jones) are an official judge of that contest. I didn't see anything in the rules about chitchatting between judges and contestants, so I don' think there's any Schrödinger's cat paradoxes to worry about. However, I really don't want to start a debate or anything here, because that's not good for anybody. I'll try to keep this post as matter-of-fact as I can. I really don't want to get an attitude with a judge, or suck up to him/her
Hope we can all be adults here.
We added 3D printing to our machine for two reasons. #1, we're using existing RepRap motion control (Marlin and RAMPS) as a basis of our design. Therefore, we get the 3D printing for free. We're not doing all sorts of development in 3D printing. That work was pioneered by the RepRap dev team years ago. We just mount a 3d print head on the machine and run existing software. #2, we intend for the component feeders and other pieces to be 3D printed from conductive plastic (from a company called 3DXtech, that uses carbon nanotubes impregnated into the ABS). This makes our feeders and other bits ESD-safe, which I think is REALLY cool. I know this isn't everyone's cup of tea, and I respect that, but it's worked extremely well for us so far. I personally don't agree with your comments Dave, but I'm a bit biased
Here's a quick list of what our machine does and doesn't do, since it's not clearly defined anywhere else:
3D printing: YES
SMT placement: YES, with closed-loop computer vision.
Paste dispense: YES, with closed-loop computer vison.
PCB milling, drilling: Not currently, if ever. It's open source, so if someone else gets it working, that's cool, they can send me a pull request.
Component tape feeders: YES, in all standard sizes. We support 24x drag-pin feed and 2x full-auto feeders at the moment. We've got 8mm, 12mm, 16mm, 24mm, 32mm, 44mm.
Component tube feeders: Will support them in the near future. 3D printed receptacle, so if you've got a weird SMT inductor, you can modify an existing feeder for your part, and optionally send us a pull request
Tray feeders: Yes, although not the big JEDEC sizes.
If you want to place parts yourself, or buy a big machine, that's fine. This machine fills a niche however. I know this, because my inbox is filled with hundreds of emails wanting me to sell them a machine. Overall, the responses that I've gotten for this machine are 98% positive, at least. That's good enough for me. If a few people think it's stupid, I'm cool with that.
I wish the entire open community stopped forking around and, for once, finished something before they moved to the next thing. All they produce is forks... Nothing ever gets finished in a workable state. So people who want to use this stuff are basically forked ...
For forks sake ..
Again, lots of misinformation here. Yes we forked OpenPnP, but we use Git, and can send pull requests back to Jason Von Nieda, who runs OpenPnP. What is the problem here? That's how software gets done these days. I have good communication with Jason, we're not doing a "hard fork", we've not come to philosophical differences on OpenPnP. We'll run it headless with a node.js webserver, instead of a java gui app, but that doesn't require much code to change. Jason's a busy guy, and it doesn't work 100% at this point as it's still in alpha; what are our other options? We could bitch about it, or we could do like we're doing, and get to work. Which we are.
Anyway, I could keep going, but not sure it'll really do much. This machine will work great for many. Some won't like it. Some may like it once I'm able to better communicate to them what it is (the whole PnP this is so nebulous, it means so many different things, to so many different people). We've got some REALLY clever ways of dealing with the problems that you guys mentioned, so PLEASE, just wait until we get something working and documented before you pass judgement. We're in this for the long-haul. This is what I'm personally doing with my life. PnP or die.
Cheers!
Neil Jansen