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Unboxing Our New Desktop Pick and Place Machine

sparkfun.com

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Re: Unboxing Our New Desktop Pick and Place Machine

#31

Post by mng2 »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #28
gh02t wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not gonna be able to pick-and-place anything with hundreds/thousands of parts at a hobby price point. Those kinds of machines are massive by necessity and hugely complex; I just can't imagine it happening for the very small number of people who would want to do something like that. If it did happen by some miracle, it'd have to follow from some sort of major technical advance. If you're one of the handful of h…

You're not gonna be able to pick-and-place anything with hundreds/thousands of parts at a hobby price point. LitePlacer is almost there. IMHO the key is recognizing that production-oriented machines need to be fast, while hobbyist/small-shop prototyping machines don't. If I need to stuff a complex prototype board with 500 parts, I literally don't care if it takes all day and all night as long as I don't have to do it…

Agreed. Being a human pick and place for anything more than low tens of parts is incredibly unfun, and paying someone to manufacture one or two doesn't really make sense. I don't care if it takes a few days, I'd rather not be sitting for hours wearing down my fine motor skills and eyesight.

Re: Unboxing Our New Desktop Pick and Place Machine

#32

Post by jwr »

Buying your own pick&place is quite similar to buying an FDM 3D printer. It doesn't make any sense at low scale, unless you want to spend endless time tinkering with the machine proper.

Pick&place, as well as 3D printing, begins to make sense at industrial scale, with huge expensive machines. Sparkfun might be a borderline case, but I suspect even they won't use these cheap pnp machines in the longer term.

If you are a hobbyist or a low-scale manufacturing operation, you are much better off using MacroFab, PCBNG, Small Batch Assembly or AISLER.net for electronics production, and Shapeways for 3D printing (SLS). Alternatively, for quantities of ~10 of electronics devices, it makes sense to order your boards and stencils from OSHpark or AISLER, place components yourself using tweezers, and either use a modified oven or a hot air soldering iron for reflow.

This is speaking from experience (as a hobbyist/maker, electronics design engineer designing proof-of-concept and small-scale production devices, and https://PartsBox.io/ founder).

Re: Unboxing Our New Desktop Pick and Place Machine

#33

Post by TaylorAlexander »

jotux wrote: post #22
ChuckMcM wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am waiting for the emergence of nano factories. Basically vertically integrated businesses like Sparkfun that can design and manufacture a very wide range of products on site, sufficient to capture the value at the exploratory front end of product design and development.

Macrofab(macrofab.com) is pretty close to this, as is SeeedStudio (SeeedStudio.io).

Seeed is wonderful. I’ve run over $80k of boards through them and while I have experienced one big error in a build they worked with me to fix it and in general they have wonderful service considering I’m one person working out of my apartment. Bigger shops charge way more or don’t work with me, and smaller shops don’t do as much as Seeed does.

Re: Unboxing Our New Desktop Pick and Place Machine

#34

Post by cjsuk »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #20
abetusk wrote: post #12

To me, here are the most relevant bits of why they chose the CHMT36VA over others: Let me say that the needs or SparkX are slightly odd. We need to build 10-50 of a design and see how it sells. As it sells we may need to build 100-500pcs. If a design needs more than 500 pieces then it immediately gets moved over to our proper SMD production lines with much more capable machines. SparkX needed something small and quic…

I am waiting for the emergence of nano factories. Basically vertically integrated businesses like Sparkfun that can design and manufacture a very wide range of products on site, sufficient to capture the value at the exploratory front end of product design and development.

I’d like to see that but I think the turnaround and unpredictability of third parties adds a lot of risk to a product development cycle. If you look at lead times for PCBs and population for example it can be a 30 day turnaround minimum for every cock up you make on a prototype. During that time your engineers may be dead in the water. To get around that you can pay a 20x premium to have your boards shipped fast. Two iterations will pay for a pick and place machine and a basic PCB fab environment and fill the boards yourself. You should already have the rework tools in house. Same with plastics where a 3d printer will get you close enough to get the production tooling done.

The big issue is really setting up manufacturing and supply chain on a large scale when you do get it working.

Re: Unboxing Our New Desktop Pick and Place Machine

#35

Post by petra »

jotux wrote: post #22
ChuckMcM wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am waiting for the emergence of nano factories. Basically vertically integrated businesses like Sparkfun that can design and manufacture a very wide range of products on site, sufficient to capture the value at the exploratory front end of product design and development.

Macrofab(macrofab.com) is pretty close to this, as is SeeedStudio (SeeedStudio.io).

Also circuithub, and potentially tempo automation , once they'll have some more capacity.

Re: Unboxing Our New Desktop Pick and Place Machine

#36

Post by birdman3131 »

gh02t wrote: post #18
marshray wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hundreds or thousands of something is typically not a hobbyist venture. But isn't this just begging the question? If hobbyists can make use of it, then by definition it's a hobbyist venture. Bringing down size, cost, and complexity is exactly the path by which so much has become available to hobbyists these days. Wasn't that long ago that a laser cutter, heaven forbid a 3d printer, was for pro shops only.

Yeah but I think there is a fundamental difference here. A 3D printer enables you to do things you can't do otherwise (fabricate custom mechanical parts). A pick-and-place enables you to do stuff you can already do with tweezers except in the most extreme cases. And likely do it faster than with a pick-and-place, because they require quite a lot of work to configure. Edit: a good analogy is a homebrewer putting caps…

As far as bottle capping machines you end up having to make custom handling parts and those are not cheap. (The chucks alone run several hundred dollars each.) Then the parts to guide the bottles through the machine have to be made specific to the bottle diameter and height. this costs several grand. There is still a lot of adjustment even after this. And if you want to change bottles or caps then outlay a ton more cash.

Capping them by hand despite the time and effort makes sense until you can afford a significant outlay in cost.

(I work for a machine shop that makes handling parts and retrofits capping/filler machines for the bottling industry. I don't fully know our prices but most of them would be far outside the range of any hobbyist starting out.)

Re: Unboxing Our New Desktop Pick and Place Machine

#37

Post by hobofan »

gh02t wrote: post #18
marshray wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hundreds or thousands of something is typically not a hobbyist venture. But isn't this just begging the question? If hobbyists can make use of it, then by definition it's a hobbyist venture. Bringing down size, cost, and complexity is exactly the path by which so much has become available to hobbyists these days. Wasn't that long ago that a laser cutter, heaven forbid a 3d printer, was for pro shops only.

Yeah but I think there is a fundamental difference here. A 3D printer enables you to do things you can't do otherwise (fabricate custom mechanical parts). A pick-and-place enables you to do stuff you can already do with tweezers except in the most extreme cases. And likely do it faster than with a pick-and-place, because they require quite a lot of work to configure. Edit: a good analogy is a homebrewer putting caps…

> And likely do it faster than with a pick-and-place, because they require quite a lot of work to configure.

So lets figure out ways to bring down the amount of work required to configure it! ;)

Re: Unboxing Our New Desktop Pick and Place Machine

#38

Post by lgbr »

jwr wrote: post #32

Buying your own pick&place is quite similar to buying an FDM 3D printer. It doesn't make any sense at low scale, unless you want to spend endless time tinkering with the machine proper. Pick&place, as well as 3D printing, begins to make sense at industrial scale, with huge expensive machines. Sparkfun might be a borderline case, but I suspect even they won't use these cheap pnp machines in the longer term. If you are…

> It doesn't make any sense at low scale, unless you want to spend endless time tinkering with the machine proper.

For 3D printing this is becoming less true every day. 3D Printers are now extremely cheap, where sub-$300 printers make sense at low scale usage. A typical print from an outsourced printer like Shapeways might cost you about $20, and once you factor in the cost of the material when you print yourself, it only takes about 20 prints for the printer to pay for itself, and you have the added benefit of having your print in an hour rather than a week.

Re: Unboxing Our New Desktop Pick and Place Machine

#39

Post by mch82 »

vonnieda wrote: post #9
zdw wrote: post #2

Interesting that for such an inexpensive but specialized hardware device it still has a "phone home on boot" feature. Given what this device does compared to a 3d printer (xyz axis movement, suction head, part reel incrementer, webcam + identification software), it seems like a sufficiently motivated hobbyist could come up with something passably similar in the same price ballpark.

I'm the founder/author of OpenPnP, which exists to do exactly this. I've been working on the project for about 6 years now and I'm happy to say that lots of hobbyists, small companies, maker spaces, etc. have built and are running OpenPnP based pick and place machines. It's a harder problem than it seems, as I've found out over the past 6 years. While the basics are quite similar to a 3D printer, PnP has some unique…

Excited to see OpenPnP progressing. Looking forward to models that are as approachable for novices as a LulzBot or Ultimaker are for 3D printing.

Re: Unboxing Our New Desktop Pick and Place Machine

#40

Post by mch82 »

gh02t wrote: post #5
zdw wrote: post #2

Interesting that for such an inexpensive but specialized hardware device it still has a "phone home on boot" feature. Given what this device does compared to a 3d printer (xyz axis movement, suction head, part reel incrementer, webcam + identification software), it seems like a sufficiently motivated hobbyist could come up with something passably similar in the same price ballpark.

PnP doesn't make sense for a hobbyist though, that's the problem. A PnP is a tool for someone making a hundred or more of the exact same design, not something you usually do unless you're selling something. It's not worth the considerable time required to set up feed reels and all the other stuff required for a PnP if you're only making a few boards. There are open source PnP designs though: https://hackaday.io/proje…

You are correct at today's prices.

My guess is that as prices drop under $2500/machine and $10/PCB and safety issues are resolved PnP will become more popular. There's a lot of need for repeatable, low rate production. A PnP is kind of like Vagrant/Puppet/Chef for hardware. Instead of manually building the board each time, use a configuration managed automated build.

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