Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Unboxing Our New Desktop Pick and Place Machine

sparkfun.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–79 of 79 posts

Re: Unboxing Our New Desktop Pick and Place Machine

#71

Post by StavrosK »

donkeyd wrote: post #61
lgbr wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Exacly! I have an FDM printer (~$300) and it's great to have it at home. When I design something, I can do a partial print at low quality to check for clearances within an hour. Then I can modify the design and print an optimized version. It makes for a really short feedback loop and if I mess something up, I don't need to pay the base fee again. And I'm a true hobbyist, I don't do anything hardware or CAD related pr…

Extremely agreed. I wanted to make a SCARA arm and it would basically be impossible without a printer. Basically, you can't make something efficiently if you don't know how the fabrication technique works and what its strengths and weaknesses are.

For another example, I made this case:

https://www.makerfol.io/project/8ycrZ9t-case-for-the-dp30v5a...

This would also have not been possible without the printer next to me. I constantly had to print segments to see how parts fit. With a week-long turnaround time instead of ten minutes, I wouldn't even have bothered.

Sure, if I already know how to design and print, maybe I could have designed something without owning a printer, but even that is not very likely (I generally have to make alterations a lot). For $300 (and a bunch of time spent), it's a no-brainer if you want to get into the hobby.

Re: Unboxing Our New Desktop Pick and Place Machine

#72

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

icebraining wrote: post #42
cjsuk wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm curious, what prices are we talking about? Around here I'm seeing prices of PCBs in 2 working days for under 70€/PCB - it doesn't seem that expensive if you only need a few boards for development.

At work, we typically budget around $5,000 per PCB spin. That assumes a 4-6 layer board, parts procurement and assembly at quantity 5-10.

Having an engineer who would otherwise be billed out at $150 - $200/hour hand placing parts and soldering boards is a waste of our in-house resources.

Re: Unboxing Our New Desktop Pick and Place Machine

#73

Post by hoopladler »

xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #66
hoopladler wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've got pretty bad essential tremor (and bad eyeseight), so I was also wondering, what's a good way to keep the chips in place on the board? I was thinking of using a tiny dab of superglue.

I am in a similar boat and I've found the easiest solution is to just find a friend who is better at soldering and a case of beer. Even with practice I'm orders of magnitude slower than people with steady hands.

I guess I figure you don't have to be good at something for it to be worthwhile. As a human, no matter how steady your hand or sharp your eye, you're always going to be inferior in manufacturing basically anything than our new robotic overlords.

The main thing I like about electronics is it makes me feel at home in a world of technology that's kinda crazy alien at least half of the time. Being able to interact with it in a proactive way makes it something I can get a grip on, even if, when we're frank, my soldering is shit.

Re: Unboxing Our New Desktop Pick and Place Machine

#74

Post by CamperBob2 »

thesmok wrote: post #54
mng2 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If it takes more than an hour to place the components, your solder paste will likely flow all over the board and it will be pointless to reflow it.

That's not a big concern for prototyping. It will reflow just fine. There might be a few solder balls rolling around afterward, maybe a bridge or two. Most of the time, this means your stencil apertures were too big, or that the cut-rate Chinese solder paste wasn't the bargain that it looked like on AliExpress.

Slump is a problem if you're trying to run a six-sigma process in a factory, of course, but that's not what's being discussed here.

Re: Unboxing Our New Desktop Pick and Place Machine

#75

Post by gh02t »

hoopladler wrote: post #64
gh02t wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Well, you can actually do stuff a 3d printer does by other means. It just typically requires more skills, and often more equipment. I think your analogy falls down because an automatic bottlecapper does the same thing as you'd normally do by hand. The difference for me is that a pick-and-place machine is an enabler. It would enable hobbyists to take on large-scale, distributed electronics projects - for which, right…

There are hobbyists who might want to, I don't dispute that, but what I'm saying is there aren't enough. You need a pretty big critical mass before the economics start to make sense and something like what happened with 3D printers becomes possible. Projects at the scale you're talking about take a massive investment of time and skill independent of how long it takes to assemble boards, putting them out of reach of the vast majority of people simply because they don't have the time. Not to mention the cost of such a project; if you can afford to invest a thousand or more dollars in a hobby project then you can probably afford the tools you need to do it, too. Maybe I'm underestimating and there are tens of thousands of people out there wanting to build complex data logging networks with hundreds of nodes just for fun or some other equally ambitious project, but I doubt it.

> I think your analogy falls down because an automatic bottlecapper does the same thing as you'd normally do by hand.

That was my point. A pick and place does the same thing you'd normally do by hand with a pair of tweezers in about 10 minutes for a board of moderate complexity. Doing surface mount work by hand with tweezers is pretty easy. The only thing a pick and place enables is for you to do things at a large scale, because they have a substantial overhead to use that you only start to recoup around 50-100 units or more. Now, if we had some revolutionary device that you could set up in 10 minutes to feed dozens of parts and cost $500 then hell yes, I'd want one too. But I don't think that's possible at present no matter any economies of scale or design optimization, because a pick and place is actually quite a complex machine by simple necessity.

Not to mention that placing parts is only part of it - you still have to fabricate and drill the boards, load the machine, clean up any mis-places, reflow them in an oven, manually place any through hole or awkwardly shaped components and solder them, cut the boards, test them, program them, mount them, etc. A pick and place would definitely save you some time if you really want to do such a large project, but by itself I don't think it's gonna be enough to really make it accessible to an individual in their free time. I'm not disputing that they would be beneficial, just that they make sense for an individual working in their free time. Especially when you consider that contract manufacturing isn't that expensive, though it does come with its own set of hassles.

Re: Unboxing Our New Desktop Pick and Place Machine

#76

Post by hoopladler »

gh02t wrote: post #75
hoopladler wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, you can actually do stuff a 3d printer does by other means. It just typically requires more skills, and often more equipment. I think your analogy falls down because an automatic bottlecapper does the same thing as you'd normally do by hand. The difference for me is that a pick-and-place machine is an enabler. It would enable hobbyists to take on large-scale, distributed electronics projects - for which, right…

There are hobbyists who might want to, I don't dispute that, but what I'm saying is there aren't enough . You need a pretty big critical mass before the economics start to make sense and something like what happened with 3D printers becomes possible. Projects at the scale you're talking about take a massive investment of time and skill independent of how long it takes to assemble boards, putting them out of reach of…

I don't think you're wrong.

I do think that a pick-and-place machine is probably more compatible with the hobbyist world than home CNC - given that CNC inherrently requires robust construction, and robust, accurate components are inherrently expensive. I mean - this machine looks more or less like a 3d printer with some reels, and a scanner. Once 3D printing becomes a cheap technology, things that require accurate repetitive movement become cheaper too.

I wouldn't be entirely surprised if stuff like small robotic arms become available to the hobbyist in the next 50 years or so, simply because being able to do arbitrary tasks with a high degree of accuracy is incredibly useful.

At the point where CNC, not as in cutting, but as in general computer-controlled movement, is an ordinary part of the workshop, I wouldn't be surprised if things like this ended up in hobbbyist spaces.

Re: Unboxing Our New Desktop Pick and Place Machine

#77

Post by jabl »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #57
jabl wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've soldered literally thousands of through-hole boards and SMT is much faster and easier to do by hand. Sorry for going off-topic, but do hobbyists actually solder SMT's manually nowadays? Or does everyone use some kind of off-the-shelf/DIY reflow oven? And if so, are stencils obligatory or is it feasible to just apply paste manually? I've been thinking of getting back (or well, properly starting if you will) my…

I do have a side business building custom electronics, but I think I still qualify as hobbyist :-) I do both: for small fixes I solder by hand. Complete boards I usually use an old toaster oven, but often if the boards are really small, I use a soldering iron. I try not to go below 0805, but 0603 isn't hard. I typically won't get a stencil for custom one-off jobs since they tend to be small and ordering them introduc…

Thanks for your answers, I appreciate it. And same to the others who answered my original question!

> I do have a side business building custom electronics, but I think I still qualify as hobbyist :-)

Taking this even further off-topic, could you elaborate a little? What kind of stuff are you doing? I imagine there is a niche for one-off or small batch stuff, but OTOH on aliexpress (or whatever) you can find almost every electronic gimmick you can imagine (and plenty you couldn't imagine!) for ridiculously low prices.

Re: Unboxing Our New Desktop Pick and Place Machine

#78

Post by gh02t »

hoopladler wrote: post #76
gh02t wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are hobbyists who might want to, I don't dispute that, but what I'm saying is there aren't enough . You need a pretty big critical mass before the economics start to make sense and something like what happened with 3D printers becomes possible. Projects at the scale you're talking about take a massive investment of time and skill independent of how long it takes to assemble boards, putting them out of reach of…

I don't think you're wrong. I do think that a pick-and-place machine is probably more compatible with the hobbyist world than home CNC - given that CNC inherrently requires robust construction, and robust, accurate components are inherrently expensive. I mean - this machine looks more or less like a 3d printer with some reels, and a scanner. Once 3D printing becomes a cheap technology, things that require accurate re…

You can already get 'em and the price isn't completely out of reach for a hobbyist:

https://www.sparkfun.com/products/14342

I had actually just discovered those recently and with 0.2mm repeatability my first thought was a pick and place. But the complexity ends up being with the part feed and with configuration. It's really hard to build a machine that can reliably feed arbitrary parts automatically, and then programming it for each job is a pain so you'd also have to revolutionize the tooling so that a person could program one in a few minutes (and don't forget loading it ugh). The kinematics do share a lot with 3D printers, but it's the open-endedness in the feed system that makes them difficult. It's probably not impossible, just really hard, so there needs to be a considerable market to recoup the cost of designing such a machine that is accessible to a hobbyist.

I mostly agree with CNC, though it depends on how ambitious you are. I have a very cheap generic CNC engraver ($100 + shipping) that I use to engrave PCBs and it actually works quite well for that as well as it can do wood and soft materials remarkably nicely. Ditto for nicer machines like the Sienci, especially if you're doing woodworking. But a 5 axis machine capable of milling metal for want one? Milling metal is always gonna be complex and full of hassles.

I feel the same way about laser cutters. They're actually affordable now and I definitely want one, but I don't wanna deal with the considerable inherent hassle. Fires, toxic fumes, permanent blindness, focusing etc, just not worth it to me even for free.

Also this has been an interesting discussion, thanks.

Re: Unboxing Our New Desktop Pick and Place Machine

#79

Post by hoopladler »

gh02t wrote: post #78
hoopladler wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you're wrong. I do think that a pick-and-place machine is probably more compatible with the hobbyist world than home CNC - given that CNC inherrently requires robust construction, and robust, accurate components are inherrently expensive. I mean - this machine looks more or less like a 3d printer with some reels, and a scanner. Once 3D printing becomes a cheap technology, things that require accurate re…

You can already get 'em and the price isn't completely out of reach for a hobbyist: https://www.sparkfun.com/products/14342 I had actually just discovered those recently and with 0.2mm repeatability my first thought was a pick and place. But the complexity ends up being with the part feed and with configuration. It's really hard to build a machine that can reliably feed arbitrary parts automatically, and then program…

Wow - that is beautiful.

You're almost certainly right about good metal-milling CNC machines never being cheap. I think the only possibility to make such a thing economical would be by re-purposing car parts (I think if you could work out a way to use common car parts and clever software, you could step around the fact that things manufactured to high tolerances out of steel are expensive - since car parts are both cheap, and well-made).

That said, the thing that really excites me about CNC is just how much it opens up a whole load of projects that I haven't had the tooling or the mechanical skill to take on. I'm a bad carpenter, so when I make things out of wood, I tend to have to allow massive tolerances in everything I do. Even a CNC that could only cut softwood would be really useful for me.

I've actually been ummming and ahhing about buying one of ali-express - where did you get your engraver from?

Post reply on HN