CHMT48VB pick and place informations

[waw]

I want to discuss informations about  CHMT48 users .
I have buyed it on april 2017 .  Belgium situation.

[sparkswillfly]

I almost bought it last year. Do you like it?

[waw]

I have used it with 0402 .  good results  for precision but to soon to speak about  feeders quality with 2mm pitch paper.
I have made new metal springs plates  because the plastic is damaged with  8mm plastic tape and
1.5mm component's high.
Have you some contact with the Charmhigh technical after sale service ?.
I whould like to have an inside view or a list of parts.

[kapooo]

Hi, waw and sparkswillfily, I reply to this topic to get some useful information about the machine from you, buyers of the CHT48VB. I'm planning to buy a P&P in the near future.
What are your impressions about that? What about the precision of 0603 placement and big IC like TQFP 144pin 0.5mm pitch?
Are feeders as terrible as I read in this forum? Does the software of the P&P use the fiducials on the PCB to auto-calibrate the position of the PCB and thus improve the precision? And in the end, is the support from charmhigh present or, once I'll receive the machine, I'll be alone in case of problems?

I know, these are a lot of questions but I need to clear my mind.

Thank you guys.

[kapooo]

I've been trying to contact charmhigh for two weeks both with email and the form on their website but I never received answers. Does anyone know what's happening to this company?

[waw]

Dear,

I have send you a response , have you received it ?

[Smallsmt]

I have used it with 0402 .  good results  for precision but to soon to speak about  feeders quality with 2mm pitch paper.

I think 0201 is useless to try, the drag needle has tolerances and the mechanics not precise enough for reliable pick up on center of part.

I've been trying to contact charmhigh for two weeks both with email and the form on their website but I never received answers. Does anyone know what's happening to this company?

Maybe Chinese national holidays?

Are feeders as terrible as I read in this forum?

The feeders are similar to old Neoden machines feeders and cause problems using plastic tapes.

And in the end, is the support from charmhigh present or, once I'll receive the machine, I'll be alone in case of problems?

Sometimes Chinese companies think you're a "one shop customer" so they are not willing to spend too much time for support.

[hugonbs]

Hi guys! Anyone knows if there is a tool/sofware that convert a "material stack file" + "pick n place output from altium" into a .dpv file?

[waw]

I use the file convertertool V2.45 from Charmhigh .
You have to adapt the orders of the column  with  excel txt to .csv ,
transform the ; to space .

[waw]

Hi, waw and sparkswillfily, I reply to this topic to get some useful information about the machine from you, buyers of the CHT48VB. I'm planning to buy a P&P in the near future.
What are your impressions about that? What about the precision of 0603 placement and big IC like TQFP 144pin 0.5mm pitch?
----------
I have placed TQFP44 1mm  and VSSOP 0.5mm .  I had to readjust the angle manually +-0.2 degrés . It is acceptable for the low cost machine .
---------
2 Mark Calibration is good quality
--------




I know, these are a lot of questions but I need to clear my mind.

Thank you guys.

[kapooo]

Thanks for the answers. I know that the Neoden 4 or the TVM920 are better but their prices are higher than 48VB. I think that the ratio quality/price is good for the 48VB. I will try to contact charmhigh again and I will update this post with my opinion.

[ghent360]

I have CHMT48VB - I'm quite happy with it. I use it for 0603 components or larger. I place finer ICs by hand since these are usually 1 or 2 per board, so I don't bother placing them automatically. I'm going to try 0402 in a few weeks.

I found their support to be quite responsive. The fastest response I had was via skype. Keep in mind February is a dead zone in China - everyone is on vacation. They sometimes respond over the weekend, but rarely.

One stupid problem I had was a light over the machine was confusing the vision camera - so beware don't do that. Another problem was the coupler to one of the stepper motors was not tight and the stepper was slipping causing the machine to loose position accuracy. Other than that it has been solid.

As for their placement file - it is all text, you can write a converter yourself. I did a small shell script to convert eagle files to csv which their machine accepts. But I also took a peek at the DPV file - it is readable text with quite a bit of comments, not that complicated.

[ghent360]

Btw.

I made a little tutorial how to load cut-tape components on this pick and place machine. Similar trick should work on desktop Neodens as well - I think they use similar mechanics.

http://blog.pcbxprt.com/index.php/2018/05/07/how-to-mount-cut-tape-parts-on-chmt48vb-and-other-desktop-pick-and-place-machines/

[pickmeup]

Hello CHM-T48VB users. I am new to this forum but have been running this machine for several months now. It must be on a sturdy table to reduce inertia of the pickup heads, more controllable by reducing travel speed to 50% and also as needed component pickup speed from 0 to 1. I have had no factory support after purchase but quick when replacement heads are needed. The instructions are quite limited and do not show instructions correctly for this model.
I have worked through most difficulties and the machine performs well with occasional tape cover not feeding and clearing the part. Another big problem was solving the pen head when tip color worn the light reflection thinks a part is attached and not record a missing part.carries on. New Pens resolved this matter. My big frustration that I cannot resolve is using dual heads. Both calibrated and go to stack and part place during setup. However in run mode pen 2 is displace about 6mm on x axis left of placement  Pen 1 is always correct. When view with up camera in run mode it show part alignment with blue lines and a green + to right approximating the origin for this placement. If I could move this to pen center placement would be correct. I tried moving pen calibration as offset but then it could not take part from the stack.
I will continue to run a single head until this is resolved but a larger head is now manually swapped at head 1 during loading of the bigger parts.
I hope this can be fixed also if I can help with user problems. No support from factory at this time just learn on the go.
Cheers.

[waw]

I have also put the 48VB  on a consolidated table . in a frame against the vibrations .
I work also at 50% speed .
To calibrate the 2 noozles, i respect the documentation , the down camera is not on the center of the target           
  (0.2mm right), i think it fix the main reference for the 2 pick and place position .
The 2 heads pick & place are ok .
For thin paper tapes (0402) i increase the thickness of the band springs with plastic self adhesive tape .

[radioactive]

Does the CHMT48VB support control from an external PC via USB/RS-232?  I'm interested in this model for the extra feeders, but probably prefer the external control (and cost) of the 36VA just in case openPNP is able to control it with future developments.

[JPlocher]

> Does the CHMT48VB support control from an external PC via USB/RS-232?

No.

The '48VB has an integrated server that only accepts file transfers via USB stick.

You might see if Charmhigh will sell you a CHMT36VA with two banks of feeders instead of just one; the '36 and the '48 look to be otherwise identical platforms, with the former requiring an external PC to drive it instead of an embedded system.

From my experience with the '48 and it's job-oriented firmware design (and, by extention, the '36), I would NOT expect OpenPnP to ever be able to control the part rotation without completely gutting and replacing all the onboard control electronics with (say) a smoothieboard.  I'd think you would rather spend less on the '36 - and thus throw out less stuff.  See the OpenPnP threads for more about the machine's limitations.  The basic mechanical platform is well built and usable for what it is - a machine with reasonably large numbers of low cost feeders.  The 2X $cost jump from CHMT's to something with Yamaha style feeders is huge for a low volume / prosumer / hobbiest like me, but (IMHO) absolutely worth it if you are planning on doing anything commercial...

OTOH, the supplied software is relatively easy to learn and use, and the I/O file formats are easy to generate from anything that can generate CSV style placement info.  The SparkFun blog posts are a good starting place.

Note that the tape-and-reel-feeders occupy the "east" and "west" sides of the machine, and the 2x optional vibe feeders stick out the front/south side several feet on both sides of the control panel.  This placement makes using the machine awkward because the plastic part tubes stick out past the feeder into the work aisle (which implies independent support structures also in the aisle) and are easily bumped and misaligned by the operator.

  -John (satisfied '48 user for about a year now, with ~350 boards / 10k parts placed)

[kobena]

I have just purchased the chmt48vb and trying to set up. The generated csv pos file from kicad had to be tweaked to get the required csv file for conversion to dpv work file. My board has components on the top and bottom and i see only the top components loaded when i do the conversion. All the coordinates seem to be in reference to the top. How do i make it work well when i turn the board for the bottom placement?

[waw]

Dear, to transform bottom to top layer i use  excel  .
To make a mirror file :
   Y new  =   Yrefr
   X new  =  -Xrefr + (pcb width)

[RMT48vb]

Does anybody know how to adjust the component's height parameter? Default is 0.5 on 1.6 mm board.
If you have i.e. 3.6 mm high component, what is a good value for that and commonly how should the height value be modified, is it
0.5 + component's height or other way?

[theatrus]

Does anybody know how to adjust the component's height parameter? Default is 0.5 on 1.6 mm board.
If you have i.e. 3.6 mm high component, what is a good value for that and commonly how should the height value be modified, is it
0.5 + component's height or other way?

I use 3.6mm myself. 

[waw]

Dear,
You have to adjust component and stack high  according to the stack number position .
I put the value in the editing mode or in the Charmhigh convert tool V2.4.5

[RMT48vb]

Yep,  I knew already where to change the value of the height.
But for me is a little bit confusing Charmhigh's advice that height defaults for 1 mm PCB is 0, for 1.6 mm PCB is 0.5 and  for 3.6 mm PCB is 3.7. I suppose that for high components on 3.6 mm PCB the good height value isn't 3.7 + component's height, right?

[DinkDonk]

I know there is software for this already out there – the converter that Charmhigh provides, and the EDA plugins developed by SparkFun to name two.
For my use they didn't quite provide the functionality I needed, and I wanted an easier integration with KiCAD.

Take a look at the software I'm using in production to make DPV files for my CHM-T48VB:

https://bitbucket.org/elektrofon/kicad-to-dpv

Pull requests are very welcome 

[theatrus]

I know there is software for this already out there – the converter that Charmhigh provides, and the EDA plugins developed by SparkFun to name two.
For my use they didn't quite provide the functionality I needed, and I wanted an easier integration with KiCAD.

Take a look at the software I'm using in production to make DPV files for my CHM-T48VB:

https://bitbucket.org/elektrofon/kicad-to-dpv

Pull requests are very welcome 

Always good to see more!

I have a crappy script for going from Altium PNP files to the dpv file that I wrote in a rage due to the awful Windows converter software. I got certain circumstances where it would start randomly rotating all parts of certain inputs were provided. I should publish that