Yes, I agree. And, I do not have a "standard setup" on my machine. I optimize feeder placement for each job.
My trade off is not swapping feeders around for specific jobs. I guess i could possibly increase speed a little bit, but for short runs the placement time gained would be much much less than effort required to optimise feeders. That being said, i have moved my most common parts to the middle slots of the pnp so they are closest to the camera.. ( such as 100nF/0603, 1nF/0603 ). Unfortuantly on my machine its not possible to swap feeders out while its running so, this becomes the biggest pain item.. When you run out on a reel. I have enough feeders, and will have a replacement reel ready to go. ( my run sheets will tell me which feeders will run out during the job ).
I have run as few as 2 boards (not panels) for a specific customer, although that board had a fair number of parts.
That is the big difference. I'm not Contract manufacturing, so i can highly optimise for my own products.. CM comes with a whole lot of extra complications for both the customer and the CM. Which is why for me at least, not using CM is the right thing to do.
The FIRST TIME setup for a new (or revised) board can be a big deal.
Yeah, if you are starting from scratch, it sure can. Theres quite a bit to do, if you have to set everything up.
I have to decide what feeders to put where,
On the yamaha system, it will do feeder optimization for you, if you really want.. It will look at the build, and then tell you were to put the feeders. Becaue i dont' want to move everything, i turn off this optimzation..
go from CAD placement file to the format the machine wants, deal with issues where I forget that 16 mm feeders cannot occupy adjacent slots, proper part rotation, what nozzle to use for each part, and so on.
the effort i put into dealing to my part library, part inventory, and part locations, and scripting that so, its all end to end was big. But its now paid off.. My process is this.
(1) Create custom Bill of materials and PNP data files from Altium..
(2) Upload files to 'fab' ( fab is our server in AWS, that has the database and engines )
(3) Fab does an inventory report, tells you what stock is on hand, what needs ordering, whats on the machines, what will need loading on the machines. When you have all the materials on the machines, ( in altium, i have an additional feild that lets me tell the the sytem how i intend to place the part.. If its hand placed, then it won't get included ), you can then proceed and create a VIOS machine file. .
The vios file is 'uploaded' to the PNP machines.. ( or you can do it manually and copy the file over ).. These are pre-network machines, and i have a serial-ethernet port on them, but its sometimes easier to just load a file.. ( i replaced the floppy disk drives with USB-FDD emulators ).
(4) you need to do a bit of work on the pnp's them selves for the import, I have not yet full scripted all that, it takes about 2-3 minutes.
Since i run across two machines, the scripts also deal to splitting the parts between the machines.