Author Topic: Pick and Place with vision.  (Read 21101 times)

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Offline mikeselectricstuff

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Re: Pick and Place with vision.
« Reply #25 on: May 11, 2015, 05:32:54 pm »
As for available pick and place there is that guy here on the forum with a $1500 unit with vision but extremely slow based on CNC hardware about 300 parts per hour and that is worse than manual so useless.

There is no one on earth that can consistently place 300cph for any time at all. You can 'maybe' do a burst of the same component repeated in an easy to memorize geometric pattern. If your board has any complexity at all with a significant component count - you will very much benefit from a 300cph machine. People need breaks, get distracted, place a 1k where the 10k goes, etc.

While you are inspecting, printing another PCB, loading software - the machine would be putting down components. It is FAR from useless. This is coming from someone that has placed nearly 100,000 components manually in the past year. I have all the tricks and TONS of practice. I have great eyesight, tools, and coordination. I have also engineered an organization system for the components and reference materials to speed things up.

I am not saying 300cph is fast - I am saying that it is MUCH faster than what a human can do for any useful length of time.
300cph is easily within the same range as manual placement with a decent setup - that's 12 whole seconds per part.
By the time you add setup, a 300cph machine would be of use to a very narrow range of applications.

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Offline electrodacusTopic starter

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Re: Pick and Place with vision.
« Reply #26 on: May 11, 2015, 05:33:53 pm »
There is no one on earth that can consistently place 300cph for any time at all. You can 'maybe' do a burst of the same component repeated in an easy to memorize geometric pattern. If your board has any complexity at all with a significant component count - you will very much benefit from a 300cph machine. People need breaks, get distracted, place a 1k where the 10k goes, etc.

I actually did around that number 250 to 300cph for quite a few boards and my wife was about as fast as I did after we learned the board of course.
You can look at the end of this video when you can see how I manually placed one of those boards.
Is not something I want to repeat so I ordered a P&P and should soon get here. Is the one without vision that can do about 6000cph with to heads. I will probably reduce that to 2000cph or so since I prefer accuracy over speed the speed is good enough in this case.
Here is the link to the video where I place manual parts. Is a long video look at the end I think last 10 minutes or so  



Offline rx8pilot

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Re: Pick and Place with vision.
« Reply #27 on: May 11, 2015, 06:45:33 pm »
The only meaningful measurement of CPH is how many components you can put down over the course of a run. Say I want to do 10 of my PCB sets with around 300 components total per PCB set (a few different PCB's that go together). 3000 parts total.

The actual placement time is about 1 hour - 300CPH. But if I look at the whole day - I can only get about half that if I am lucky. The problem is that while I am placing parts, I cannot prep the next PCB, manage the re-flow oven, inspect the previous PCB, manage the parts, answer a phone call, go to the restroom, etc. With a 300cph machine, I can be doing all the other tasks needed and the machine would only stop long enough for me to load the next PCB. That would be a true 300CPH line.

I learned the details when I had my machine shop. We were very focused on how fast the machine could move and never paid much attention to how slow all the other processes were. I was about to drop $500k on a super-fast machine when I realized we can triple the output of our current machines by feeding them faster. For only a few $thousand I dramatically sped up the process by being able to keep our slow machines busy 99% of the time. My only concern was how many parts can I get in a day - NOT how fast the cutter can shred the metal.

In the case of P&P, the concept is similar. I would say that a 300cph machine would at least double the output for someone coming from a fully manual process, maybe even triple. You will be placing parts while you eat lunch, talk on the phone, count parts, day dream, whatever.
« Last Edit: May 11, 2015, 06:47:56 pm by rx8pilot »
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Offline electrodacusTopic starter

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Re: Pick and Place with vision.
« Reply #28 on: May 11, 2015, 08:48:24 pm »
rx8pilot,  There are so much more things to consider. Yes you are right for your example you need two days of hard work to do those boards but the alternative is not better.
You need to set up the machine that can take a full day easy for a new board then you will need a very long day to be able to finalize the boards the day after setup.
That inexpensive P&P has some other problems except for the speed. I like that guy so I will not want to comment more on those problems. I'm curios what Dave1 and Dave2 will think about this one since they just received the kit.
I paid a bit more than double for a machine that is way superior to that one an place parts 10 to 20x faster and more precise even without vision.
Is now clearing customs so I hope it will be here in about a week and I will give you my firs impression about it if anyone is interested. Is the CHMT28 the smaller brother of the CHMT36. Is almost no difference in price and the parts are exactly the same the 28 is just smaller and has less feeders but I have limited space in my lab and do not realy need the larger size.
The CHMT48V the one with vision I listed in the first post will have been realy great but is quite a bit more and I can not afford at this time and the gain is probably minimal for my use case. 
 

Offline rx8pilot

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Re: Pick and Place with vision.
« Reply #29 on: May 11, 2015, 11:04:27 pm »
I also got a used machine recently - A Quad IV-C. It's been a few months now and I still have not made a single PCB. There have been a number of things that need to be fixed/replaced in addition to the learning curve. I have alos been too busy to spend too much time on it.

There is no magic solution to P&P, it's a major undertaking no matter how you do it. Even for manual assembly, it takes a long time to get all the parts organized and planned out.
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Offline electrodacusTopic starter

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Re: Pick and Place with vision.
« Reply #30 on: May 12, 2015, 01:31:32 am »
I also got a used machine recently - A Quad IV-C. It's been a few months now and I still have not made a single PCB. There have been a number of things that need to be fixed/replaced in addition to the learning curve. I have alos been too busy to spend too much time on it.

There is no magic solution to P&P, it's a major undertaking no matter how you do it. Even for manual assembly, it takes a long time to get all the parts organized and planned out.

I did not got a used machine is a new one low cost based on the popular TM220A and TM240A just with some improvements in my opinion and at a slightly better price.

Offline charlespax

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Re: Pick and Place with vision.
« Reply #31 on: May 12, 2015, 04:33:09 am »
The Neoden sales representative in Hua Qiang Bei told me they are launching a vision-enabled machine within the next month or two. I haven't seen it myself, but I'm told it's very professional.
 

Offline electrodacusTopic starter

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Re: Pick and Place with vision.
« Reply #32 on: May 12, 2015, 05:05:57 am »
The Neoden sales representative in Hua Qiang Bei told me they are launching a vision-enabled machine within the next month or two. I haven't seen it myself, but I'm told it's very professional.

Thanks. I guess it will be similar to the one in the first post.  It will also probably be more expensive than their new version that is also not cheap.
It will not fit in to my budget and I also do not have much need for camera even if I need to place by hand the few small pitch IC's.
The worst part that I have is 48pin  0.4mm pitch QFN and that is the main part there is no alternative.

Offline electrodacusTopic starter

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Re: Pick and Place with vision.
« Reply #33 on: May 16, 2015, 06:56:10 pm »
For those interested I got a CHMT28 the smallest version of CHMT48V(the one with vision in original post) and CHMT36.
Look at the second half of this short video for a few clips with the machine in the same day I got it (two days ago).


Everything seems to work as expected but it was just a short test to see that it works. I will have no need for it for quite a few weeks at least.

Offline jt

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Re: Pick and Place with vision.
« Reply #34 on: May 17, 2015, 05:11:15 am »
I work for a small business that probably averages three or four quick-turn one-off's a month.  We are constantly fighting assembly quality issues from multiple vendors.  We burn >150k$ on PCBA direct cost a year plus an embarrassing amount of engineering labor troubleshooting issues that turn out to be blatant failures to conform to the IPC class-2 standards we call out. 

It is tempting to bring assembly capability in-house.  However, no one at the company has any experience with P&P and we are worried the learning curve, maintenance, set-up labor and the direct cost of the machines being too much of a burden. 

Does anyone have any experience bringing this capability in-house for a small business?  What kind of support staff is typically needed?
 

Offline mikeselectricstuff

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Re: Pick and Place with vision.
« Reply #35 on: May 17, 2015, 06:21:53 am »
I work for a small business that probably averages three or four quick-turn one-off's a month.  We are constantly fighting assembly quality issues from multiple vendors.  We burn >150k$ on PCBA direct cost a year plus an embarrassing amount of engineering labor troubleshooting issues that turn out to be blatant failures to conform to the IPC class-2 standards we call out. 

It is tempting to bring assembly capability in-house.  However, no one at the company has any experience with P&P and we are worried the learning curve, maintenance, set-up labor and the direct cost of the machines being too much of a burden. 

Does anyone have any experience bringing this capability in-house for a small business?  What kind of support staff is typically needed?
For 1-offs it's all about setup. You need to spend some time to get a streamlined process, so, for example, your PCB libraries match the P&P library (feeder orientation., component height etc), so you know that parts will be the right way round without having to check each one.
Another thing with 1-offs is you want a machine that can fed short tapes without wasting lots of parts on a long leader/trailer - Mydata have short-tape feeders, and you also need the ability to pick from lengths of static tape.

As regards the rest of the process, by far the biggest factor in good quality is getting a good stencil print. Use stainless stencils.
The cheapest decent printer I know of is the Eurocircuits one.
Once you have decent paste print and placement, reflow isn't a big deal - a toaster oven works fine for leaded.  If you really want to use lead-free, and for 1-offs there isn't really a reason to, you may need to look at something a bit more well controlled, maybe vapour-phase.
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Offline jt

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Re: Pick and Place with vision.
« Reply #36 on: May 17, 2015, 06:41:51 am »
Thanks for the insight!

 

Offline ProtoVoltaics

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Re: Pick and Place with vision.
« Reply #37 on: May 22, 2015, 03:48:57 pm »
Hey everyone,

I have actually been working on making a pnp with vision. The unit is almost complete, and we will be selling them. If you are interested I would ask you to visit our Hackaday page https://hackaday.io/ProtoVoltaics and check out our pnp. Here is the latest video on our machine taken yesterday. It was taken with a phone camera, because I forgot my actual camera at home  :palm:

https://youtu.be/C7Pi4akL5og

Thanks!
 


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