Just for future reference for others having problems with this machine and finding this thread, I’m posting a few problems and solutions that I’ve encountered with the S103:
System: S103 with automatic tool change and vacuum table
- Drill bits breaking often / wearing down fast:
Clean and lubricate the chuck. We found out that if this is not done regularly it will shoot the bits out of the chuck when calibrating the tool height (which it does whenever changing tool). When hitting the sloped calibration surface it will shatter the tip on the bit, this cost us a lot of them.
- Material moving:
We tape down the material as much as possible, at least on the last layer before it routes out the board. The vacuum table is often not good enough to hold the material when routing out / removing large areas of copper. Also, if you choose to rub out large areas, keep in mind that the head slides along the surface. If the whole head moves over a rubbed out area it can snag when hitting a copper edge, ripping it off the track or moving the material.
- Bits touching the surface where it should not:
The replaceable vacuum boards vary *a lot* in thickness, this is not a huge problem as the head rides on the surface. However, it seems like the play in height difference the head can tolerate is less then the difference in thickness of the vacuum boards. We measure all 4 corners when replacing a vacuum board, take the average and adjust the "vacuum table height" setting. it is unclear how this should be measured as the manual does not mention it, but it seems to be from the aluminium surface the vacuum table is mounted on to the top of the replaceable material.
- Layers out of alignment when using camera to read fiducials:
Not figured this one out yet, even when calibrating the camera head offset every time the machine is booted up its still misaligned.
All in all its a good tool to have, but I would not recommend anyone to buy this with the intention of letting many different people use it. With all the hiccups and bugs it should be operated by one user only.
If anyone from LPKF reads this, I have a lot of tips regarding improvements to the system (just listing a few, please PM me if you are interested in speaking to me) I have spent so much time on this machine, I don’t want to spend more time rewriting this and sending it to LPKF:
- If you haven’t already, the manual requires a lot of work, this would also save you a lot of phone calls.
- Add an emergency stop button to the software!
- When you flip the board and the machine tries to find the fiducials, which it never manages to do automatically unless you lucked out and flipped it perfectly, let the user select if he wants to direct the head manually before having to wait for it to fail the automatic recognition which takes time.
- When calibrating milling width with the camera, let the user manually measure the width. Why? read the next problem
- You should have a picture from the camera with optimal settings as an example to go by when adjusting the image settings. When measuring milling width the machine more then often finds the wrong edges. What looks good for a human does not work at all for the recognition software it seems.
- When routing out boards, the contour router sticks out the exact same depth every time, causing it to be worn out just in that point. This should be fixed so that you could either manually or automatically vary this depth.
- In the "Board production wizard" why does the machine not switch to camera reference when setting up the material area? I still forget to change to camera as reference and not drill before I start the wizard (or at least let the user change this while the wizard is up).
- Let the user pause the machine when using the wizard as it really should be supervised at all times when milling.
- Explain how to remove the dummy bit that is in the chuck when the machine is delivered, the program says no bits are mounted, we where afraid that it would try to pick up a new tool with the dummy bit already in the chuck. Also, add an option to manually release the chuck.
- In general, the machine does a lot of things automatically, like releasing the dummy bit on first tool change, many things like this is not specified in the manual, and because of all the hiccups and bugs I would like more manual control in general. An option to reduce contour routing speed for instance would be nice as it could reduce the risk of moving the material.
- Tell me how on earth the solder paste dispenser is suppose to work (granted, the last time I tried this was one year ago, maybe the software has been fixed). Machine said 0,X mm nozzle was mounted while we only had the 0,Y mm nozzle, I found no way to change this