So back to the Open Placer.....
I looked at the feeders and have some practical comments. My opinions are not random - they are based on actual experience of assembling boards manually and with P&P as well as designing and CNC machining my own cut tape holders over the past few years.
It appears there are small dovetails that wedge the tapes in place. While this is a clever and low-cost design, it will have a critical flaw - stability. Tapes are all thicknesses and have variations in width. This scheme will nearly guarantee that the tape will be very tight or too loose for many tapes. When the tape is too tight and the user is struggling with it, it is VERY easy to bump all the parts out of the other tapes. Any user will have to load a single lane while not disturbing the others and this is not easy after the cover tape is removed.
When a tape is even slightly loose, the pickup process makes the other parts jump out of their pockets. Hand placing a bunch of parts back into the tape is not productive.
The other major issue is that they are fixed width. The ones I see in the pictures have 10x 8mm lanes. This is great if you have 10 8mm tapes, but the idea quickly becomes a problem if you have 11 8mm tapes. You have to waste a lot of very valuable space with 9 empty lanes. In my experience - many of my boards have a bunch of 8mm (not in multiples of 10), some 12mm, some 16mm, and 1-2 24mm. The feeders really need to be individual lanes to accommodate a practical number of parts.
My first cut tape holders for manual assembly and P&P were fixed groups and the limitation was immediately obvious. I then started making adjustable cut tape trays that are adjusted in 4mm increments and had clamps to hold any tape rigidly. I rarely have parts jumping out and I can mix any width tape either 6" or 12" on the holder. This was a dramatic improvement in how I use my P&P because I can get 20+ unique parts on a single cut tape tray. I have trays for production boards and open ones for prototypes. My machine has room for two trays so I can swap 40 unique parts in a few minutes with any combination of parts. The clamps on top allow tapes to be swapped easily without disturbing the adjacent tapes.
Stability and flexibility of the feeders are a crucial element of success. I have spent a lot of time working this particular problem - cut tape holders for manual and P&P processes. It is not trivial.
On the Open Placer Indigogo - you can see one of the test videos. The system picks up a few parts, and then one jumps out of the tape. These are the things that force an operator to watch the machine and correct issues all the time.
The images show some small parts being placed but the consistency is predictably not so good. You can get away with some misalignment, but at some point, your passives will tombstone. The user either fixes this before or after the reflow - taking time, a steady hand, a microscope. The smaller the part, the more sensitive they are.
So - feeders are crucial. A poor feeder setup can send an otherwise capable machine to the bottom of a river. If you are thinking that you will simply push the GO! button, walk away, and come back to an assembled PCB - you need good feeders.
For the double sided PCB's - It is a fairly simple setup. For irregular shaped double-sided, it requires a bit more consideration. I designed special trays for double-sided single PCB's that are irregular shape. I add a photo of that setup as well.