CHMT-528P / CHMT-530P4

[Spikee]

I just wanted to start a topic about these machines. After seeing some video's, the manual and some (short) reviews online all seem fairly good for this pricepoint.


20-06-2017 -> Charmhigh confirmed that the 528 and 530p4 both are 0.015mm accuracy / resolution

Link to english CHM-T528P Manual:
https://mega.nz/#!5IkkCL6D!yQOVkXCRoHZ1k0_Zj4XEvDywZStkMohmfm0eHSv4x0U

Link to english CHM-T530P4 Manual:
https://mega.nz/#!RcFADISB!ftWwkCUXQYOeYOWSE0StwlhKNLzBe5VffRVDmE4NX9M

The difference between the 528 and the 530p4 seems minimal. But for the 530P4 you are paying a 1000USD premium.
According to Charmhigh this extra resolution is good for 0.4mm pitch and BGA's (max size 22x22mm).

The 528 seems to be at a good pricepoint. Since it is the same software you are not missing out on features either.
Worst case if you get annoyed by the SW it seems fairly easy to convert this to OPENPNP or simular projects.

The software seems a continuation from their CHM-36(VA) and CHM-48(VA) systems. Even those "lower end" machines seem
to be able to do 0.5mm pitch ic's and 0402 with good results.

I'm leaning towards the 528 since it is at such pricepoint that even if it just did 0402 and or 0604 passives the time that saves on prototype / small batch assembly earns back the machine
fairly quick. And at this pricepoint there is nothing really that compares. Just some drag feeder machines with ot without vision which are the same price. And some hobby-ish taoboa pnp machines.

Videos:

"Charmhigh CHMT530P Pick and Place Machine Vision + Mark2"


"Charmhigh Pick and Place Machine CHMT530P Working - Video by Patrick from UK"


"4 heads pick and place machine - Charmhigh CHMT530P4"


"Quick start CHMT530P4 Placing 0603 - Charmhigh Pick and Place Machine"


"4 Heads CHM-T530P4 Pick and Place Machine - Real working video from Customer"


"CHMT528P , CHMT530P Placing Cree LED Package 5050 (work with Yamaha feeder)"


"Charmhigh (CHMT528P) WORKING 0402 - Exhibition in SZ China"


"CHMT528P Feeder machine place IC with vision system"


Relevant links on EEVBLOG:

"Owner of 530P4"
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/manufacture/desktop-pick-and-place-overview/msg1058666/#msg1058666

"Asking about the 560P4"
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/manufacture/charmhigh-560p4-pick-and-place/

[Spikee]

It seems to work pretty well. Any personal expiriences here  with these machines or one of their lower end one's? if so please share.

The 528 seems good value for money. Sadly they don't have a sales store here in Shenzhen China so at this moment it is not possible to check it out
personally.

[Spikee]

I had further discussions with Charmhigh and people that own one and have decided to get it.
The return policy is generous so it can be returned if it is not satisfactory within 1 week.
And it has a one year warranty. And I got it for a good deal.

I'll be documenting the process of getting it, setting it up and using it via this forum
and also via some video's on YouTube.

This is my order:

[Spikee]

I received my machine and I must say that it is made really well for this price-point. Not a typical benchtop pick and place quality.
It is also larger than I expected it to be. In the pictures and the video's it looks not that big. But in reality it is hefty and has a good size to it.

The custom milling, wiring, fit and finish are nice. The packaging was top notch (125kg crate) and the kit comes with some spares and maintenance items.
The machine works out of the box without any issues. I have also made video's of the unpacking, first look and some small pnp test run (0603, 0805 , wson 2x3mm ic).

Shipping crate (note i had to remove two of the bottom wooden "legs" so it would fit trough the door):


Open the crate at the side, good packaging, machine goes nowhere, a lot of dense foam panels for protection:


Got the machine out of the box, the x,y,z axis is zip tied and protected with foam so it does not bash around during shipping:


Back side; wiring and general construction is really good:


Inspection report and packing list:


Spares / maintenance kit:




Machine put in final position and added feeders on the machine:


There are some small improvements that can be made here and there in the software. But
nothing that prohibits the usability of the machine. It works out of the box with nothing else
than the basic calibration described in the manual.

It can automatically recognize fiducials (three point calibration) so you just press run and the whole process just works.
If there are any issues that prohibit the placement than the machine will stop and will show a visual indication and make a three second beeping sound
to get the attention of the operator.

It is easy to set up a new job (they have a program for on the pc to do that in english). And really easy
to change feeders or something like that. For smaller packages you might have to re-calibrate the feeder center position (this takes like 30 seconds)
but for 0805 or bigger that is not really the case.

The user interface is straightforward and easy to work with.

It might not be fully visable in the pictures but the machine base is milled aluminium that is brushed to a certain extend.
Really high quality , well the whole construction is. I will take some better close-up pictures later today / tonight.

Monday / tuesday I will assembly one of my boards that has around 100 passives and a few qfn / tqfp / sot23 ic's.
I have full confidence in it and will keep you guys updated. I will upload the youtube video's at another time (unpacking, first start up, first placement).

Edit:
It looks like they intended to make this machine have 28 feeders in the front and the back. But for some reason they have not done that.

Vision for passives, ic's and fiducials works out of the box with no tuning.

[sparkswillfly]

Looks good, waiting for videos.  May get one.

[DigitalDeath]

Thanks for this thread.
A few questions:

1) I'm a bit confused as to what's the maximum amount of feeders it can take. Is it 28, 30, 28x2=56 or 30x2=60?
2) What's the smallest discrete it can place 0402, 0201?
3)What's the smallest pitch is can place 0.5mm, 0.4mm, etc?

Thanks,

John.

[sparkswillfly]

It depends on which model you order as to how many feeders and heads you get.
528P is 28 feeders, 2 heads
560P4 is 60 feeders, 4 heads

[DigitalDeath]

Thanks for the clarification.

How about the part sizes/pitch?

[Spikee]

Apparently the resolution is 0.025mm. So far 2x3 mm 0.5mm pitch wson has placed with no issue I doubt 0.4mm spacing will change much.
Machine is specified for 0402 and up. I have not tried 0402 and it is because of the following reason. 0402 requires a special 8x2 cl feeder.
0603,0805,small diodes, sot23 all fit in the cl 8x4 feeder. And if you look at the bias voltage vs capacity for these small 0402 caps than you see another disadvantage of using it.

The machine does not have auto toolchange which  is a feature that would improve placement speed a lot. Since people with the 4 head machine simply put one of each nozzle on the head to mitigate this problem. But you are killing placement speed in that way. Even a manual prompt to change the nozzle would be a solution.

It should be fairly easy for them to implement auto toolchange. Just a bit of software and a tool holder.  I will be making all these recommendations to them.

maximum ic size is 22x22mm as far as i know

[DigitalDeath]

Thanks for the thorough reply.

John. 

[Spikee]

So I have assembled about 12 board snow (~300-500 components) and these are my initial findings:
1. 0603,0805,sot23-X, SOIC, ... all work fine with no real issue
2. If things are not in feeders than it is just more work for small runs
3. I had some consistent over rotation for some TQFP (note only used 2 point fiducial calibration, not three point).
And had to adjust the component manually (although reflow would have probably pulled it straight). They have a "two point" ic placement feature
which probably fixes it. Or it is caused by some mis-calibration on my side.
4. You always want more feeders
5. Use three fiduacials for pcb calibration

Biggest annoyance:
There is no general stack/feeder list in the machine itself. Each placement file (.dpv) has it's own stack/feeder list.
Why is this annoying? well if your component is on a reel the zero rotation angle might not correspond directly with your footprint library.
So you correct for one file and ... for the next .dpv (placement) file you will have to do it again. Instead of heaving one general stack on the machine that would automatically
do that angle correction (once you have done it once).

This can be fixed by charmhigh or simply by making a pnp .csv parser yourself that does all this for you.

I talked with charmigh and they are working on a 6 head pnp machine with conveyor and auto nozzle change.
And i talked with kimi to add this functionality to the 528 / 530 / 560 and just charge extra for it as an option (200-350 usd).

This would make  this machine killer. If you support this idea than It is good to contact charmhigh / kimi and say that. If enough people ask for the feature
they will implement it. Do not hesitate to mention this post. They are following it closely.

I made a video but it includes one of my customers board so I can't share that sadly. The board did not have that many components but it would have took me 15 minutes at least to do it by hand for each board. The machine does it with head at 50% in about 48 seconds. The bottleneck now is my solder paste applying method. Not the assembly.

The second board had about 100 passives and that would really have took me 30 min to 1 hour to place it by hand. The machine did it in about 1 min 48.
I did not bother to place the chips (qfn , soic ..) with the pick and place because this was only for two boards.

[sparkswillfly]

Nozzle changer and conveyer option, yes please!

How many feeders can you get for $2500? (not enough)

[DigitalDeath]

Definitely nozzle changer. That's a must and easy to implement.
I would also like to have the option to have north, south and east feeders so that the total of possible feeders be more like 80-90 and if conveyor then not use the east feeder area while using conveyor.

[Spikee]

My personal opinion regarding so many feeders is that if you need those quantity of feeder slots than these low end machines are not for you.
With 90 feeders we are talking about 5 grand in just cheap knockoff 8mm yamaha CL feeders.

Assuming you also need a mix of bigger sizes than even with knockoff one's you are talking 7-10 grand. With real one's being like 3x time knockoff price
it is 15 - 30 grand in feeders. In that case a better machine / software mandatory in my opinion.

Or ... just buy two of them

[overthere]

Feeders cost:
8mm $60
12mm &16mm $70
24mm $250

Mostly you will need 8mm anyhow.

The problem is, 6-7k are so much money. I'm falling in love with the 560P4, however 10k until it's here. Too much for me for private stuff. My salary is not so high 

[DigitalDeath]

Actually no, the number of different components is only dependent on how many different components your board needs. Despite reworking the design to minimize the number of different components sometimes there is no way around the fact that you need that many different ones and that doesn't change the fact that if they were available in one of the sides of the machine it would work out just fine with a low cost machine. When you think about a high end machine where the feeders are expensive then that's where you see that the cost difference is really large.

My personal opinion regarding so many feeders is that if you need those quantity of feeder slots than these low end machines are not for you.
With 90 feeders we are talking about 5 grand in just cheap knockoff 8mm yamaha CL feeders.

Assuming you also need a mix of bigger sizes than even with knockoff one's you are talking 7-10 grand. With real one's being like 3x time knockoff price
it is 15 - 30 grand in feeders. In that case a better machine / software mandatory in my opinion.

Or ... just buy two of them

[Yellofriend]

Sorry for jumping in, what feeder type/brand is that? I saw similar feeders on a Autotronik PnP.

I am aware that they are most likely fakes. But the beauty of that is that you can buy originals if you want to. Like the nozzles, fake Juki RMB 50 - real Juki at least RMB 800

(I just bought a Qihe. So far so good but a full class lower then yours)

[Spikee]

I have 10 china cl 8x4mm "fake" feeders from Charmhigh, and one fake / used / refurbushed one from taoboa (~ 280 rmb).
There is very little difference between them. And I can't say that the refurbished/used one works worse than the new ones.

[sparkswillfly]

I was looking at SMT460 and 5 (or 3) camera option may be nice for this machine. 

How your machine doing, Spikee?

[Spikee]

Machine is doing fine, Will do another proto assembly job next week.
Only thing I have to test / figure out is some calibration settings and two point ic calibration / placement.

Note in all these video's if it is doing something strange that means that I have messed it up.
Not machine's fault All vids are un-edited.

CHMT-528P #6 - Test board:
https://youtu.be/mnqhINv9Edw

CHMT-528P #5 - Quick test:
https://youtu.be/lDwidaYXk4k

CHMT-528P #4 - Quick test:
https://youtu.be/MiLd46t2FMA

CHMT-528P #3 - Machine overview:
https://youtu.be/G16L8IE8feE

CHMT-528P #2 - Inspecting the machine
https://youtu.be/62KXDhkk2y0

CHMT-528P #1 - Machine arrived / unpacking
https://youtu.be/X7eLHIAHYMA

[jmelson]

The big one only holds 30 feeders.  That is 8mm feeders, generally, any wider ones take up two slots.  So, if you need 10 feeders of 12 or 16mm, that only leaves 10 8mm slots left.  Think carefully about the boards you will run on it.  My CSM84 has 36 8mm slots on the front, plus a vibratory feeder for up to a dozen or so SOIC tubes, plus a rear feeder which I use mostly for a waffle tray holder.
I usually use up almost all of my front slots, especially now that a lot of parts are only available in tapes rather than the tubes.

Jon

[Spikee]

Well this machine only cost like 4 grand. They have a 60 feeder one for who wants to spend more money

[Spikee]

These are my experiences after assembling two more designs a few days ago:

1. 0603 / SOIC / SOT work without any issue
2. SOT-123 diodes do not get recognized correctly (all the time). So have to shut of vision for this part
3. I placed a 48 pin TSSOP using the two point ic placement function. The placement location was correct. But from time to time there seems to be a rotation offset.
Not sure if this is due to some calibration on my end or the vision system being finicky. I adjusted it by hand afterwards.
3. Placing TSSOP / QFN / small IC's  from the tray using vision I often have a small rotation or misalignment So I had to re-adjust it manually. For the last boards I placed these manually.
4. Not having any auto or manual tool-change feature can be really annoying. This kinda forces you to buy the 4 head machine. Which then will be used in a manner where the two additional heads are doing nothing for 80% of the time.
5. You always want more feeders; Changing a reel is 30-60 seconds of work. But setting up two jobs etc is just hassle. Best to do it at once.
6. You always want more feeder slots

As a side note:
When I got the machine I calibrated it according to the manual. But there is a problem. The template that charmhigh provides to align the camera etc is out of focus if you follow the manual.
No spacer or anything like that is provided. Later on I commented regarding that and I was told that the calibration was done in the factory. And that I should not do it myself (although the manual states this). Possibly my rotation issue comes from this ? The factory settings were provided on a USB stick with the machine. But... After hours of searching I can't find it anywhere.  .I have to ask Charmhigh if they have a backup of this or that they can provide me the proper details to calibrate the machine on my own (see out of focus issue).

I have not heard anything back from charmhigh regarding the notes / improvement recommendations I gave to them at least a month ago now.
I'm a little bit disappointed at that. It is mainly small things that could improve this machine tremendously.

1. Auto and or manual tool-change
2. Proper (automatic) nozzle calibration
3. Ability to (automatically) import fiducials and locations from the pnp file; Now this has to be done manually at the machine
4. Ability to automatically calibrate the feeder (component center location). This should be easy enough. This greatly decreases the chance of miss-picks, positional errors etc
5. Ability to have a machine feeder table instead of having a feeder table per assembly file. You basically have to duplicate what is already there in another file.
6. Some kind of feature to get the center position of some parts even more accurately. Or just offer a camera upgrade; I was told this is just a cheapo 30 USD webcam thingy.

[Spikee]

I did 3 consecutive placements on the same pcb, Did nozzle calibration beforehand. Did three point fiducial correction before every placement.
It does not seem to be a consistent error. The results are varying (note: this is not using the two point calibration)
Would the reflow process possibly fix this ? who knows ... but I rather do not take the chance. Re-working it takes a serious amount of time. So for now i just adjust and or place it manually.

[sparkswillfly]

Sad.  Smallsmt added auto nozzle changer like it was no big deal.  Why no one else doing it?  Still can't unsee the 6 camera vision of smt460, everything else looks uncivilized.