Users of Bovi PNPs?

[Just-sean]

As I'm getting closer to deciding between a few Chinese PNPs, what I come to love about HWGC is the community support. This is a huge plus for me. I'm curious if Bovi has a similar community? I'm looking at the BV-F8GS, but can't find any users of it or videos online, so I'm a bit hesitent. I just have the word of the Bovi sales person claiming their flying camera and software is the best.
Since software is probably just as or more important than the hardware, I love that people like 48X24X48X make videos and post of their HWGC machine.

[Styno]

I can't even find the BV-F8GS on their website of which the English version is quite Chinglish, so I would worry a bit about documentation and help (unless you speak Chinese).

[SMTech]

Useful online videos for any brand of machine are fairly rare. Users are workers, they have work to do, they may also not give a flying **** about the machine or process.

I think Styno has a point, Bovi may be prominent in some Asian markets but it is almost invisible in this forum so you have no idea what support might be like.  The website is perhaps not a good way to judge, even big Chinese manufacturers often have barely functional incomplete sites. HWGC has a couple of users on here who can give good feedback on their experience not to mention the many other users who have rebadged low end Aliexpress versions.

Beyond that, hop and a plane and have a Chinese holiday, make them build something (possibly of yours) in front of you and judge for yourself. With the mainstream brands visiting a salesroom or existing client is often the only way to see how some features work.

[48X24X48X]

Yeah, best way is to hop on a plane and visit the factory. I brought my own PCB last time, ship some parts from Taobao (worried China custom might do funny things) to HWGC factory prior to my visit and then tested with just that board of mine with the position files that I brought. This was how I crossed out other manufacturers from my list. It's also an opportunity to check out how established the company is.

[glenenglish]

all their software is a P.O.S, total rubbish
use Open PNP with it.
will be be slow but reliable. be prepared to change all the cameras frrom analog  to USB3 types. learn about optics , lenses etc.

[Aspartame]

all their software is a P.O.S, total rubbish
use Open PNP with it.
will be be slow but reliable. be prepared to change all the cameras frrom analog  to USB3 types. learn about optics , lenses etc.

Bovi uses gige hikvision camera, do you think that will make a difference?

[glenenglish]

GigE seems an odd choice. good for large machines > 5m.  and choosing color imagers shows they still really do not know what they are doing.
But speed helps-  for image acquisition time it does....  but GigE is a bit slow compared to USB3. and it is a bit bespoke for drivers

the USB1 and USB2 cameras generally are low frame rates on color high res,  3 to 7 fps made worse by using colour imagers (more info) .
some of the USB1/2 cameras get away with it by applying JPG compression over the USB, that's the worst thing .

Monochrome USB2 cameras are OK for speed.

Slow frame rate makes everything slow, since most of these are NOT global shutter and everything must have stopped moving and mechanically settled.

In the Kayos I changed the cameras over to these company- their options are excellent , support is good and their drivers (C++ , C and Python native)  all work well without problems with OpenCV Python.

https://www.jinghangtech.com/    they do have an english language site and all documentation is in good english, and they can do SW or HW trigger, not just free running, This reduces lag, also.

for the PnP SMT : I used JHSM series JHSM120B --- this is a 1.2MPX MONOCHROME USB2 GLOBAL SHUTTER (15-25fps)
and also used a USB3 imager :  JHUM131B       a 1.3Mpx 1/2" global shutter monochrome . 120 fps...

I was so impressed, that I went onto buy some 900 fps VGA USB3 cameras from them to troubleshoot placement issues...

[glenenglish]

Hey 48X48C38X48X : Surely in Malaysia, you would have good access to used Jap and Korean machines ?

[48X24X48X]

Yeah, there's plenty of those especially Yamaha here. But I don't have the space to keep one. Malaysia used to be a manufacturing hub before China came up. So plenty of them in the market especially in the past 10-15 years or so as surviving PCBA companies eventually close down due to China and Vietnam. There's quite a few HWGC customer in Malaysia.

[Styno]

[..]
In the Kayos I changed the cameras over to these company- their options are excellent , support is good and their drivers (C++ , C and Python native)  all work well without problems with OpenCV Python.

https://www.jinghangtech.com/    they do have an english language site and all documentation is in good english, and they can do SW or HW trigger, not just free running, This reduces lag, also.

for the PnP SMT : I used JHSM series JHSM120B --- this is a 1.2MPX MONOCHROME USB2 GLOBAL SHUTTER (15-25fps)
and also used a USB3 imager :  JHUM131B       a 1.3Mpx 1/2" global shutter monochrome . 120 fps...

I was so impressed, that I went onto buy some 900 fps VGA USB3 cameras from them to troubleshoot placement issues...

Thanks for sharing your story and tips. I'm curious how your closed-software Chinese machine responded to the camera changes. Was it p&p? Did you have to do color/position calibration, poke around with drivers etc?

[MR]

Optical recognition is fine with 640x480, don't dream about highres... for what? Old PNP machines used CVBS (Mechatronika is still using CVBS). The chinese ones are using AHD (still analog but at least full frames and not crap interlaced frames).
Higher resolution just results in more data for computation, my optical recognition algorithms are all based around black/white(u8) data.

Small passives can be matched easily with 5-20% of a 640x480 camera depending on the focus of course.
Even oversized parts/ICs can be matched with a suitable algorithm (detecting corners).

I'm using 60 FPS 640x480 on my DIY and it's just fine, the data comes via MJPEG in my case; RAW data would not work out of course. Mechatronika uses 720x480 50 half frames (PAL) via PCI, the driver just merges the half frames so 1sec/25 is the least time it takes to get a full frame.

PCIe has the advantage that the data can directly be written to the memory without CPU intervention, while via USB the CPU still has to process the packets. Modern CPUs have no problem with that.

[glenenglish]

MR is exact.
No need for high resolution is the lens and optics  and focus depth choice is appropriate. I used 1.2Mpx because it was a common monochrome machine vision imager.
640x480 monochrome imagers have same resolution as a 1900 x 1500 color imager..... (due to the Bayer filter) .

As for Styno's question- I wrote my own PnP software, and write all my own vision algorithms, they worked very well. ALl in OpenCV in Python. But prepare to spend 6 months. So, OpenPNP is a good option.
If you want more than 750 components per hour (cph)  , I would try and fit a year 2002+ Yamaha machine in my workshop, much better I think than any chinese pnp . But you need a big air supply and 3 phase power. You can make 3 phase power with three ganged inverters, but the big air supply takes space and makes noise.   
Below 750 cph,  I think Open PNP is a good thing. Most hobbyists, 750 cph is plenty.