Excellent effort, and I don't want to be overly critical, but I agree with Mike and Dave - I really don't see the point.
Hand placing would be significantly faster (especially when you include setup time), and since the machine doesn't support feeders or auto loading/unloading of boards, it's not like you can let it run all day on it's own. The placement accuracy also seems quite poor... seems there is 0.010" and/or several degrees of error on many of the placements.
I don't think it comes close to buying a used machine (I always recommend a Quad 4C) for the $5-7k range which will likely come with a couple dozen feeders, be orders of magnitude faster and more accurate and have factory support if necessary. I know Mike has another brand of machine he's used that also seems quite capable, and perhaps even less $$.
Picking and placing is not a difficult task. What makes it hard is performing the task quickly and accurately, as well as the feeding of components. This device doesn't address any of the difficult aspects of PnP'ing.
But still, a significant achievement in difficulty and you should be proud of your work.
You said you don't see the point, so let me explain: The point of the machine is to help the
prototype phase. Feeders, auto loading of boards and other stuff you mentioned belong to production environment. I'm the first to say this is not a production machine - for daily production, there are better options.
But I do claim this is faster than hand
for a prototype, unless the board is very simple. Building a board for the first or second time, you are looking up each component and its place on the board, and that is tedious and error-prone. If you are hand-placement for production, you would know the position of the components by heart, for a new board you don't. Not a big problem if your board has 20 passives and half of them are bypass caps and the other half pull-up resistors, but when you have a new board with 100+ passives (nowadays often 0603) with various values, you really don't want to do that by hand. For my designs, that would still be on the simple side. This is the problem I built the machine for. Whether the problem is universally big enough that it pays off to finish the design and software properly so others can use it too, prepare the kits, build the website and documentation and so on, we'll see. It will be interesting and fun to find out!
The inherent accuracy of the machine is somewhere in 0.1 -0.15mm range and a small fraction of a degree. The machine does not look at the part itself, it uses the tape holes for location. The parts sit loosely in their pockets, and that is significant error source for placement and most of the rotational error. Still, the parts would reflow and self-align just fine. Paradoxically, 0402s are placed more accurately than 0603 - the small parts have tighter pockets.
For setup: You must get parts from part storage and place them somewhere, no way around that. When you have done that, the setup is minimal. The video shows all that you have to do: turn on the machine, start the software, one click to home it, another click to select placement tab, three click to load the pick and place file (unmodified, directly from CAD system), three clicks to select all components for placement, two to exclude fiducials (you don't want to place anything there), two clicks on each component type to tell the machine where you put the tapes on and one click to place all; few seconds total. I don't know how this could be simpler?
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