The Reality of a Pick and Place Lifestyle

[mikeselectricstuff]

On the subject of printers, I use the Eurocircuits one, which has no adjustments except tension and height. It uses a pin registration system, which works very well, but is ridiculously over-engineered.
I think with some clever design, something similar could easily be done for between a quarter and a third of the price.

Is that one that uses frameless?    The main lissue i have with framed stencils is they take up a lot of space to store.

Yes - you can clamp and tension any size of frameless stencil
https://www.eurocircuits.com/ec-equipment-ec-stencil-mate/

[khs]

What manual printers is everyone using?

Because I did not find a suitable one (for my pnp) , I made one myself (with my cnc).

If I'm not wrong, it's the only printer in the world capable of printing small circuit boards using stencils without a frame.

If interested, you may take a look at


At 0:38  you can see how to adjust very small pc-boards.

Unfortunately it's out of stock at the moment, but the new batch in nearly finished.

(It was designed for very small businesses, but reality showed that in many cases larger companies were those who had one ordered...)

[julianhigginson]

Because I did not find a suitable one (for my pnp) , I made one myself (with my cnc).

If I'm not wrong, it's the only printer in the world capable of printing small circuit boards using stencils without a frame.

really nice! It looks very solid and neat and simple and efficient, and I am keen to know when they are available.

I notice it holds boards with a channel in the edges of the side pieces.
How does it handle different thickness boards?

And do you get flexing issues when printing on wide boards?

[khs]

It looks very solid and neat and simple and efficient, and I am keen to know when they are available.

The milling and drilling work is done, I expect the stencil printers in about a week back from anodizing.

I notice it holds boards with a channel in the edges of the side pieces. How does it handle different thickness boards?

There are two channels, 1.0 mm and 1.6 mm.

And do you get flexing issues when printing on wide boards?

It depends on the thickness of the pc-board and the force on the stencil. Because the squeegee is supported by the both board holders, the force on the pc-board can be quite low.

But the stencil printer is more or less a vise for the stencil with a massive holder for the board, so it is more or less impossible to move the stencil relative to the board. So, when the pc-board is bent, the stencil and the pc-Bard are bent together.

To minimize the forces on the stencil, I started with a solder paste with low viscosity. Surprisingly, the print quality increased with increasing viscosity.

Increasing viscosity means that at the end the solder paste has the viscosity of plasticine, with the appropriate forces on the stencil / pc-board. It was a bit like filling holes in a wall with smoothing cement. As a result the solder paste was formed to tiny 'bricks' on the 0.5 mm pitch pins and my 144 pin FPGA was soldered perfectly. (I think this could  work with other stencil printers too).
 

[mrpackethead]

Interesting design for a printer

At small board sizes I can see this working alright. But once the boards get much bigger than 100mm wide or so it might be problematic. You need mod point support pins or something to keep the boards
From flexing.

How does it cope with double sided?  Normally there is some warp in the boards after reflow so they are are not perfectly flat

[briandorey]

I use a https://blundell.co.uk/product/manual-screen-printer-foil-type/ for unmounted stencils and we have made thousands of boards using it in the past few years.

I made a shoort video of our first go with it on . It wasnt very cheap but it is well made.

[Dubbie]

That looks very nice khs . I might have to build myself something similar.

[khs]

At small board sizes I can see this working alright. But once the boards get much bigger than 100mm wide or so it might be problematic. You need mod point support pins or something to keep the boards From flexing.

The stencil printer is designed for small prototypes typical up to euro card size 100 mm x 160 mm.

Here in Europe there is a company adding free stencils to their prototype boards. So for a small pc board you get a small stencil. With this stencil printer you can print with it in minutes. This saved me lot of time and money.

With increasing board size professional (an a lot more expensive) printers are better.
Every tool hat it's limitations..

How does it cope with double sided?  Normally there is some warp in the boards after reflow so they are are not perfectly flat

I have not seen it yet. If the pc-board is not flat, it would be very difficult to print with a stencil due to the gap between the pc-board and the stencil.

[khs]

I use a https://blundell.co.uk/product/manual-screen-printer-foil-type/ for unmounted stencils and we have made thousands of boards using it in the past few years.

I made a shoort video of our first go with it on . It wasnt very cheap but it is well made.

Nice printer. 

[rx8pilot]

I use a https://blundell.co.uk/product/manual-screen-printer-foil-type/ for unmounted stencils and we have made thousands of boards using it in the past few years.

Have you tried larger panelized setups? Anything fine pitched?

[briandorey]

Have you tried larger panelized setups? Anything fine pitched?

I havent used it on larger panelized  boards but have used it on a single 20cm x 15cm pcb with down to 0.4 pitch QNF packages.

[DerekG]

Nice printer.

Just a kind pointer. You will get the paste right to the edges of the pads if you screed in all 4 directions

[girts]

Have you tried larger panelized setups? Anything fine pitched?

Panelized / double sided boards boards / fine pitch - no problems, excellent.
Must use some additional supports to avoid curving and bending, standard set of supports is not enough for larger or flexible boards.

Just a kind pointer. You will get the paste right to the edges of the pads if you screed in all 4 directions

There is a simplier solution - use "rounded rectangle" instead of "square" for pads.

Just a kind pointer. You will get the paste right to the edges of the pads if you screed in all 4 directions
 

[khs]

If you have a bad temper - 0201 IS a problem

Maybe. But take a look at the temperature:

To pick the 0201 you need an absolute accuracy of about dx = 0.1 mm
The dimension of your pnp is about  L = 2 m
The temperature coefficient of steel is about K = 12e-6 / K

So we can calculate the maximum temperature change for a 0.1 mm shift.

dx = K * dt * L
dx / (L * K) = dt = 4.1K

So placing 0201 may require a temperature stabilized room.
(Just my two cents..)

Some more info:

www.circuitsassembly.com/cms/images/stories/pdf/0305/smtai02_motorola.pdf

[rx8pilot]

My machine and almost any commercial system use glass linear encoders. They are very stable and .1mm is no problem at all. The Quad machines use steppers, but the linear encoders don't really care of a step is missed. (missed steps are likely very rare, only occurring if something is very wrong).

This old machine is probably in the range of .01mm repeatability. Assuming the ball screws and every other motion component is dialed into perfection. Obviously, the modern gear will beat that even when running at 10x-20x the speed.

For 0201 and 01005 parts - the nozzle and feeder performance need to be amazing. The nozzle for 0402 is about $40 - the nozzle intended for 0201 and 01005 is $300 each.

[mrpackethead]

If you have a bad temper - 0201 IS a problem

Maybe. But take a look at the temperature:

To pick the 0201 you need an absolute accuracy of about dx = 0.1 mm
The dimension of your pnp is about  L = 2 m
The temperature coefficient of steel is about K = 12e-6 / K

So we can calculate the maximum temperature change for a 0.1 mm shift.

dx = K * dt * L
dx / (L * K) = dt = 4.1K

So placing 0201 may require a temperature stabilized room.
(Just my two cents..)

Some more info:

www.circuitsassembly.com/cms/images/stories/pdf/0305/smtai02_motorola.pdf

One of the reasons to use fidudicals on boards is so that you dynamically scale things every time a board is loaded.     Yes, there is some shift in your machine, but in reality its not a huge issue.

[AgileE]

Manual printers can be pretty good if you take your time. I use a small USB microscope thingy on a PC to help with alignment when smaller parts are used. It's an APS printer for framed stencils and I still use even though the original APS P&P machine (LEV40) is long gone. I replaced the APS P&P with a Europlacer XPII as even with a manual printer as long as the boards were panalised I could printer faster than the P&P could do it's job. Still can with a lot of boards even with the faster P&P machine.

I do mostly my own boards, but all so other peoples, it certainly teaches you good design for manufacture.

[flasonsmts]

I want to adjust some idea of the Automatic solder paste printer, An automatic solder paste printer don't means it's high speed stencil printer, Automatic solder paste printer is just a high accuracy SMT printer, that it is automatic adjusting the stencil position by high clearance camera and computer. The print speed of this kind Automatic solder paste printer is just about 2 times printing per minute, a manual or semi auto solder paste printer is faster than this. When will need to use automatic solder paste printer, when the components is too small like 0201 and 01005 chips, this kind solder pad is hard to identify by human eyes, and manual or semi auto printer maybe slightly changing the print position by shaking etc. This will need Automatic SMT stencil printer. how to got the high output, it's simple, use 2 or many printer.

[rx8pilot]

I feel like a manual printer with a USB camera used for alignment would be right for low-volume / in-house printer usage. The full auto printers are generally huge and complicated, although probably do well with tiny apertures and critical alignment.

My super low-end setup uses a photographers loupe that I put directly in the stencil and use a handheld LED light to get the alignment. In the end, it gets a great alignment but at the expense of being a total pain in the butt. Wishing I had about 2 days that I could dedicate to designing and machining an alignment system based on a camera with a monitor.

I'll just add that to my 2-mile long lab wish list........

[jedas]

I've purchased TVM920, manual stencil printer and T960 oven one year ago. Now it is the time, when it almost payed off. We've assembled about 3k boards with it. PNP behaviour is unpredictable to say the least. I've tried to cure it with openPNP software, didn't helped much. It needs lots of baby siting and manual component realigment on the PCB quite often. But if you can live with it, it can be quite productive. We were able to do 300+ boards per day. I'm considering to upgrade to Kayo 6 head system in a year or so. Few shops around has purchased those, so I'll be able to get honest reviews about it.

I wanted to ask your opinion about semi automatic paste printer from Kayo (or any other vendor):
http://en.kayosmt.com/prod/detail/40.html
They've quoted it for 2390 USD, plus shipping. It looks quite not expensive, considering there are manual printers for 2-4k in the market. Would be such printer good fit for few hunder pcb's per day operation? Maybe it's not precise enough and would be total waste of money? I'm looking a way to improve paste printing quality for small footprints, and maybe speed up process a bit. Thank you for opinions.

[rx8pilot]

They've quoted it for 2390 USD, plus shipping. It looks quite not expensive, considering there are manual printers for 2-4k in the market. Would be such printer good fit for few hunder pcb's per day operation? Maybe it's not precise enough and would be total waste of money? I'm looking a way to improve paste printing quality for small footprints, and maybe speed up process a bit. Thank you for opinions.

That is a lot of hardware for the money. Of course that says nothing of what it may be like to use it. Visually, it looks pretty serious but it is the details you cannot see that will determine whether you love it or want to drop it into the bottom of the ocean.

[tautech]

Went to see a client today with a cute little PnP setup in his office. (thanks Mark)
It can do 300mm² PCBs and is self contained not needing any external air or vacuum supply.
NeoDen brand. ~$7k NZD

IIRC 32 feeders.
Issues, really only the SMD card working loose after periods of operation on the table that could be more rigid.

Upgrades from 'as supplied":
Keyboard, mouse and monitor although it can be driven and managed from the touch screen.

Overview


Platen


OS


We discussed the 'getting up to speed' issues and the common traps for novices and most have already been mentioned in this thread, eg: collisions, feeder tape, alignment and components left out for hand placement prior to reflow. SMD electrolytics where hand placed.
He had his own componentry management system/library that mainly grew from issues managing the Z axis variations of even very similar components.
These pics demonstrate his component management style.

Footprint values


Footprint list.

[Reckless]

This is not my pick and place lifestyle, but I am drooling for just a moment.....




Now....back to our regularly scheduled programming.....

I bought that machine for $4500 (mine is dual gantry so has 2 of those heads for twice the speed) but I had to replace a $1000 servo and clean a virus.  Not running it yet as I need 60 nozzles and some more feeders.

I just saw this thread.  It took me ~6 months to get up and going.  Like others I contemplated chinese machines, eventually I bought a used universal instruments genesis dual gantry 7 nozzle head linear motor machine off ebay for $4000 (cost new $300k).  When it arrived one of the axis wouldnt origin due to encoder being off axis and safety switch being broken, I spent 1 month solving.  Then the unit wouldnt read my fidicuals due to having 5mm edge instead of 3mm.  Lost one month trying to learn how to pop coordinates eventually redid CAD data to be more readable.  Lost 1-2 months over bad nozzles/feeders, also learning how to configure component/feeder/board data.  Had to purchase $6k of gold feeders and $500 worth nozzles.  I bought a used DEK automatic screen printer for $450 (cost new $250k) and an essemtec 3 zone oven with edge rail for $800 (new $30k).  Got some smema conveyors for $200.

[rx8pilot]

I bought that machine for $4500 but I had to replace a servo.  Not running it yet as I need 60 nozzles and some more feeders.

Holy crap!!
I don't think I have the stomach for the maintenance on that beast. My little single nozzle machine is already a handful - either expensive or time-consuming or both depending on the maintenance needed.

[Reckless]

Surprisingly ultra low maintenance according to everyone who has one.  The spindles need to have dust removed, universal recommends once a month but some people never do it, others once a year.  I think thats why people love universal for its super reliability.  Like you, I drooled heavily over that machine (gc-30, I got the gc-60).  My other machine GI-14D flex mounter is its sister (single gantry gi-07 shown in above video) often sold together for cell phone manufacturing back in the day. 

I have heard a few people describe it as having no maintenance machine.  One guy had to replace a $400 spindle in 5 years without doing proper preventive maintenance.