The Reality of a Pick and Place Lifestyle

[jmelson]

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.

Wow, that is insane.  I do boards with a wide mix of parts, from 0603 passives up to 20mm square FPGAs, and a lot of SOIC-16 and similar types.  Not sure the Universal handles such a wide variety of sizes.  The big wheel with the vision camera at the top is REALLY smart, though!

Well, I have a Philips CSM84, it does about 3000 PPH in real usage, and that is enough to keep me busy.  It is built like a tank, I've been running it for close to 12 years now in very intermittent use, with only a few problems.

Jon

[Reckless]

That machine is a chip shooter.  It's sister machine is a flex mounter.  Universal was most famous in the industry for making the best flex mounters back in the 90s.  When all the japanese units could only handle 3-5mm tall components they were able to handle 15-20mm.  I need speed in my application so I prefer the turret machine gun style head.  The GC-60 does 57,000 cph which I feel is too slow.  We are debating whether to chain the GC-60D with GI-14D to get 86,000 cph.  My tallest component is 3mm.  I have been trying to figure out a way to have radial components fed through a feeder (Universal makes one called the Radon but only works in new machines and they are pricey). 

[HHaase]

Ahhh, the Universal Lightning.   My previous employer had one of them, and I was in charge of maintenance on it.   Really a great setup and as you said, comparatively trouble free.   Feel free to tap me as a resource.   Compared to the Fuji CP6/IP3 lines, people hated working on the Universal line,  they said it was boring because nothing ever happened.  It just spit boards out all day long.   The OVEN had more trouble than the placement machine.

I'll give a longer post on my own P&P life in a bit.   But my TVM802A is placing away behind me, and it may not be loud but still disturbs my thought process when I'm internetting.

-Hans

[SMTech]

I think would be better if you could show your work for the high qualified specialists. I think you would get much more recommendations from them than here 

Ahh for a thumbs down button.

[PixieDust]

[GUESSING] I have a couple of hundred hours total fiddling, fixing, and learning on top of the effort to just setup and run the system.

You would be surprised how much less time it actually took you learning about the machine. I track my time and I'm usually 2 to 4 times out in terms of estimated time something took and reality, i.e. whatever felt like an hour was usually just 15 mins. My experience working with people on various projects and they were usually 2-4 times out on how long something took as well.

I'm at the very beginning of my electronics journey and all I can say is that there is no chance that I'll buy a Chinese machine, no way, that is if I get a PnP machine at all. I'm still poking away at many things and still have many unknowns. If I decide to go the PnP route, I think I'll build a custom made thing, even though it will probably take around a year to make I'm still confident that the end result will be much better than buying Chinese.

[rx8pilot]

I think I'll build a custom made thing, even though it will probably take around a year to make I'm still confident that the end result will be much better than buying Chinese.

This is one of my favorite DIY pick and place stories....endless lessons to be learned in the dark art of PCB assembly.
https://www.youtube.com/c/StephenTheRobot

[jmelson]

I think I'll build a custom made thing, even though it will probably take around a year to make I'm still confident that the end result will be much better than buying Chinese.

Well, I have only used name-brand "professional" machines, bought used.  I have had 2 machines, a Philips CSM84, made by Yamaha, similar to their CM84, and a Quad QSA30A, made by Samsung on their basic CP30, but with Quad electronic feeders and component vision cameras.
If you have never run a P&P machine, you will not appreciate the amount of attention to error recovery required!  My QSA30A inspects each part for X, Y and height dimensions, and discards parts that don't measure right, as that probably means the part was picked up sideways on the nozzle.  Even my old Philips machine would try to pick parts 4 times before stopping and asking for manual recovery.  The QSA will try 3 times, and then give up on that part, but will remember that that particular part type has not been placed.  Once it finishes the board, you can reach in and clear the feeder jam or whatever the issue was, and hit start, and it will place those skipped parts.  Pretty neat!  Also, there is a LOT of setup testing help built into the system.  When setting up the fiducials, there is a "scan test" button, and it will go the the location of each fiducial and then image it and tell you the offset from the nominal location, and wait a second for you to view how it located the centroid.  There is also a test pick button, that allows you to pick up a part and it will run the vison tests and tell you what the part size was and how far off from the center of the nozzle.  Also, you can use the down-looking camera to check and adjust the pickup position of every part, to improve pick-up reliability.  All of these software features probably took a while to develop.

Jon

[mikeselectricstuff]

The QSA will try 3 times, and then give up on that part, but will remember that that particular part type has not been placed.  Once it finishes the board, you can reach in and clear the feeder jam or whatever the issue was, and hit start, and it will place those skipped parts. 

I'm amazed that this isn't a standard feature on all P&P's - it's such an obvious way to do it - the whole point of a P&P is that it will do as much as possible of the job by itself without babysitting.

[SMTech]

The QSA will try 3 times, and then give up on that part, but will remember that that particular part type has not been placed.  Once it finishes the board, you can reach in and clear the feeder jam or whatever the issue was, and hit start, and it will place those skipped parts. 

I'm amazed that this isn't a standard feature on all P&P's - it's such an obvious way to do it - the whole point of a P&P is that it will do as much as possible of the job by itself without babysitting.

Right, but it should also be smart enough to know it shouldn't place something that will then get in the way when this other part is placed out-of-order but this is often called collision avoidance and charged as an optional extra.

[jmelson]

The QSA will try 3 times, and then give up on that part, but will remember that that particular part type has not been placed.  Once it finishes the board, you can reach in and clear the feeder jam or whatever the issue was, and hit start, and it will place those skipped parts. 

I'm amazed that this isn't a standard feature on all P&P's - it's such an obvious way to do it - the whole point of a P&P is that it will do as much as possible of the job by itself without babysitting.

Well, you have to realize I started on a 1995 Philips CSM84, and then upgraded to a Quad QSA30A, made in about 1999 or so.
The feeders on the Philips were really bad, the cover tape pull was VERY weak, and I had to choke up on springs to try to get more pull.  So, I had to babysit the machine all the time.  The Quad has feeders that work a LOT better, so I can generally walk away and do something else.
Jon

[jmelson]

Right, but it should also be smart enough to know it shouldn't place something that will then get in the way when this other part is placed out-of-order but this is often called collision avoidance and charged as an optional extra.

None of the machines I've worked on (only 2) have this kind of sophistication.  Collision avoidance is a VERY complex issue, it VASTLY complicates the motion planning.  It is easier to just raise the nozzle higher.
Jon

[mikeselectricstuff]

The QSA will try 3 times, and then give up on that part, but will remember that that particular part type has not been placed.  Once it finishes the board, you can reach in and clear the feeder jam or whatever the issue was, and hit start, and it will place those skipped parts. 

I'm amazed that this isn't a standard feature on all P&P's - it's such an obvious way to do it - the whole point of a P&P is that it will do as much as possible of the job by itself without babysitting.

Right, but it should also be smart enough to know it shouldn't place something that will then get in the way when this other part is placed out-of-order but this is often called collision avoidance and charged as an optional extra.

That's easy enough if you can specify the retry behaviour - collision avoidance isn't going to be needed that often unless you have tall parts and a limited nozzle height range, or a very dense board with some tall parts,  so on the occasions it is, you should be able to tell it to halt on retry fail.

"Place as much as you can then tell me about any issues when you're done" should certainly be the default behaviour. Unfortunately many of the Chinese manufacturers don't seem to understand this

[rx8pilot]

My Quad has the Windows software which simply stops when the retry limit is reached. Sometimes this is good, but mostly I wish it would just continue and provide me a list of errors at the end.

If I am doing 0805/0603 I can generally walk away. Once I get into 0402 and 0201, I have to stay pretty close and expect to tweak feeders regularly. Over time, I have identified the better feeders in my inventory and those are the ones that get used for the small parts.

At the moment....none of this matters since I cannot even buy the parts I need for my existing products or the new designs. 

[48X24X48X]

"Place as much as you can then tell me about any issues when you're done" should certainly be the default behaviour. Unfortunately many of the Chinese manufacturers don't seem to understand this

On my Chinese HWGC machine, you can set the retry attempt count to as many as you want or no retry at all. At least in their latest software version I can now mute the buzzer alarm (it's annoying) when an error happens and it gives you options to retry, skip this time around, skip entirely for that particular feeder or abort the entire job completely. I also did suggest what you mentioned here to them. I think over time, they might just add these features, hopefully.

[mikeselectricstuff]

"Place as much as you can then tell me about any issues when you're done" should certainly be the default behaviour. Unfortunately many of the Chinese manufacturers don't seem to understand this

On my Chinese HWGC machine, you can set the retry attempt count to as many as you want or no retry at all. At least in their latest software version I can now mute the buzzer alarm (it's annoying) when an error happens and it gives you options to retry, skip this time around, skip entirely for that particular feeder or abort the entire job completely. I also did suggest what you mentioned here to them. I think over time, they might just add these features, hopefully.

I wouldn't bet on it - having it place as much as possible then fix up afterwards will usually mean a fundamental change to the way the data is handled, i.e. it needs to have a "placed" marker for every part instead of just remembering how far through the file it got. It's really something that needs to be designed in from the start

[48X24X48X]

In the current version, it already has logging on failed placement including a screen capture of the vision with all the parameters. I think it's more on whether they want or don't want to do it. But I have seen the software progress so much over a span of 2 years, so I still have a tiny hope of that.