Electronics > Manufacturing & Assembly

To buy or not to buy, which is the problem? Neoden 4 VS Neoden YY1 VS P20

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Fdr87CC:
It’s been a full month now (even though it feels like years) of investigation for a PNP machine and I am back to the origin of the search (one more time). That is why, with all my frustration desperation, I decided to try and get some help from experienced people: maybe this time I will take my final decision. It may be.
Long story short (no story is ever been made short but I will try) we are in need to set up a little prototyping area in our facility in order to be able to produce prototypes in little time.

The machines I’ve selected (Neoden 4, Neoden YY1 and Mechatronics Systems P20) all have:
-   Bottom camera;
-   Fiducial recognition;
-   Automatic feeders;
-   Comparable feeder capacity.

We don’t care about CPH, but we further need:
-   User friendly software. It would be nice to avoid spending one hour to program it for a 20 minutes run;
-   Reliability. The idea is the following: in the meantime the machine populates the board I am going to take a coffee and, when I came back, the machine shouldn’t be stuck after the 10th step.

We are using passives (1206, 0805, 0603), LQFP100, SOD-123, SOT23, DO-219AB, SOP-8, TO263-7, VSSOP-8, WSON8, SO8 and DPAK.
In this light, which of the mentioned machines would be the most reliable and easy to use? Is it worth spending more money to get a Neoden 4 (or P20) or would the YY1 will be good enough? Any other recommendation worth to mention?

Thanks to your contribution my headache will be out of the picture!

Jackster:
Personally, I would stay away from Neoden going off this thread https://www.eevblog.com/forum/manufacture/neoden-yy1-pick-and-place-machine-with-under-$3k-price-for-hobbiestlow-vol-usag/msg4292275/#msg4292275

What sort of workload are you looking at putting through a machine? Total boards/panels, components per board, accuracy requirements (size of components) etc?

Fdr87CC:
Thank you for the support!!

I had a look and I discarded the YY1, but I still see Neoden 4 as an option.

I expect to produce few different boards in a year: between 3 to 5 PCBs per prototype, and no more than 10/12 designs. Worst case scenario would be 60 PCBs, not much (but PCBs may have 200/300 components each, which means a lot of work if I were to populate components by hand). I don’t need to use any panel, just single PCBs. 

Concerning components size:
-   Smallest passive footprint is 0603;
-   LQFP100 with pitch of 0,5mm;
-   Several ICs with 0,4mm and 0,5mm.

Mangozac:

--- Quote from: Fdr87CC on November 18, 2022, 12:14:37 pm ---Thank you for the support!!

I had a look and I discarded the YY1, but I still see Neoden 4 as an option.

I expect to produce few different boards in a year: between 3 to 5 PCBs per prototype, and no more than 10/12 designs. Worst case scenario would be 60 PCBs, not much (but PCBs may have 200/300 components each, which means a lot of work if I were to populate components by hand). I don’t need to use any panel, just single PCBs. 

--- End quote ---
Based on that I still wouldn't bother. 300 components is a lot to place but you will spend a lot of time programming and mucking around that I still think it would be a break even in terms of time spent. You're probably better off investing in a decent electric assist manual placer and a good method of picking from cut tape.

mikeselectricstuff:

--- Quote from: Fdr87CC on November 18, 2022, 12:14:37 pm ---
-   Several ICs with 0,4mm and 0,5mm.

--- End quote ---
I think any cheap machine is likely to struggle with that - expect to do some manual tweaking between placement and reflow.

--- Quote ----   User friendly software. It would be nice to avoid spending one hour to program it for a 20 minutes run;

--- End quote ---
Forget that with any Chinese machine, until you write your own software to translate


--- Quote ----   Reliability. The idea is the following: in the meantime the machine populates the board I am going to take a coffee and, when I came back, the machine shouldn’t be stuck after the 10th step.

--- End quote ---
The biggest issue you are likely to see affecting reliability is feeders. Unfortunately AFAIK no Chinese machine does the sensible thing on a feeder problem, which is to move on to the next part after a few retries and alert all problem parts at the end of the job, so it gets as much as possible done without attention - instead they just stop where they are and cry for help.

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