PNP machine for high bom?

[Just-sean]

I currently have a custom DIY LumenPNP using OpenPNP to support my needs, but it requires a ton of babysitting (custom 3D printed feeders that aren’t the best). My largest board has 80 or so components.. I mainly run 0402s and variety of 12,16,34, and 44 sized components.
In a perfect world I could find a machine that allowed 45 8mm feeders, a couple 12 and 16s, and the rest I could do tray/strips around the machine. I don’t necessarily care about high speed more so reliability and not having to watch over it.

Coming from OpenPnp, I love that the software seems really good as compared to horror stories of some of the Chinese PNP software.

Any thoughts on solutions here?

[ajb]

If you're looking to step into big name brands, Europlacer really emphasize low/volume high mix features.  Any machine brand can sell you a single tray holder or a tray changer that typically hold 10-20 trays, but either one will typically cost you 1/4 of your feeder slots.  Europlacer can fit 5-10 trays (depending on machine) internally without losing feeder slots (you might lose some max board length or an optional nozzle tray or something).  They also emphasize support for trays of cut tapes (other companies may support this to greater or lesser degrees), and freeform pickup of loose parts in trays, which AFAIK is unique in the industry.  Their feeder design may also represent better value for you, depending on a lot of variables.

That's not to say other brands wouldn't be just as good or better for your situation, you'd have to really look at your anticipated needs and see how they map onto offerings from different brands.  Feeder costs are especially tricky to compare between Europlacer and others, and in general the labor and time of swapping and maintaining feeders is a significant factor for high mix production. 

[loki42]

Is it a changing bom or large bom but always the same?  Euro placer and mydata are good for high mix so lots of short run stuff. Any mainstream brand will fit that many feeders. My Universal machines fit 144 x 8mm as you can fit 2 x 8mm in a dual lane feeder per slot.  With a platform tray feeder you can have something like 80 different trays loaded and stacks off 10 deep in a tray feeder. 

[trevwhite]

Is OpenPNP software good enough? Is it the hardware that is the issue?


There has been some work done to support Kayo machines with OpenPNP. That might be an option? I think possibly the same with some of the Neoden machines too. This might save some pain in having to relearn new software and Chinese machines have a reputation for rubbish software.

[SMTech]

As others say, pretty much any standard non-Chinese pick and place can handle this many parts "120 lanes" is a very common standard machine size. The Yamaha/Hanwha/Fuji etc machines don't officially advertise support for strips of tape loaded onto "trays" but 3rd parties sell strip trays to use in them. In some cases there is somewhere to put a tray or two without losing feeder spaces (certainly I was told this when looking at an iPulse M20 but I never saw it demonstrated).

There is enough evidence in this forum alone that Chinese machines and clone feeders range from pretty poor to at least acceptable, if you pick the biggest Chinese machines from Neoden/Kayo you just about fit your needs & babysitting would probably be reduced (with good feeders). However you wouldn't have a machine as well built as you might get 2nd hand and mainstream.

Fristsch,Essemtec,Autotronik(Manncorp in the US), TWS Automation & DDM Novastar all make (or made) smaller machines that understand requirement like yours (or mine) from the off. Unfortunately they also often come with surprising shortcomings or higher pricing than you might expect. Essemtec newer machines in particular are now very expensive as their aim has shifted and seems focused on a high margin agile lab or prototyping department. However if you find one of these the right size and config for you they aren't bad options (well I'm less sure about DDM) . Essemtec in particular has quite nice software and will always support a machine but some official spares are crazy expensive.

Europlacers strip handling and loose part handling are fairly new changes to the software while the strip handling was possible before there was a software limit to how many. The tray shelf is also an option not a standard feature, it is a popular option tho' so will be fitted on many machines used by small batch contractors. As with Mydata(Mycronic) it is changeover time and relative cost of owning many "smart" feeders that is their primary weapon along with being a true flexplacer that can place just about anything. Both brands make massive machines, you have to really want these features to justify the space. Europlacer has some older machines (flexys being one) that don't really reflect the primary brand focus.

[Styno]

I'm afraid that the Chinese have pushed almost everyone out of the small scale production market.

I looked at a Dima Modulo MP-200. Its quite a compact machine but even so, in an off-line setup, it handles up to 180 8/12 mm smart feeders an uses simple, easy to understand software. Trays don't reduce feederslots but reduce pcb working area. Reasonably fast too for small shops with 9k IPC placement rate. These systems are out of official support, which is a pity, but it makes then fairly cheap to buy.

[SMTech]

I'm afraid that the Chinese have pushed almost everyone out of the small scale production market.

I looked at a Dima Modulo MP-200. Its quite a compact machine but even so, in an off-line setup, it handles up to 180 8/12 mm smart feeders an uses simple, easy to understand software. Trays don't reduce feederslots but reduce pcb working area. Reasonably fast too for small shops with 9k IPC placement rate. These systems are out of official support, which is a pity, but it makes then fairly cheap to buy.

We nearly chose an MP-200 nice little machine but Dimas future was fairly clear even then.

I don't know that they have been affected by China so much as you might think. What has changed is the established players (in some but not all cases) can build machines using modern & cheaper technology for very similar prices to the numbers being asked by the little ones, for example Panansonic can apparently sell you a new machine with feeders for around £100KGBP, I think Hanwha can too, that is not too dissimilar to what was possible 10-15 years ago. That will get you a machine several times faster than the small machines.

This has pushed the small machines further into a niche, they have very few features that set them apart aside from size and feeder counter for sqaure metre (only without a conveyor). Dima was out of the game before China even started playing, and over the last 10 years its the big players that have merged or closed (Hitachi->Yamaha, Sony->Juki,iPulse->Yamaha). Actually this is where the european small machines clearly understand the market better than China, you NEED the feeder capacity for modern electronics and they make no attempt to cater for that market.

[Styno]

We nearly chose an MP-200 nice little machine but Dimas future was fairly clear even then.

I don't know that they have been affected by China so much as you might think. Dima was out of the game before China even started playing

Indeed, I wasn't thinking about Dima but the current market.

What has changed is the established players (in some but not all cases) can build machines using modern & cheaper technology for very similar prices to the numbers being asked by the little ones, for example Panansonic can apparently sell you a new machine with feeders for around £100KGBP, I think Hanwha can too, that is not too dissimilar to what was possible 10-15 years ago. That will get you a machine several times faster than the small machines.

I have a quote for a new Hanwha SM482 with some feeders for about that price. You can lease too, for a pretty good price. It's a beast of a machine, would sincerely love to be able to afford one.

This has pushed the small machines further into a niche, they have very few features that set them apart aside from size and feeder counter for sqaure metre (only without a conveyor). Dima was out of the game before China even started playing, and over the last 10 years its the big players that have merged or closed (Hitachi->Yamaha, Sony->Juki,iPulse->Yamaha). Actually this is where the European small machines clearly understand the market better than China, you NEED the feeder capacity for modern electronics and they make no attempt to cater for that market.

True, I haven't seen (standalone) large feeder count cheap Chinese machines yet. But for the price of a single SM482 you can buy two or three Kayo/Qihi/HWGC type machines that would exceed the feeder count and match speed. But then you'd need the space and it requires more feeder bookkeeping etc. Hanwha does have great support.

A old second hand Dima MP-200 is more or less the same price of a new Chinese. Both have minimal support but the Dima has a smart feeder and space advantage.

[Just-sean]

Thank you all! A lot to chew on. While I’ll probably appreciate the no fuss with name brands, the price tag and sheer size of them don’t really work for me. What is making the most sense is the kayo 8 head machine with 80 slots. I hear great things about kayo. 

[48X24X48X]

Maximum I see from Chinese companies are 120 feeder from HWGC around $25K and 100 feeder from Bovi (not sure about the price).

[Just-sean]

Who’s the most reliable, software, suppory of the three - kayo , bovi, or Hwgc?

[MR]

I'm afraid that the Chinese have pushed almost everyone out of the small scale production market.

for some of them that's just very good news, back then when we bought the Mechatronika from Poland it was a clear fail, service was a fail and the machine and software was rubbish.
We demanded multiselect in their application to select particular components to be placed and to lock problematic feeders during a pick and place process so issues can be handled at the end of the process (to avoid permanent babysitting) - all we got back was basically we have no idea how pick and place machines work, we have no idea about mechanical engineering, we have no idea about software.

Great so we had a closer look at their machine and others, designed a pnp machine by ourself and built our own machine which covers all our needs including our own pick and place software (which has a multi-select feature). That was before chinese machines came up. But even now that shitty polish company is spreading that we have no idea about anything to their customers ;-)

Well they're on a sinking boat luckily, the market is wiping them away slowly.
How stupid can a manufacturer in Europe be to not support customer demands if they want to be 5-10x more expensive than the chinese.
Natural selection is kicking in.

[Aspartame]

Best to my knowledge chinese machines are not great at picking up from trays.
I would start with a second hand SM482 with chinese aftermarket electric feeders.

[48X24X48X]

Who’s the most reliable, software, suppory of the three - kayo , bovi, or Hwgc?

I guess that is subjective. Doubt anyone has tried them all and able to give a conclusion. Bovi & HWGC are splinter companies from Boreytech ages ago. So the 3 might look familiar in the early days but has since pretty much developed their own stuff. Software also doesn't look the same. Kayo is just a rebadger for Bovi until 2019, not sure who they use today but their lineup has pretty much stagnated ever since. I have only used HWGC until now so I can't comment on the rest. Just look at my videos, it might give you a better picture of what to expect. HWGC support has been excellent to me even though I bought my machine from a reseller. They basically just offload the support from their reseller to themselves. Very nice gesture, and I like that very much.

[glenenglish]

All machines.. if you have lots of 0402s, you will need to babysit it, or be prepared to dump alot of parts and set the part to  do a  few retries.

My Samsung Hanwha SM482+ is a 120 slot.   ......  you can put a single mixed tray in it if you want,
but  I have a used 20 tray loader for it which I load all sorts of parts into all the trays. fantastic, never looked back
Why is it so good ? Because I can use double sided adhesive tape to stick down say a 10 or 20  unit cut tape. once stuck down you can pull the cover tape off.  I have some acrylic sheets cut to same size as a jedec tray about 5mm thick.
then , teach the machine where part 1 is, and part n is and how many parts and away it goes.... it remembers it.

[MR]

All machines.. if you have lots of 0402s, you will need to babysit it, or be prepared to dump alot of parts and set the part to  do a  few retries.

why do you think so?
I'm mostly doing 0402 and it's pretty much okay
My experience is most babysitting is related to bad feeders, ok Mechatronika had a shitty optical recognition for one part we use but that's an exception.
I designed and manufactured my own e-feeders, good feeders definitely need some R&D and prototyping cycles.
The chinese e-feeders went through several cycles as well I can tell.

[SMTech]

All machines.. if you have lots of 0402s, you will need to babysit it, or be prepared to dump alot of parts and set the part to  do a  few retries.

why do you think so?
I'm mostly doing 0402 and it's pretty much okay
My experience is most babysitting is related to bad feeders, ok Mechatronika had a shitty optical recognition for one part we use but that's an exception.
I designed and manufactured my own e-feeders, good feeders definitely need some R&D and prototyping cycles.
The chinese e-feeders went through several cycles as well I can tell.

Well for one because IIRC he made the transition from that class of machine...

For the most part, the Chinese machines are (or were) not sold with e-feeders and have a strong focus on using cloned pneumatic Yamaha feeders, assuming they use true feeders at all. These are often, by all accounts, not as good as the real thing. The real thing also I think might predate in 0402 in design. Lots of feeders (even electronic ones) are pitch or pocket size specific which can mean you need to own quite a lot if you use a high mix of 0603+ and 0402. 0402 needs more than just accurate feeders, from 0402 down, everything matters just that little bit more and inaccuracy of movement or build will factor in.

Everyones version of OK is different, our Essemtec does 0402 passives very well (as you would hope given it can in theory do 01005), assuming the board is properly secured and level but if you have strips loaded into electronic feeders it works better after a little bedding in. However if you take your tiny semiconductor packages, they are much harder to pick and will really show up a bad feeder or maintenance requirement.

It is high time your shared your mystical in house SMT machine and put your Mechatonika ancient history to bed, we get it, you had a bad experience.. so do people who bought Land Rovers in the last 5 years...

[loki42]

My uic machines never have problems with 0402. I've got auto feeder teach and auto pick update turned on, Gold plus feeders.  They do have issues sometimes with QFN though.  BGA and any leaded part is fine but QFN the cameras sometimes decide there isn't enough contrast between the background and the part and can't find the size of the package.

[SMTech]

My uic machines never have problems with 0402. I've got auto feeder teach and auto pick update turned on, Gold plus feeders.  They do have issues sometimes with QFN though.  BGA and any leaded part is fine but QFN the cameras sometimes decide there isn't enough contrast between the background and the part and can't find the size of the package.

Software/algorithms written before QFN was a thing?

That's a curious limitation, ePlace on Essemtec is using the same algorithms for QFN as QFP, it see's pads as legs using the same lighting settings and works perfectly. Notably the biggest difference between the vision on the Essemtec and our previous budget placer is the old machine did extremely crude edge detection to get an x&y max dimension, Essemtec is measuring every lead/ball and comparing them with a model. A bent leg or missing ball and the part is rejected. I get the impression many chinese platforms are rather more like the old system. The old machine was on its very last legs when we first encountered QFN, it lacked the mechanical accuracy to place a thin fine pitch device such as they typically are but luckily they really don't mind a little nudge post placement. On that note Essemtex FLX machines if you were to stumble on one.. I was certainly told by a user that they spent time on every board pre-reflow nudging and checking 0402 placement. That was something they were managing, they used it for a small number of boards that they didn't outsource and they still purchased it successor. Since then however, everything has come in-house and they use Europlacer machines, mainly I think for the feeder count to start with and then they liked the platform. When you build boards with 20K+ parts (many tiny QFN & DFN) on them, your tolerance for the odd part being wonky or missing is very very low.

[48X24X48X]

The Yamaha clone electrical feeder works very well and consistent with 0402. If coupled with the proper nozzle size (example: 502 Juki for 0402), they actually fare better than 0603 placement.

[jayx]

Autotronik don't have much problems with 0402. Even 0201 are not bad, especially on the latest machines which use hi-res cameras. Also you can use the same feeders from 0201 to 1210 components. Highest capacity is 256 8mm tape feeders (without conveyer), 192 with conveyer. Software could be a bit better, but it's manageable.

But I think regardless of the machine, high BOM / high number of feeders means some of them will be far from the PCB, so speed suffer quite a lot (unless it's a dual gantry machine).

[loki42]

My uic machines never have problems with 0402. I've got auto feeder teach and auto pick update turned on, Gold plus feeders.  They do have issues sometimes with QFN though.  BGA and any leaded part is fine but QFN the cameras sometimes decide there isn't enough contrast between the background and the part and can't find the size of the package.

Software/algorithms written before QFN was a thing?

They mention them briefly in the docs but there's a bunch of different algorithms and I might not be using the right one. It's mostly to do with lighting and there's times where I've just turned up the camera lighting levels and then it's worked fine.  I've switched to using pattern find on some of the troublesome ones and it's fine. The parts in question are pretty tiny and 0.4mm pin pitch.  For qfp I never have issues and it detects bent pins etc. 

[SMTech]

Autotronik don't have much problems with 0402. Even 0201 are not bad, especially on the latest machines which use hi-res cameras. Also you can use the same feeders from 0201 to 1210 components. Highest capacity is 256 8mm tape feeders (without conveyer), 192 with conveyer. Software could be a bit better, but it's manageable.

But I think regardless of the machine, high BOM / high number of feeders means some of them will be far from the PCB, so speed suffer quite a lot (unless it's a dual gantry machine).

I could almost swear I would have needed dedicated 2mm pitch feeders from Autotronik a decade a go, but it looks like they have a new feeder (is it a clone/semiclone?). They otherwise offer an interesting mid ground, if they are priced similarly they sit pretty firmly between your Kayo/Neoden machines and the big brands and they have always had some of the quirky little features to handle strips and loose parts that others are only just catching on to. Some of the model numbers haven't changed in ages however but the paintjob has changed, there also seems to be some evidence you need to be careful if buying 2nd hand.

Higher feeder counts do indeed mean further to travel and hence potentially slower realtime placement vs a headline optimal speed. The head typically has to pick, come back to camera and then to board to place. Some machines have cameras on the head so they can go pick->board, others might have a camera on both the front and back of the machine. Typically you optimise your feeder loading to keep the high volume parts in front of the camera which is probably where your board stops. I think the latest Europlacers track the board down the conveyor and place as they go as the on the fly camera on those can handle more than just small passives.

On our Essemtec, which is not exactly designed for speed, I'd say a reasonably optimised feeder loadout is easily worth 15% of speed however that speed is almost meaningless if you are not doing any kind of volume or placing lots of parts. We sacrificed conveyor for feeder/tray capacity when we specified our machine, that is probably worth 30-40% of effective production speed as you have to interact with the machine for every board, loading securing and removing it. That number is of course very variable depending on the component count.

[glenenglish]

My 0402 issues are NEVER placement,  0402 issues , when I have them , -- are always pickup.
Placement with the Samsung 482 is always 'perfect'.

0402s can be good, or not... tape varies enormously.   When you have 100 x  0402 feeders loaded up like I do  - in one go....  some will give you more trouble.

I actually prefer 0402 compared to dealing with 0805 and 1206  as I find thick paper tape issues to be a bigger PITA.

I have a mix of electric + air.  the air chinese 8mm feeders for the machine are good and cheap (USD135)  so I have alot of them....
and I use the electric for things I need to be able to reverse.

I put the thicker tape into the electric feeders because they handle pushing thick tape around the curve and pulling tape off a bit better, and often they are short tape and so I need to go fwd/back. but... the air feeders the minimum tape length usable is shorter than the electric.... The air feeders are a bit faster to load.

Yes, I had a Yamaha YVL88, (old) ., tried a few chinese machines, I  wrote lots of software (spent months) etc,  decided my time was spent better in other areas, so I bought a '482+.
I would also recommend factory Juki, heard good things.

Oh by the way- anyone who is interested, happy to share----- I have a XML reader and writer for the samsung (I wrote it in python) and I and tell the machine what is in each slot. and I can read what it thinks it has, also.
No need for me to go through and use the '482 GUI to load the machine slots, my software writes native files that can be imported / exported.

Certainly with high mix with some high count, you think about where you put your parts.  IE you put your top 10 right in front of the PCB. But reality is probably only the top 20 used makes a big difference on feeder placement. I am not a volume user...  just high mix. 

[jayx]

I could almost swear I would have needed dedicated 2mm pitch feeders from Autotronik a decade ago

You're right, there were two types of feeders: with minimum 2mm or 4mm step. 2mm step were more expensive but also more flexible as they could be programed for 4mm pitch components. Not sure when Autotronik introduced them, but I'd say at least 8 years ago. The older/cheaper 4mm step feeders can be converted to 2mm step: https://elektromatt.pl/smt/en/feedermod/.

Can't say much about the new feeders, apart form that the tiny display is likely useless.

Autotronik have a camera on the head which can do fairly large components (up to ~15mm square if I remember correctly) and have much better package recognition system than Neoden. I'm curious what may be the problem with 2nd hand machines, apart from hard to find 2nd hand feeders?

I've seen Essemtec Fox on a trade show a year ago, and was impressed with the software and paste jetting capability. What was less impressive, was a PCB holding system (for no conveyer option). Very poor for such a nice machine, required at least three hands to operate properly  . Also I've asked a tricky question, whether Essemtec build the PCBs for the machines themselves. The answer was no .