High speed passive component pick and place machine for $3600
Mats tipped us to this high speed pick and place machine that’s currently about $3600 on Taobao. It features 15 automatic reel feeders, and the top speed of the machine is 6000 parts per hour. The placement head can handle parts as small as 0402, but it doesn’t use a vision system so accuracy will be limited.
This entry was posted in tools and tagged pick 'n' place, tool.
Comments
I wonder if one of the ex-pats over there (Mitch, Zach) could be talked into going to take a look at this thing?
Every Chinese thing has a limit. I have t962 reflow oven it is rubbish. Inside is sticked everything by paper stick. Timer is going out. Reflow profile is a lot longer than measure, etc.. I expect similar problems with this machine. It needs a lot of work to be usable, but some parts are usable of this machine. It is much cheaper than you can do. You need to improve it. In Czeck we say ‘DODO’ ie. Finish it at home/work. It is communism joke from own country.
Jirka
Yes, looks ‘made to a price’ for sure, but it would be interesting to get a good look at one and check out it’s good and bad points.
Some metal parts are usable. But not sw. You have to rewrite sw (it is not open source). There are some CNC machines which could be rebuild to pick and place or you can buy metal parts separatelly. It is cheaper and you can choise for example ball screw or belt.
Jirka
Have you seen the software for this machine? Were? Or else how else can you say that the software is not usable?
SW is not easy thing. You could need some changes and it is closed. You need support and there is no support. It is black box. It is not usable. If you buy it only for some type of PCBs, it could run. We are used to quality, precise work. They are in developing state. It is big different between machine from our country, germany, etc. and China machines. They are clever, but they do not have materials, tools, etc. as we have. For them this is high quility but for us not. Buy it and you will see.
There are video on toabao, but i think it is promotion. There are missing steps on video.
Jirka
Yes, this looks great at first glance, but when you look at it in more detail, it’s a bit ‘mickey mouse’. There are already open-source pick and place machine projects around, I haven’t looked at them yet, just a friend of mine said he was building one. The hardest hardware part I think would be getting all the feeders setup nicely.
There is small cup on the corner. This cup is for alignment SMD. Head pick smd, next head is moved into cup, alignment SMD and then put part on PCB. This is not shown on video. But it must be, because it does not have optic to alignment parts. It is easy, but the time is longer to place a SMD part.
Jirka
They claim to have +-0.025 mm ( about 1 mil) position cabability. A soic normally have 1.27 mm (50 mil) pitch which means that if the machine is even 5 times worse that the claimed precision the chip will only be 10% off and will easily snap back into place during reflow. I’d guess that even if the chip is placed 20% off the correct position it will correct itself during reflow.
And no – the machine does not need to bounce the chip around in the “cup” to align it as can clearly be seen in this video. http://www.tudou.com/programs/view/ONuk_woLYEk/?resourceId=0_06_02_99
This video was prepared. It is not possible to pick each SMD in the same place. It is reason why this types of machines have cup, and why professional systems have camera.
Wrong. The specs on the todou page:
http://item.taobao.com/item.htm?spm=2013.1.48-8305995323.5.aQ4kl0&id=19943724706
Twin pickup heads, each head can swivel between -180 to 180 deg. That’s how they are placing the 0402 components in the test board in the clock dial.
Just because it came out of China doesn’t mean it’s automatically a scam.
I am willing to bet the price of the machine that it performs as advertised — and if I would be in the SMT small-shop business (like e.g. SparkFun), I’d buy one tomorrow. Chinese technology isn’t what it used to be 10 years ago, at least not in the “cheap and crap” department.
Oh, and by the way, the machine does have vision (see the white LEDs lighting the target in the last video) and can rotate the part literally on the fly (that’s why the specs say “it can place parts in any orientation without performance [cph] decrease”).
I wouldn’t be surprised if it can read your Eagle .brd files too ;-) I’m not saying it can do 6000 cph 24/7/365 and I’m also not claiming it can do BGA or anything finer than the packages advertised — but when used within spec, I’m sure it delivers to spec.
The chinese stuff is improving, but it’s still a long long way from being ‘quality’ stuff. But it’s probably quite suitable for it’s intended purpose – i.e. light duty work and as Matseng said, most parts will snap back in the oven anyway. But I know precision machinery and I can absolutely 100% guarantee you that this will not hold 0.0254mm (1 thou) (or one mil for the PCB layout-ers) consistently over time. It’s simply folded sheet for the bed, that *will* expand/contract, twist and warp at different temperatures (not to mention the stresses introduced by the folding process), there is absolutely no question whatsoever.
But, having said all that, it’s likely perfectly fine for light duty, small volume work (DP Lab? lol), just don’t expect it to perform like a proper precision machine tool. If it does have a camera as is usggest, that would be good, that’s really a necessity.
Hi
I would buy this device
Please give me a price