[quote author="JohnSL"]I've been watching this with interest until I saw the price. I was expecting a price of about $1,000-2,000 based on the billing of low price. However the Kickstarter price looks to be more than the smallsmt.biz machines, which have full vision, run at 3600 cph, and are shipping today, so no risk.[/quote]
I'm glad you have been following along with our project! Sorry you don't like the price, but we believe it is good for where the market is at with these types of vision machines.
I'm not sure what you mean by "based on the billing of low price". After looking at their website our KickStarter price looks to be identical to their entry level machine. Not sure why you thought ours was more expensive? Also, it seems their shipping is $850 per unit, and on top of this you will have to buy their air compressor at $325 with another $250 in shipping for the air compressor (total cost $7425 for entry level machine). Seems like they are more expensive than ours? Shipping for KickStarter backers is free. The early-bird special on our KS includes 8 feeders at $6750 which would still be cheaper than their unit + shipping costs & compressor.
I wouldn't say they have "full vision", or that they run at 3600 CPH. I watched their videos, and it looks like they are only using downward looking vision for "homing". This is oddly identical to the Liteplacer's downward looking vision (open source) http://http://www.liteplacer.com/. Our downward looking vision is much more robust, and allows us to place 01005 we will have video soon. Upward looking vision looks good, we have this as well. After timing their videos it seems they were going 1850 CPH when the board was right next to the feeders. Maybe they don't have a video at full speed though? Our current average speed is 1000 CPH (meaning not turning off the vision, and not having board next to feeders.) We already are implementing ways to increase the speed as well, and this should be down before next Thursday. Will have videos of this as well.
They seem to be as new as us so I'm not sure why you see less risk with them, and no risk at that. Can you elaborate? They do however have a cool machine, and I wish them the best!
We have been working on a Pick and place project since January. We have finally, a few months ago, got the machine working really reliably. We have now started a kick starter for the campaign http://https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/protovoltaics/pick-and-place-machine-by-protovoltaics. We are currently working on adding new ways to speed the machine up that we have been putting off. Our thought was, "First make it work, then make it fast".
We are glad to say we are now close to an average speed of 1000 CPH. We hope to be able to increase this even more before we attend the World Maker Faire in NYC in just 8 days! This project is constantly evolving, and the community feedback has helped us advance the machine quite a bit.
We started this project knowing we would need individual automatic feeders. Our most common community feedback was how hard it is to change reels on machines where each feeder isn't modular. We started here, and built the machine around the feeders.
There are lots of videos and project logs available there. We are always looking for more feedback on our machine so we can continue to grow it as a product.
[quote author="doub"]The video says 1/10th the price of an existing desktop pick and place, so we're talking something around 350 USD, right?[/quote]
Hahaha. Unfortunately no, we didn't base the "existing desktop Pick and Place machine" off the 220A. That machine isn't similar to ours. I believe it was based off of the Manncorp desktop machine with feeders.
This purpose of this project is to deliver cost-effective pick and place machines to makers, businesses, laboratories, academic institutions, and others interested in electronics manufacturing. A pick and place machine automates the assembly of electronics by picking up tiny electronic components and placing them on circuit boards.
Our automatic feeders are the biggest differentiator between us and other projects like ours. We laser cut the parts for our feeders locally. We have a demo video of our previous prototype of the feeders here.
Each feeder bus has a master feeder that talks back to the control computer with a USB cable. Each master feeder can be connected to multiple "daughter" feeders through a CAN (Controller Area Network) bus. The CAN bus is what is used in automobiles for reliable communication among all of the electronics in vehicles. The feeders are daisy chained together to establish communication from a feeder, to the master feeder, back to the control computer.
Various parameters stored on the feeder control the actions of the feeders, such as how many steps the stepper motor should take to advance the tape reel, how long the tape retraction motor should run, and so on.
We will release the details for all of this communication in case someone wants to use our feeders with a different machine.
The video https://youtu.be/Ny99KzsySHE shows placements of 0603 and 0805 passives as well as TSSOP-28 (0.65mm pitch) and TQFP-44 (0.8m pitch) packages. These are not the limits of the machine! It's just what we use. We will upload videos to demonstrate the machine's performance with other packages. If you have a package you're curious about, let us know, or offer to send us a part to try!
In terms of components-per-hour: the average placement speed as shown in the video is 260 components-per-hour. Yes, we know this is on the slow side. This is with full vision processing on every part (worst case scenario). If you line up your parts square with your circuit board and don't need to do rotational vision correction on every part you can currently get closer to 850 components-per-hour.
We should be able to move our speed numbers up substantially before shipping. Our new head will enable this in several ways.
With our current pick up head our computer vision might tell us we need to rotate 3 degrees, then we tell the motor to rotate the part 3 degrees, but then we have to check to see if we actually rotated the part by 3 degrees. We have to check our work because of the backlash between our motor and our suction tube: with the backlash we might not actually rotate the part a full 3 degrees. The new head has zero backlash. So we'll be able to fly over the upward looking camera, grab a snapshot, immediately start on our way to the placement location, and apply the rotational correction as we're dropping the part after the computer vision has operated on the snapshot it took.
The new head will also have the cameras rigidly mounted to it, so we should be able to go faster without the cameras unintentionally moving from the acceleration.
The pick and place is powered by NEMA 17 stepper motors, and the feeder is powered by a pancake motor.
Altogether we've been working on the machine for less than 8 months, so we think we have come pretty far pretty fast. We hope to continue to make progress at this rate and will keep everyone up to date on what we have accomplished.
The best source for updates on our machine will be on our hackaday.io page hackaday.io/protovoltaics
Hey guys, Just wanted to post an update here. We were working on speeding the machine up, and we got it to a point where we would use it for ourselves :-+. We have a few more things we are working on now to get it even faster, and should be done with that in the next couple weeks. Currently we are placing at a little over 850 CPH. Here is our latest video, I forgot my camera at home so this video is taken with my phone.
I think the really cool thing is that it aligns to every piece it picks up, and every pad it's placing on. You can see in the video it will stop over top of the PCB, and then align and go down. This will be very beneficial to us when placing more than one of the same board at the same time. If the offsets between boards are different our machine will still work, because the position it goes to doesn't have to be dead on. It will just align to the pad it needs to and place.
Also, I haven't mentioned here, but the feeder we are using was homemade too! We actually just got those completed last week!
I work for a very small group called ProtoVoltaics. We make electronics and do custom projects for people including prototyping.
This has been keeping us busy, and placing a bunch of boards by hand is time consuming. We looked online for pick and place machines, but what we found were machines that: needed the user to check, and correct misplaced placed parts, could place small parts but not IC's, and were either too slow or too expensive.
It didn't take us too long to decide we would make this our next in-house project. We have been working on our machine for a few months now, and we are ready to grow awareness of our project. As of now we have only been using Hackaday.io, and our blog to show our updates. However, there are many other great places to talk about projects like this such as here on Dangerous Prototypes.
We are looking to start a discussion about our PnP machine to find out what people would like in a PnP machine. Maybe you have a PnP already, but the CV isn't robust enough, or it can only place a few hundred components per hour. Maybe you have never seen a PnP machine before, and just want to know how one works.
We look forward to seeing what people have to say. We invite you to check out the project details on our hackaday.io/protovoltaics page, and to view videos of our projects/progress on our YouTube. I can't post links here, but you can just search for ProtoVoltaics on YouTube and you'll find us!
We have applied to attend the National Maker Faire. If we get an invite we hope to see you all there!
