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.
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!
