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Messages - hansknec

1
Tools of the trade / DIY soldering iron controller
I know there are a few of you out there interested in DIY soldering iron controllers.  I have no time to get into that, but I'm quite aware that my JBC soldering station that just broke may be of interest to someone here, either to repair or build your own PID controller.  It heats the tip red hot in about 10 seconds, so I can imagine it must be capable of pouring 500-600 watts into the tip when the controller calls for heat.

Anyway, it is up on ebay now for USA sale if you are interested.
2
Tools of the trade / Re: Pick and Place machines TVM802A, TM245P, SMT50 and etc
There is one statement in this thread that I disagree with.  A servo does not give any higher accuracy or speed than a properly designed stepper system.  The maximum speed achievable by a machine is more a matter of the mass and the programming of acceleration and deceleration ramps.  The only time someone can make a claim that a servo is more "accurate" would be if comparing against a condition where a stepper motor has slipped poles.  This is rare in a properly designed system.  There was a time when I would have believed that statement that a servo is better.  There were countless hours that I spent trying to tune my CNC machine and the steppers were having resonance problems.  Then I switched to newer stepper drivers.  Modern stepper drivers, especially the 32 bit DSP stepper drivers, take care of these resonances to the point that if you were to listen and watch a machine with steppers, you could not distinguish it from a servo machine.  I will concede though that I believe the TM-240A's steppers have some resonance that make them whine (vibrate) a bit, and this could be eliminated with better drivers.  But I have not seen any evidence of slipped poles or loss of accuracy.  Perhaps the TM-245P uses the newer 32bit DSP controlled steppers.  I don't know.  Since it appears all the manufacturers are watching these threads, I'm sure someone will speak up.
3
Tools of the trade / Re: Eagle export script for TM220A pick and place machine
Well I just wrote a long and detailed response, but I guess it took too long and my login expired as I hit "submit" and now it is gone.

I love the machine, and in my mind it has paid for itself already.  I think it is well built and much better than trying to do something homemade.  I have built a CNC machine, reflow oven, and a laser engraver, so I know how to build and program mechatronics, but for something like this, it is not worth the effort.  I would have hated to write Gcode for every board too.

You won't like the machine if your part count is high and you think you will just be swapping reels a lot.  I do about 8 standard boards and I have 95% of my parts on the reels and never need to swap.  I do wish I had a few more 12mm tape spaces though, but my method of using the front bins has saved me there.  Most of my parts are 1206 and SOIC, so I certainly don't need vision.  I could imagine the smaller parts being problematic.

The Dangerous Prototypes eagle ULP is fantastic.  It sometimes gets the rotations wrong, but that is easy to spot and fix in the output file.  Once you have a working file, you're done and you can print boards all day long.

This is a large investment for a small business, but my other choice was to pay setup fees, buy inventory, and do runs of 100 or more at a time, which I don't want to do because I like the flexibility of making rapid revisions to boards and not losing excess inventory.  Doing them myself by hand was burning up my weekends, so this purchase was a "no brainer" for me.  You might remember when a 386 personal computer was $3500, so in that regard I guess you can say this investment is not that huge in comparison.

I wish you luck and hope you can also justify the purchase like I could.
4
Tools of the trade / Re: Eagle export script for TM220A pick and place machine
Ok.. just figured this out.  Instead of messing with the ULP, one can save the board as a new file, select all in a group, then mirror the group.  This puts all bottom placed items on the top now in the right orientation for part loading.  Then I use the ULP for PCB Top Layer as usual.
5
Tools of the trade / Re: Eagle export script for TM220A pick and place machine
Ok.  I ran into a problem and would love any advice.  The ULP runs great for all components on the board top, but just now I tried to run a board where all of my components are mounted on the bottom.  Of course this means I flip the board over to load everything and I use the "bottom file" from the ULP.  Unfortunately, it does not flip the locations of the bottom components along the Y axis.  As an example, if I am looking at my gerber from the top and seeing through the board there is a capacitor on the upper right.  When I flip the board, the pads for this cap are now on the upper left.  Now when I run the file created by the ULP, it wants to put the capacitor on the upper right.

So there is either some heavy math to be done in the ULP, or I need to find an eagle command to mirror the whole board about origin to the left.  Or, I guess if I must, then I will make the load file manually using their laser for placement.

Thanks,

John
6
Tools of the trade / Re: Eagle export script for TM220A pick and place machine
By the way, the DP eagle export script found here works great when edited for 27 reels.  But it was crashing the machine on an error somewhere in the code generated by the board panelizing section.  I just deleted that code and it works great.  It was throwing a 65535% in the output that crashes on load.

There is an issue with parts rotation and it is not consistent on the same part with different boards, so on the occasion that it happens, I just manually edit the output code.

I am quite pleased with the TM-240A.  I wish I could have afforded the 245, but that is getting too expensive for my modest requirements.
7
Tools of the trade / Re: Eagle export script for TM220A pick and place machine
Okay...My TM-240A  arrived last Friday.  Only took a couple hours to get it all figured out.  I was totally confused why Neoden suggested putting parts in the upper left corner of the bulk trays.  My method works much nicer, and now I can easily add individual chips of different sizes.  Up to 10 different components, or multiples of the same.

I made a YouTube video to show how.

enjoy.  John

  http://https://youtu.be/PF0tvy9faaQ
8
Tools of the trade / Re: Eagle export script for TM220A pick and place machine
I just realized that Bin 0 can be used for placement of 10 of the identical bulk IC, or if each chip is placed exactly centered in the 10 bins, then you could have 10 different components because the machine doesn't know what it is picking up, only that it has moved to the next bin over. One would probably need to machine a custom plate for accurate centering if you were trying to perform this trick on it.  But with your own 3D printer, you can print a custom chip holder for each bin that is appropriately sized and centered.
9
Tools of the trade / Re: High speed Pick & Place for $3600
Oh well.  I'll live with manual placement since I need to stand by the machine anyway to load and unload the boards.  This machine is going to save me hundreds of hours per year!  I'm excited, even though I am not buying the latest and greatest!
I do have a small concern.  When I view videos on YouTube, it sometimes shows a model 240a that doesn't have the front bulk chip bins.  I pray my unit will have them.
11
Tools of the trade / Re: High speed Pick & Place for $3600
So an aftermarket vibrational feeder could be put in the front stack if it were designed with and optical switch to detect the absence of a part in the final slot, or if it just vibrated all the time.  I wish I could have afforded the newest unit, but I had to stretch my budget to get the TM-240A instead of the TM-220A.
12
Tools of the trade / Re: High speed Pick & Place for $3600
Brand new to the forum.  Just ordered the TM-240A, because I can't afford much more and my needs are small.  Would be interested to see if there is motivation to build an aftermarket attachment that can add one or more vibrational feeders to the TM-220A and TM-240A.  It doesn't seem like it would be rocket science.  For that matter, is it possible for me to also add bulk IC trays in the areas of the TM-240A that are not in use?  Is the program flexible enough to be told to "pick up" from just about anywhere within the reach of the XY stage?

John
13
Tools of the trade / Re: Eagle export script for TM220A pick and place machine
Hello everyone.  First post for me, and I apologize if resurrecting an old post is unwanted.  I just hit the "purchase" button on Ebay for a new TM-240A.  Been watching all the videos and ordering reels of my common resistors and such.  Amazed at the price of full reels of 5000pcs.  ($14.00 at Digikey).  Why did I wait so long?  Well, in all honesty I didn't even know the TM-220 and others existed until last week.  I always assumed pick and place machines were like $50K.

The demo video from this site sold me on the TM240A.  I also like that you all have done some work on the Eagle ULP's because I am an Eagle user.  I do have a couple of questions:

1.  Has anyone done any further development on the ULP that has not been posted?  I have the TM240A and I found another post by cibomahto at GitHub where he took your DP-tm220.ulp and modified it for the TM-240.  It looks simple enough and very well written. 

2.  Whether desired or not, it appears the Dangerousprototypes appears to be "The place to go" for all english speaking owners interested in getting the machines going.  Is there any reason why the ULP was not uploaded to the Eagle website where users can submit ULP's?
3.  It is probably a stupid question and I will quickly learn how, but how does one use the manual place bins in the front of the machine for larger parts?  Can the ULP be adapted to also access those bins or is it so simple to do manually that it isn't worth editing the ULP?

Thanks for your development work on this!

John

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