[quote author="mikeselectricstuff"]To the Neoden people - you really need to hire a Native English speaker to write your video scripts (not just to voice them). Your video on Youtube looks great but the soundtrack is terrible, and makes you look very unprofessional.
A pick/place is a big investment, and if you want to sell to English-speaking countries, you really need to show that you can communicate better than this.[/quote]
It might be easier and cheaper to ship one to Mike and let him review it for the rest of us.
Please keep in mind its from an ease-of-use point of view. There are other considerations such as cost and capability. KiCAD is free in both senses. Eagle is free up to a certain board size (Eurocard). Diptrace is free up to 500 pins. CircuitMaker is free as in beer with no limits, but since its SaS, if the service breaks (or they switch it off at some point) you lose work.
There are other packages out there too that are sort of vendor specific. Digi-Key and Mouser both have some sort of offering I think. But that it another kind of limit.
I think KiCAD could ultimately become the obvious choice for folks not doing super high-end design, but KiCAD is just not there yet, IMHO.
OPL's? Fritzing does have an editable parts library if that is what you mean.
Anyway, they all have a learning curve, but my favorite for GUI intuitiveness is Diptrace. I think they come the closest to a modern GUI paradigm where more of your habits from modern GUI programs will transfer over. They have fewer translation errors so, for example, the opposite of Group is Ungroup, whereas in Eagle the opposite is "Smash".
Diptrace's library system is pretty easy to work with as well. Som people eschew the supplied libraries because it is so easy to make your own. On the other hand, Eagle is very popular and there are many pre-made vendor libraries available for Eagle.
KiCAD is coming along, but they still suffer from really dumb stuff such as the keyboard short cuts in layout being different from the ones in schematic. Once the CERN people have made their way through their KiCAD development roadmap, however, KiCAD may be a very attractive program.
CircuitMaker is pretty new. Its not clear how popular/useful it will ultimately become. The folks I know that have used it, stopped due to lost work.
All that said, all of the other programs are really targeted at helping to streamline manufacturing. If you are going to send a one-off board to OSHPark every once in a while, and Fritzing works for you, use it.
I'm curious about what this recent crop of smaller machines can do. I'd like to get a feel for the lines that divide hand assembly, out-sourced assembly, and in-house assembly. I feel like the sort of shops looking at this class of machine are not making cell phones or other tiny stuff and thus 0201 and 0402 performance is irrelevant. Reliably accurate of placement fine pitch chips that are fiddly to work with by hand (but still quite doable so that hand assembly is an option) would be more important.
For whatever, reason, most of the videos for these machines just place a bunch of resistors. This makes me wonder about how well they do with chips.
Seeing several 0.5mm QFNs and several 0.65mm TSSOPs placed close enough to the pads top reflow properly would be a pretty convincing argument that a given machine can place any sort of chip I'm likely to use. Your new TQFP-48 video + plus hi-res still photographs is a big improvement over the video with that larger package that seems to have bent/missing pins.
I've been trying to locate some heatsink hardware on Taobao and have had pretty limited results.
I'm trying to secure some packages to a heatsink where the pre-tapped hole is a cm or so above the package. An s shaped spring clip that could be screwed to the hole would probably be just fine to ensure a good thermal bond.
But I'm having a devil of a time finding much of that sort of thing on Taobao. It might just be my keyword translation skills or maybe they just don't list stuff like that there.
I pulled this down just now and tried it. Pretty neat! I simply dragged the files I had just sent to Elecrow on to it and it guessed the nature of each layer correctly. The only miss was that I had two NC Drill files and only one rendered. For whatever reason, Elecrow requests that plated holes and non-plated holes be submitted in separate files. (I'm not sure why, iTead, OSHPark, etc, are all good with a combined file.)
Diptrace has a free version that will output Gerbers and drills. I'm not aware of an automation engine though; you might have to simulate clicks. That might be more trouble than it is worth. Especially considering that the export process isn't really that hard.
[quote author="ian"]I don't know yet :) I called my local branch of Bank of China, and it turns out they are completely separate from the one in China and have no info on wire transfers, online banking, deposits, etc.[/quote]
I guess this means I can't fly to BOC in NY and open an account that would work directly on TaoBao, huh?
[quote author="matseng"]Their script is really slow, but so are their website so it seems like the price calculations is done at the server and not locally at the webpage.
$8.90 is for 1-layer... :-) Change to 2-layer and you'll get $9.90[/quote]
From what I could tell, they key off a change in focus, not a change in value. So go select something in another field and it will do the price update right away.
Steppers with single turn fine pitch leadscrews are slow (just like matseng noted, these are usually used on DIY CNC's). Nema17 steppers directly driving a light load via a belt drive are an entirely different animal (for speed) - they can be quite fast. What you don't get with this arragement is torque or a lot of accuracy (you're at the mercy of the stepper/driver micro-stepping accuracy, sometimes not so good). Since there's no vision on this machine, the resolution of the steppers is probably a non-issue anyway (a 1.25mm pulley stepper being driven with 1/8th steps gives a theoretical resolution of under 1 um).
Speed and high accuracy is where ballscrews and servo's come into play. The ballscrews don't have nearly as much friction as the ACME thread and the servo's can provide the necessary torque at high speed. The fact that they're performing gear reduction increases the accuracy without the speed penalty (the penalty is your wallet instead!) - ballscrews are also made to much tighter tolerances, so positioning with them is more consistent.
Thanks for the explanation. I guess I'm just surprised that as much hobbyist experience as there is with steppers and belts in arenas like 3D printing that there isn't a hobby effort closer to this.
That said, are we sure there is no vision of any sort on this device? I watched the demonstration videos again and noticed that one of the videos towards the bottom, where it works on a panellized PCB, there are clearly two LEDs shining down from the head and the head seems to pause on occasion.
Sam, if you do buy one, please let us know how it works!
Looking at the photograph, however, I see steppers and belts and other relatively mundane equipment. Every hobby PnP I have ever seen appeared to be constructed similarly but was far, far slower than this device. What's the secret sauce to such speed?
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