Homebrew Surface Mount Pick and Place Taig Mill Conversion

[clkunde]

Is this video in slow motion?

[SteveCiciora]

@clkunde No.... :-) I did this 5 years ago, and that was as fast as my Taig mill would go. But it did place the parts faster than I could. I've made a ton of improvements since then, and will soon find some time to document them and release them to the public.

When designing a PCB where you are going to have about 100 or less made, thinking "Do I really need this $0.005 resistor? It's gonna cost me $0.25 to pay someone to put it on the board" stifles creativity.

[viniciusguedes03]

I agree it is a good idea, using their hands more cheaper, at least for me who live in Brazil and I am unable to create one of these, because here everything is very expensive, the only things that are cheap here are wood and leaf!

[stefke72yamaha]

how does the machine now where the components are?Did you code it manually?

[SteveCiciora]

@stefke72yamaha

It's tedious. I wrote a .ulp in Eagle to export the centers of each part, then I loaded it into Excel to sort it, re-exporting it. Then I wrote a LabVIEW program that loads the sorted data, and asks questions like where to pick the part up from, and orientation on board vs orientation on the feeder strip. Finally, this program generates G-Code that Mach3 interprets. I'm currently revisiting the project and working on ways to streamline this process...

[Mous0001a]

Nicely done Steve!

[lepermunna]

awesome effort!

[merasanam]

Really nice made, but noisy and has a 0.1*10^-10 component place rate.

[r0nd0m]

lol :P

[diemicro]

slow .....but hands free...

rock on brother

[raulgigea]

Did you also built a feeder for the parts or do you manualy put the stripes of components there?

[matt9741399]

I really like your method for aligning the components. Does it work well for bigger packages like TQFPs etc? Would you need to use a bigger nozzle to hold such parts?

[cnightwing]

What software are you using for placment of the parts?

[Erikdb]

Remember that if this thing uses an hour to P'n'P a PCB, that's really not a problem since it can work day and night. Once you have (access to) such a machine anyway there's only the power costs and no further investments, and (ideally) it works for you 24/7 while you can do something else...

[cutterschoicenotmine]

I also guess that someone has to be present to click return to spindle or something like. I hear a double click after every component placement. But still, good work!

[SteveCiciora]

The clicks are air valves turning off the vacuum and then giving a puff of compressed air, so the part doesn't stick to the tip. Yes, it's slow (only due to my CNC controller for my taig; it works "good enough" so I have not improved it yet), but it was a fun project, and it's still faster than me doing it by hand. Thanks!! - Steve

[cutterschoicenotmine]

Whats the quicker method, stepper motors? low torque high speed ones? I used to work with a Pick n Place, it was only a small 4 boards at a time one, very noisy but quite fast, lots of errors tho.

[Kostagh]

Soooo slow!

Better have this done industrially by a pro company.

It's merely useful as an exercise. I mean "wonder if I could build that..." kinda thingy..

[IVisitedTheHTLLienz]

I really like the sound of the machine... this is more than just noise - this is art!

[OghamTheBold]

An easy speed up - a smaller component alignment well

[aampudia8]

yeah.. but what if you want to align a microcontroller?? so you need a big hole.. he could have different sizes though

[VT340]

Wow, something I need to have at home! But it takes several hours to finish a complete PCB, looks slow.

[CrumpledHen]

What's with the the Y-axis dog-barfing sound? Cool piece of kit though!