Homebrew Surface Mount Pick and Place Taig Mill Conversion

The above link s for a clip of my CNC Taig mill setup as a surface mount Pick and Place machine. It's slow, but it's more fun watching it do the work then it is to do it by hand! Notice how it picks up the parts in one orientation, and then rotates them to the correct destination orientation. It then "centers" the part in the "centering pit". Also notice the way-cool http://www.HighTechSystemsLLC.com Modular Work Holding System that holds the PCB down on the HighTechSystemsLLC.com tooling plate. It makes clamping the PCBs down a snap!

After being on http://www.hackaday.com for a few hours, my web site (www.ciciora.com) got shut down due to too much bandwidth! So I transfered the videos to YouTube and provided a link to it. Please see www.ciciora.com for more details.

Category:

Howto & Style

Tags:

• Surface
• Mount
• CNC
• Pick
• and
• Place
• Homebrew
• DIY
• Taig

[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.

[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...

[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

[merasanam]

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

[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!

[r0nd0m]

lol :P

[Mous0001a]

Nicely done Steve!

[lepermunna]

awesome effort!

[diemicro]

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

rock on brother