Pick and Place Machine

[ProtoVoltaics]

Hi All

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 project updates. However, there are many other great
places to talk about projects like this such as here on Evil Mad Scientist.

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 https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLqKBaRZHeLOnbVsihLs8_A/videos

We have signed up to attend the National Maker Faire in Washington DC and hope to get an invite! If we do we hope to see you all there!

[ProtoVoltaics]

Hey guys, Just wanted to post an update here. We were working on speeding the machine up, and we got it to a point where we would use it for ourselves  :-+. We have a few more things we are working on now to get it even faster, and should be done with that in the next couple weeks. Currently we are placing at a little over 850 CPH. Here is our latest video, I forgot my camera at home so this video is taken with my phone.

https://youtu.be/C7Pi4akL5og

I think the really cool thing is that it aligns to every piece it picks up, and every pad it’s placing on. You can see in the video it will stop over top of the PCB, and then align and go down. This will be very beneficial to us when placing more than one of the same board at the same time. If the offsets between boards are different our machine will still work, because the position it goes to doesn’t have to be dead on. It will just align to the pad it needs to and place.

Also, I haven’t mentioned here, but the feeder we are using was homemade too! We actually just got those completed last week!

[Author]

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