Pick and Place

[cerving]

Does anyone have any experience with a desktop pick and place machine? Which one? What is your experience with it, would you buy it again, etc...

The new version of the Proton that's going to be released in about a month has a few small-pitch parts on it (no choice... sensors keep getting smaller), and I'm not 100% confident of my ability to reliably place them. Plus, I'm getting lazy in my old age... might as well have a machine do it for me.

Thanks for your feedback!

 

[A-ron]

These links might give you some ideas...

https://tinyletter.com/jamesbowman/letters/placement-stencils
https://www.liteplacer.com/

 

[cerving]

Do you have a LitePlacer? I'm looking at LitePlacer and LumenPNP. The problem with LitePlacer is that it doesn't support feeders... you have to lay out the tapes and peel them back, and tell the machine where they are.

I have not heard good things about the low-cost Chinese machines in terms of support and reliability so I'm hesitant to buy one of those.

 

[dvdsnyd]

Oops Cris ....I should have read your last post more carefully...either way, for those interested, here's the direct links to the LumenPnP...

Original post...

I don't have experience with it, but the LumenPnP is intriguing. It's all open source. I've been following along on his YouTube Channel.

https://opulo.io/products/lumenpnp

 

[Brainstormz123]

Building the kits is half the fun of the eggtimers! Don't do us dirty

 

[cerving]

Don't worry, Eggtimers are still going to be kits. I'm just looking for something to make pre-mounting the itty bitty sensor components on the Proton easier on my part. I "may" start offering "semi-kits" as an option... where the silicon is pre-mounted, so you just have to solder the passives and the through-hole parts. That would be for the altimeters... Quark, Quantum, Proton, and Quasar.

 

[dvdsnyd]

Building the kits is half the fun of the eggtimers! Don't do us dirty

Agree. However, Cris does a lot to keep the kits accessible to as much of the masses as possible. The way I read into his posts here, sensors are getting smaller and harder, if not impossible to mount by hand, especially for those without the necessary equipment/knowledge and ability. Hopefully he can strike a balance.

 

[waltr]

I have always seen the Baro sensor pre-soldered on his boards. That thing is pretty tiny and glad I don't need to solder it on. I could do it in the lab at work with hot air but not at home.

 

[Charles_McG]

A couple of the new parts on the new Proton are almost as bad as the baro.

 

[cerving]

They're worse, that's why I'm looking to automate it. It's not the size of the part, it's the size of the pads and the space between them. The baro has 1mm square pads spaced 2mm apart, and there are only four of them in a nice square pattern. It's gigantic by SMT standards, and is easily hand-placeable. The new accelerometer has fourteen .4mm x .8mm pads, spaced .8mm apart. Even worse is the glue logic chip... eight 0.3mm wide pads spaced 0.65mm apart. Not much margin for error there.

 

[Charles_McG]

Yikes. My eyes don't go that small.

 

[rocket_troy]

They're worse, that's why I'm looking to automate it. It's not the size of the part, it's the size of the pads and the space between them. The baro has 1mm square pads spaced 2mm apart, and there are only four of them in a nice square pattern. It's gigantic by SMT standards, and is easily hand-placeable. The new accelerometer has fourteen .4mm x .8mm pads, spaced .8mm apart. Even worse is the glue logic chip... eight 0.3mm wide pads spaced 0.65mm apart. Not much margin for error there.

Consider yaself lucky you're not dealing with these *1990s* era processor chips found in PalmPilots.

https://www.propulsionlabs.com.au/images/Tiny_Pitch.jpg
Those ruler graduations are in mm

TP

 

[cerving]

Holy schnikes... that's 0.125 mm pitch. Mounting something like that requires a very expensive machine, definitely not in the Eggtimer budget.

Manufacturers have gone to ball grid array (BGA) packages for those high-density parts, because they can space the balls out farther apart in 2-d space in a smaller package than they can by putting them on the perimeter, increasing the reliability of the reflow mounting. That's a 12mm x 12mm package, with 320 pins (counting spaces). An equivalent 0.5 mm pitch BGA package would only take 9.5 mm x 9.5 mm (with 0.5mm border). With things like phones and watches, space is a huge consideration... which is why the sensor packages are shrinking.

 

[cerving]

So I ended up getting an older model Neoden TM220A, there was a local guy that was selling it for $1000 after using it for one project. It looked and worked like new. The good thing about it (besides the price) is that it's virtually all metal, and it comes with the feeders (drag feeders, but they seem to work OK). The bad thing about it is that there's no cameras... it works strictly by position. After playing around with some real-world placements, it should be fine for what I'm currently doing. If I end up having to start using 0.5mm or 0402 parts, I'll end up hunting for another machine but this will take care of my immediate needs.