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SXSW: Imagine a Practical, Low-Cost Circuit Board Assembly System (Video)
SXSW Create is one of a handful of sub-shows at SXSW which don't require an expensive badge — it's maker-oriented and small, and a few blocks from the slicker parts of the convention. (The local ATX Hackerspace was there showing off robots and giving out soldering lessons and blinkies, without a single corporate pitch.) Under the same tent, I met with Jeff McAlvay, co-creator of Board Forge, which Jeff hopes will make small-run circuit board creation as easy and accessible as small-scale 3-D printing has become in the last few years. ("Think MakerBot for electronics.") The prototype hardware McAlvay had on hand looks -- in fact, is a 3-D printer, albeit one lower-slung than the ones that make plastic doo-dads. That's because the Board Forge's specialized task of assembling circuit boards requires only limited vertical movement. It's using the open-source OpenCV computer vision software and a tiny camera mounted on a movable head to accomplish the specialized task of selecting and placing components onto the boards. The tiny electronic components are lined up in strips on one side of the device, where that smart head can grab them for placement. The brains of the operation include an Arduino-family processor for basic controls, and a Raspberry Pi for the higher-level functions like computer vision. The projected cost for one of these machines — about $2000 — should put instant-gratification machine-aided circuit creation in reach of schools and serious hobbyists, but there's plenty of work before it's set for sale to the public; look for a Kickstarter project in the next few months.
Ultimately, the machine will etch traces, apply solder paste, place components, cook, and test. Version 1.0 places components.
Unless you have some mysterious reason for insisting that the control electronics duplicate, rather than supplement, the ridiculously powerful, RAM-heavy, and massively-mass-storaged computer that you can buy for $200 and use for all kinds of neat stuff, is there a problem with AVRs?
If you are doing a circuit design(or even just downloading one from somebody who did) you presumably own a computer massively more powerful than any microcontroller or embedded system(not counting 'embedded' systems that are server gear with extended temperature ratings put in the same box as the device being controlled) ever made. That PC won't have many PWM outputs, and any DACs and ADCs it has will probably be horribly tweaked in favor of pleasing sound, since they'll be on the sound card; but it will otherwise have ridiculous power to spare.
Microcontrollers make excellent complements, since they have pitiful computational and RAM specs; but tend to be well supplied with PWMs and ADCs. Why reinvent the PC as part of the machine?
realtime reasons? controlling more devices in sync? minimizing delays? I mean those are among the reasons usually cited as reasons when asking why not just have all the devices hooked up to pc separately.
with cnc machines it's common that they're just hooked up to parallel though(though usb is coming more common in home cnc as parallel is going exint). but with repraps, makerbots it's generally preferable to print from sd card on the machine as while feeding the movement codes over usb works ok 99% of the time(that's how I usually do with because of being a lazy ass).. it's that 1%, that one extra pause due to it being usb, that can cause a blip on your print.
on cnc routers that's not a problem though. it's not like the routing bit is going to leak.
so barring all that yeah, I would prefer just a solution where I could just run endless amount of steppers in sync from my pc, of course. but in the meantime I'd rather have lots of more cpu time (and by extension pins) available for io on the avr board that I need to use to run them now.
point being you can buy servos now with optical encoders and arm chips embedded, which makes avr+steppers look quite stone age.(those servos with continous rotation cost a hundred bucks a pop though).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Actually a pick and place machine is precisely addressing the bottleneck if you need to make small runs. Sure, for a 1-off board it doesn't matter much. But if you want to make a run of 50 boards, you can get the bare PCBs made very cheaply, but assembling the boards is another matter altogether. (I have actually found a company that will assemble 50 boards for a reasonable price, but it would still be a lot better - even if it wasn't any cheaper - to have the assembly done genuinely "in house", not to mention a much faster turnaround time).
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Those machines are also eyewateringly expensive. This machine is actually pretty damn cheap even if all it does is pick and place.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows