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A Look At the Firepick Delta Circuit Board Assembler (Video)
From the Firepick website: 'We are developing a really cool robotic machine that is capable of assembling electronic circuit boards (it also 3D prints, and does some other stuff!). It uses a vacuum nozzle to pick really tiny resistors and computer chips up, and place them down very carefully on a printed circuit board.' There are lots of companies here and in China that will happily place and solder components on your printed circuit board, but hardly any that will do a one-off prototype or a small quantity. And the components have gotten small enough that this is really a job for a robot (or at least a Waldo), not human fingers. || There are obviously other devices on the market that do this, but Firepick Delta creator Neil Jansen says they are far too expensive for small companies, let alone individual makers.
The Firepick Delta Hackaday page talks about a $300 price for this machine. That may be too optimistic, but even if it ends up costing two or three times that amount, that's still a huge step forward for small-time inventors and custom manufacturers who need to populate just a few circuit boards, not thousands. They have a Haxlr8r pitch video, and have been noticed by TechCrunch, 3DPrintBoard.com, and Adafruit, just to name a few. Kickstarter? Not yet. Maybe next year. Open source? Totally, complete with GitHub repository. And they were at OSCON 2014, which is where Timothy found them. (Alternate Video Link)
The Firepick Delta Hackaday page talks about a $300 price for this machine. That may be too optimistic, but even if it ends up costing two or three times that amount, that's still a huge step forward for small-time inventors and custom manufacturers who need to populate just a few circuit boards, not thousands. They have a Haxlr8r pitch video, and have been noticed by TechCrunch, 3DPrintBoard.com, and Adafruit, just to name a few. Kickstarter? Not yet. Maybe next year. Open source? Totally, complete with GitHub repository. And they were at OSCON 2014, which is where Timothy found them. (Alternate Video Link)
I'm right in the target market for this device and I don't know if I'm really interested. We always do a couple small batches of prototyping on a new product, several times a year. However, I find that our circuit assemblers are all very helpful and more than willing to do this for us for a reasonable fee. If your business partners are not interested in helping develop your product (there's FAR more to it than just quick prototype assembly!) then I'd look for somebody else who isn't in it just for the repeat high volume stuff.
Sure, this $300 machine *seems* cheaper than paying your assembly house for the service, but here it's not free either. You pay your employees and you have to train them (not just "here, this is how you load the machine", but ideally also training like IPC certifications for operators), and you'll have to assume the cost of all potential errors, from having placed the wrong part or having it placed reversed (loaded the machine incorrectly), dealing with all the placement/soldering defects that might arise, managing the inventory levels (keeping enough parts on hand of everything necessary on small reels, often at higher cost), etc. Nobody knows yet how good the feeders are, what parts it can or can't handle, board size limits, etc. There's WAY too many unknowns still...
It's probably gonna take a good while to fine tune your process to know its limits and to get reliable results, and that time is money. Setting up a pick and place machines (and stencils and what not) is typically too labor intensive and too expensive for small runs, and I don't see how a cheaper machine will change that. It could end up being very nice but we're more than happy to outsource all that trouble for now :)