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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)
how can i make you take my money!
How do I feed it parts?
I can see two rolls kind tucked to the side there, with tape just loosely hanging out. Would it somehow take parts out of those?
What about designs with lots of different parts?
Parts that don't come on rolls (this is about small numbers and prototypes after all)?
How much time goes into preparing all the parts for pick up?
These are around $6000 but it's the real deal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
My fathers got a few where he works. They're so fast a crucial part of setup is laying out where the parts are in the feed tray. You put the most used parts in the center so the head has less travel, and the least used parts near the ends. It's so important that the machine calculates this for you and tells you where to place what.
It's amazing to watch, that video doesn't even do it justice.
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 :)
this machines has feeders for rolls of many different parts the larger reels your seeing in the pictures aren't the part reels, the part reels are smaller and it can hold a dozen of them
This project appears to have computer vision for parts alignment, which is a HUGE deal for a pick-and-place. You need your machine to know if a component is oriented improperly in the reel, and to provide positive feedback on board position by referencing fiducials for accurate placement of fine-pitch components. Other pick-and-place projects I've seen in the past have been just standard 3-axis CNC gantries with a vacuum pickup, the addition of CV means it potentially can truly compete with the high-cost units.
He says right in the video that it's accurate enough to place 201 sized components, as that was one of their design goals.
John
This means pretty soon we'll have more "robotic machines that are capable of assembling electronic circuit boards"
than we have electronic circuit boards.
because when you're designing and building electronics devices, a lot of the time you're trying to build something that doesn't already exist and you can't just order from china for $2 with free shipping.
Eventually the machines will start designing and building better revisions of themselves autonomously, at which point it will really become their world, not ours.
Their presentation for investors quotes a sale price of $1000, not $300. At that price they might be able to do it. How well they'll do it remains to be seen.
Their presentation is all about their XY positioning mechanism. But that's not the problem. The hard problem is dispensing solder paste reliably and precisely, sticking the component down, and using hot air to solder it into place. As with low-end 3D printers, most of the problems are where the weld/soldering action takes place. They don't say much about how that's done.
The important thing is doing a consistently good soldering job. Nobody needs a machine that produces lots of reject boards.
For runs of 1 to a few dozen pieces of a board which would take me more than an hour to hand assemble, I just send my stuff to Advanced Assembly: http://www.aa-pcbassembly.com/
The hidden costs involved in assembling boards by hand are staggering, mostly in time. I've built an entire electronics lab, which is 3/4 storage. The buying, organizing, and storing of parts takes a big chunk of my time. If I were to set up a reflow oven, stock solder paste, etc., that would eat up more money and time. Consequently, I've become very skilled at building any type of SMD (except BGA) with just wire solder and an ordinary soldering iron. Then there is the hazardous waste management and chemical inventory overhead, and the entire day down the drain ordeals several times a year when I use the corporate application to do the waste tickets, which tells me I have to install a new Java version (different from the one in the corp. standard desktop--WTF?!?), which works after 4 hours of installing uninstalling and reinstalling, but then breaks all my other corp. apps (accounting) so I have to do the ordeal in reverse to reconcile my CC later.
Thus, even for smaller batches of fairly simple boards, I am going to be sending all my boards to places like Advanced Circuits. Even if it costs 50%-100% more than my time is worth, it's still worth it, because my co. will let me do it, and then I can use my time for stuff that actually matters for performance. I'm sick of building more than 1 of anything.
I don't have my 'phones handy, so had to watch with the sound off. The video doesn't show the machine actually working, which makes it a pretty boring watch. Hell, even the guy in the checked shirt looks bored talking about it.
I know us geeks aren't great at PR, but if you've got a machine that does something and you're at a trade show, then make sure your machine runs 24x7 - even if it's not your machine and it's just an incidental part of what you do, it's still better than leaving it idle.
While this looks like an interesting and cheap device to populate empty PCBs, it is only a small part of the total sulution. The PCB has to be made, solder paste added (maybe this device could be extended to do so), and most importantly: heated. Of all these steps, the pick-and-place may be the least enjoyable, but also the one that _could_ be done manualy, if needed. Still, if this device saves two days of manual labor, it already pays itself.