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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 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.
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 guess you're supposed to stencil the paste in first and the put it in a heat oven as if you had done the pick and placing by hand.
Their FAQ contains:
That's what would make the machine useful for prototyping. Printing a solder paste stencil can be done on a laser cutter, but you need access to one, or you must send the job out. Laying down solder paste by hand with a little syringe on each pad (probably under a microscope) takes longer than manually placing parts and is Not Fun.
Printing solder paste with an ink-jet printer type head has been done. If they can make that work, that will be a big win.