It's a harder problem than it seems, as I've found out over the past 6 years. While the basics are quite similar to a 3D printer, PnP has some unique challenges. 3D printing can be relatively inaccurate but still produce a good output since you are working with a pretty "oozy" substance to begin with. PnP has to be pretty accurate across it's entire work surface, though. If the machine is 0.1mm off at any point in it's travel that creates a likelihood that a part will be placed incorrectly. Feeders are also, mechanically, a lot more difficult to get right than it seems like they would be.
In any case, we're having good luck and a lot of success, so if you are interested in DIY / Open Source / Hobby pick and place, please come check it out!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9BGVYnaOs8
(great project by the way!)
Looks interesting (to me anyway) for this type of project. I can’t tell if the precision you need for PnP is there yet, but it looks like the speed is.
There are open source PnP designs though:
https://hackaday.io/project/9319-diy-pick-and-place
it's really just that not many hobbyists need or even want one.
Depending on how complex your board is, building, say, 100 units by hand isn't time consuming. I've soldered literally thousands of through-hole boards and SMT is much faster and easier to do by hand.
Sorry for going off-topic, but do hobbyists actually solder SMT's manually nowadays? Or does everyone use some kind of off-the-shelf/DIY reflow oven? And if so, are stencils obligatory or is it feasible to just apply paste manually?
I've been thinking of getting back (or well, properly starting if you will) my electronics hobby, but I've ever only done through-hole components. At least based on tutorials on the web, it's possible to hand-solder SMT's with some practice. But given how small e.g. 0603's are I guess that might involve an unhealthy amount of swearing..
[1] http://www.aoyue.eu/aoyue-int998-smd-rework-station-hot-air-... [2] https://www.aliexpress.com/item/220V-AD-982-Semi-Auto-Glue-D...
Even with practice I'm orders of magnitude slower than people with steady hands.
The main thing I like about electronics is it makes me feel at home in a world of technology that's kinda crazy alien at least half of the time. Being able to interact with it in a proactive way makes it something I can get a grip on, even if, when we're frank, my soldering is shit.
I do both: for small fixes I solder by hand. Complete boards I usually use an old toaster oven, but often if the boards are really small, I use a soldering iron. I try not to go below 0805, but 0603 isn't hard.
I typically won't get a stencil for custom one-off jobs since they tend to be small and ordering them introduces delay. When I do, I use oshstencils.com. Had great luck with them and they are very price competitive.
> I do have a side business building custom electronics, but I think I still qualify as hobbyist :-)
Taking this even further off-topic, could you elaborate a little? What kind of stuff are you doing? I imagine there is a niche for one-off or small batch stuff, but OTOH on aliexpress (or whatever) you can find almost every electronic gimmick you can imagine (and plenty you couldn't imagine!) for ridiculously low prices.
https://www.sparkfun.com/tutorials/60
https://www.sparkfun.com/tutorials/59
I've been skilletting my boards (fabbed by OSHpark) for the last few months, and it's really easy. As another commenter mentioned, use a syringe to deposit solder paste. It only takes a few boards to dial in the right amount to lay, and is actually surprisingly quick to place the parts (even 0603) with tweezers and then throw 'em on the skillet.
But isn't this just begging the question?
If hobbyists can make use of it, then by definition it's a hobbyist venture. Bringing down size, cost, and complexity is exactly the path by which so much has become available to hobbyists these days.
Wasn't that long ago that a laser cutter, heaven forbid a 3d printer, was for pro shops only.
Edit: a good analogy is a homebrewer putting caps on beer bottles. You can do it by hand with a simple tool pretty easily - even capping 100 bottles at once is no sweat, really. It just doesn't make sense to have an automated bottle capping machine even if it was cheap, because it takes up space and ends up taking more effort to set up for a small run than it saves you. Pardon the pun, but the bottleneck lies elsewhere.
Capping them by hand despite the time and effort makes sense until you can afford a significant outlay in cost.
(I work for a machine shop that makes handling parts and retrofits capping/filler machines for the bottling industry. I don't fully know our prices but most of them would be far outside the range of any hobbyist starting out.)
I think your analogy falls down because an automatic bottlecapper does the same thing as you'd normally do by hand.
The difference for me is that a pick-and-place machine is an enabler. It would enable hobbyists to take on large-scale, distributed electronics projects - for which, right now, assembly time is normally the bottleneck.
If all hobbyists were solely interested in producing consumer-style devices, like bad versions of phones, or home-automation systems, then a pick-and-place machine wouldn't be a good idea for anyone. But there are actually lots of hobbyists that do stuff like data logging, where assembly time is a major problem.
> I think your analogy falls down because an automatic bottlecapper does the same thing as you'd normally do by hand.
That was my point. A pick and place does the same thing you'd normally do by hand with a pair of tweezers in about 10 minutes for a board of moderate complexity. Doing surface mount work by hand with tweezers is pretty easy. The only thing a pick and place enables is for you to do things at a large scale, because they have a substantial overhead to use that you only start to recoup around 50-100 units or more. Now, if we had some revolutionary device that you could set up in 10 minutes to feed dozens of parts and cost $500 then hell yes, I'd want one too. But I don't think that's possible at present no matter any economies of scale or design optimization, because a pick and place is actually quite a complex machine by simple necessity.
Not to mention that placing parts is only part of it - you still have to fabricate and drill the boards, load the machine, clean up any mis-places, reflow them in an oven, manually place any through hole or awkwardly shaped components and solder them, cut the boards, test them, program them, mount them, etc. A pick and place would definitely save you some time if you really want to do such a large project, but by itself I don't think it's gonna be enough to really make it accessible to an individual in their free time. I'm not disputing that they would be beneficial, just that they make sense for an individual working in their free time. Especially when you consider that contract manufacturing isn't that expensive, though it does come with its own set of hassles.
I do think that a pick-and-place machine is probably more compatible with the hobbyist world than home CNC - given that CNC inherrently requires robust construction, and robust, accurate components are inherrently expensive. I mean - this machine looks more or less like a 3d printer with some reels, and a scanner. Once 3D printing becomes a cheap technology, things that require accurate repetitive movement become cheaper too.
I wouldn't be entirely surprised if stuff like small robotic arms become available to the hobbyist in the next 50 years or so, simply because being able to do arbitrary tasks with a high degree of accuracy is incredibly useful.
At the point where CNC, not as in cutting, but as in general computer-controlled movement, is an ordinary part of the workshop, I wouldn't be surprised if things like this ended up in hobbbyist spaces.
https://www.sparkfun.com/products/14342
I had actually just discovered those recently and with 0.2mm repeatability my first thought was a pick and place. But the complexity ends up being with the part feed and with configuration. It's really hard to build a machine that can reliably feed arbitrary parts automatically, and then programming it for each job is a pain so you'd also have to revolutionize the tooling so that a person could program one in a few minutes (and don't forget loading it ugh). The kinematics do share a lot with 3D printers, but it's the open-endedness in the feed system that makes them difficult. It's probably not impossible, just really hard, so there needs to be a considerable market to recoup the cost of designing such a machine that is accessible to a hobbyist.
I mostly agree with CNC, though it depends on how ambitious you are. I have a very cheap generic CNC engraver ($100 + shipping) that I use to engrave PCBs and it actually works quite well for that as well as it can do wood and soft materials remarkably nicely. Ditto for nicer machines like the Sienci, especially if you're doing woodworking. But a 5 axis machine capable of milling metal for <$500? It's not gonna happen. And even if it did, would you really want one? Milling metal is always gonna be complex and full of hassles.
I feel the same way about laser cutters. They're actually affordable now and I definitely want one, but I don't wanna deal with the considerable inherent hassle. Fires, toxic fumes, permanent blindness, focusing etc, just not worth it to me even for free.
Also this has been an interesting discussion, thanks.
You're almost certainly right about good metal-milling CNC machines never being cheap. I think the only possibility to make such a thing economical would be by re-purposing car parts (I think if you could work out a way to use common car parts and clever software, you could step around the fact that things manufactured to high tolerances out of steel are expensive - since car parts are both cheap, and well-made).
That said, the thing that really excites me about CNC is just how much it opens up a whole load of projects that I haven't had the tooling or the mechanical skill to take on. I'm a bad carpenter, so when I make things out of wood, I tend to have to allow massive tolerances in everything I do. Even a CNC that could only cut softwood would be really useful for me.
I've actually been ummming and ahhing about buying one of ali-express - where did you get your engraver from?
So lets figure out ways to bring down the amount of work required to configure it! ;)
The tool isn't the issue. If a hobbyist wants to play with a Pick & Place, go for it.
My point was that the typical hobbyist isn't going to be manufacturing 1,000 units of anything, no matter how cheap is to do. Once you get into those numbers, it's far more likely to be a (small) business venture.
If you're one of the handful of hobbyists that want to do such complex projects I think contract manufacturing is probably a more realistic option. Not sure if you've ever set up a PnP before but it's a huge pain in the ass. I'd rather stencil and tweezer as long it was remotely practical. They are utterly mesmerizing to watch work once they're set up however...
LitePlacer is almost there. IMHO the key is recognizing that production-oriented machines need to be fast, while hobbyist/small-shop prototyping machines don't. If I need to stuff a complex prototype board with 500 parts, I literally don't care if it takes all day and all night as long as I don't have to do it. Obviously production shops don't have that luxury, but I do.
Really, the only unsolved problem (at least at the 0402 and up level) is loose part pickup and orientation.
Slump is a problem if you're trying to run a six-sigma process in a factory, of course, but that's not what's being discussed here.
My guess is that as prices drop under $2500/machine and $10/PCB and safety issues are resolved PnP will become more popular. There's a lot of need for repeatable, low rate production. A PnP is kind of like Vagrant/Puppet/Chef for hardware. Instead of manually building the board each time, use a configuration managed automated build.
This is one of those things that sounds trivial but has tons of hidden gotcha's.
EEVBlog usually breaks it down pretty well but I can't find any of the recent ones he's reviewed.
to support your point, from 2 weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16184255
PnP seems like a hard problem. I thought the same thing as you awhile ago, looked at some efforts that others were putting together, and was surprised at how many opted for complex things like computer vision to verify part positioning.
And it did not take long for me to decide that, like most problems I take a cursory look at, there was no flippin' way I'd be able to make anything workable on my own in a reasonable cost/time-box.
If I had an affordable plug-and-play design, I might take steps to protect it. Personally I'd think twice about a 'phone home' solution because I hate that shit as a consumer - or just open source it outright - but I can understand the stance.
Given what this device does compared to a 3d printer (xyz axis movement, suction head, part reel incrementer, webcam + identification software), it seems like a sufficiently motivated hobbyist could come up with something passably similar in the same price ballpark.