Pick and Place Machine

We had a blast at the National Maker Faire! It was great meeting all the other makers from across the country. We got some really good input from people who have purchased beta kits of the Fire Pick Deltas and other machines. It was amazing to hear them say how much further along they thought we were, and to get the input from them about their current machines.

We thought this might be our last Maker Faire for our Pick and Place, but these trips have just been to valuable! We will keep you all updated on where we will be demoing our unit next!

Once we finish going to the Maker Faires we've been invited to, we will be starting out KickStarter campaign. We expect this to be around the last week of June or first week of July. By then we will have a completed and tested product. Right now we have been running the prototype as much as we can to collect data. The machine is far better than we had expected it to be. We were able to learn so much from the community to make this machine do what you all want it to, and not just do what we needed from it. With this machine we hope to bring the tools to do prototyping and manufacturing back to you.

In the next coming weeks we will be moving very fast to finish the final design. A much better unit will be displayed on this page with much sleeker makerslides, a drag chain for the cabling, cased electronics, and a more efficient z axis to name a few things.

We had a really successful time at the Cleveland Mini Maker Faire in Ohio. We met some great people who we shared experiences with. We learned a lot about what people want in a machine like this, and some great tips on how to make it successful. June 11th we start our journey to Washington DC for the National Maker Faire. We hope to continue to gather the great information we have been from you all to help make this a successful product. We will be starting our KickStarter campaign shortly after the National Maker Faire, so stay tuned!

Hey everyone we have officially been invited to display our pnp at the DC Maker Faire! We hope to see you all there!

Hey everyone, I forgot my camera at home so this was taken with my phone. As you can see from the video the placement was pretty great, the feeders are working great and we are placing at more than 850 components per hour (CPH)! As I stated in a previous comment, I believe we can get this number over 1,000 CPH in the next few weeks with a few tweaks we are planning on making.

On another note we just received an invite to the Cleavland Mini Maker Faire, so if you're in the Cleavland Ohio area we hope to see you there! We are also hoping to get an invite to the National Maker Faire in Washington DC!

Hey everyone! Yesterday was a pretty exciting day. We made a few tweaks, and were able to get our speed up considerably. Currently we are close to 1,000 CPH, but in the next few weeks we are very confident that we can increase this number. A few things that we hope will help us get there are: variable (lower) safe heights, new screw for Z-axis (currently using all thread), 24V power supply (currently using 12V).

The machine is really awesome to watch at its current speed. We are really excited about how far we've come in such a short time. I will try to make a video tomorrow showing the new speed of the machine if I can remember to bring in my camera.

Until then we are working as fast as we can to get IC placements down. This has been challenging to do with our camera set up; we are working on doing it without an upward facing camera. We are sure it can be done, and we think we are getting close. I hope to have something to show you all on the IC's soon. Our goal is to have IC placements down to a science by the time of the Cleavland Mini Maker Faire on June 6th. We were just invited to show our machine there! If you are in the Cleavland Ohio area come check us out!

Hey everyone! Well we finally got everything working pretty well together. In the video below you will see the feeder in action working with our pick and place machine. I will make another video soon with multiple feeders feeding the pick and place, and I will also show you how easy they are to install/replace. Enjoy and thanks for your support!

We covered Auto Tool Changing in the last video. In that video we were using new cameras, and unfortunately once we got those new camera attached we discovered that the new cameras would crash into the tool changing wells. Because of this we had to leave every other well empty, so the camera had somewhere to go. After a few days of planning how to fix this problem someone sat up and said, "can't we do this", and with the turn of 2 screws the problem was fixed. Aren't those 10 second fixes the best!

Now that we have resolved that issue I have made a new video showing the head changing in all active wells.

You may notice in this video that the head goes over to the PCB and touches it. This is to set the Z axis 0. This is needed because the length of the tools vary. Enjoy!

Today we are working on finishing our automatic tape feeders, and they should be completed today. Also, we are changing some things to make the CV work faster, and should be done today as well. The next thing we will be working on is the placement of IC's.

The next video posted will most likely be of us producing one of our Arduino RTD Shields seen here http://www.protovoltaics.com/arduino-rtd-shield/ To populate the Arduino will require two head changes for each of the two IC components on the board. The starting head will place the 0603 components.

No time frame has been set for this "to do list." We aren't sure how much extra programming will need to go into the CV to place the IC's, but we have a general idea of what we think will work. We will keep you updated throughout the process.

I know its more than a week late, but it is finally here! The video isn't as good as I'd like it to be, but I just had to get it on here today. Please note that the speed you see in the camera view isn't the max speed. The unit will place as fast as a TM-240A. We are now moving on to testing placements of 0402's and 0201's. I will work on getting a better video of the current progress up as well. Hopefully there will be a few more things to show when it is ready. Thanks all!