Pick and Place Machine

We were having a lot of problems with lighting so the video will be a while longer. We believe we have fixed the lighting problem by using a cheaper camera (yeah cheaper haha). We will do some test and get the video up ASAP.

We are working very hard on getting this project further along. We are hoping to have a video up soon of the PnP placing 0603's, and switching heads automatically to a larger head to place IC's.

If there is anything you guys would like to see in this video or a future video let us know! We will see if we can fit it in or make it happen in the future.

We played around with the color recognition for a while after we finished with it, and it worked pretty good, but the template matching we used at the beginning of the project seems to be working best for now.

We are finishing up on the CV part of our project. We were using some really complicated matrix algebra, but we are now trying out color recognition. We've painted the needle on the pick head, and from that we are able to find the needle. We then enclose that area in a rectangle and say we are interested in the bottom middle part of the rectangle. This gives us the tip of the needle where we will be picking up parts.

We do the same thing to the board we are placing parts on, and the parts we are placing. Nothing is painted here. We recognize the area the part will be place, and the part before we pick it up. Once the part is over the area it gets placed we correct for any error caused by rotating and the part is then placed.

So far this route has been a lot less complicated, but we will update after some testing and let you see the results!

We put a lot of work into this project before putting it here on Hackaday.io. To see what we did to gt where we are now check out our blog! links are posted below.

http://blog.protovoltaics.com/diy-pick-and-place/

http://blog.protovoltaics.com/diy-pick-and-place-part-2/

We are changing the way our CV works to make it faster, and then we will be updating the tape feeders. Still on target for our next goal which is to have a video showing how accurate our machine is. We plan to have this by the beginning of May.

After that, we will be doing a lot of clean up on the machine. We will be storing the computer, control board, and vacuum under the unit to make it look a little less like a monster!