pick-and-place

In our previous episode, The Brat was dragging 8000 pound pallets of pick-and-place machine around with her Jeep.

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Well, we finally got it installed and working.

This is the line: solder stencil, pnp, reflow oven.

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It's a Universal dual-head (double side) pick and place.

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Oven stuff:

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This is the PCB washer. Behind that big door is a Kenmore dishwasher. Not kidding.

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Other stuff:

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First boards through:

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PnP time was 2.5 minutes per board, versus 2 hours per board on the semi-auto machines. But we'll still do the thru-hole parts by hand.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

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John Larkin
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How many zones in the oven? How's the pizza?

Only 30 feeders?

Ah, eight zones. That's goodness. We found that socialist solder needed 'em all. Four was plenty for real solder.

Did you hire someone to set up your process and recipes or did your folks learn how to run the line themselves?

Reply to
krw

Cool. Of course now you have to tear it all down and move it to your new digs. ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

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Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
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Phil Hobbs

The sales rep [1] and several factory people came in for a couple of days to help us fire it all up. My production guy figured out the pnp programming pretty much by himself.

I was surprised that the oven doesn't get very hot on its surface. The screw compressor make a lot of heat, so we need to vent that outside.

[1] He also runs Frogs Tooth winery in Murphys... excellent fume blanc. Their motto is

If wine can have legs, frogs can have teeth.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

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John Larkin

Does your PCB CAD produce some kind of standard format files for this thing?

Reply to
bloggs.fredbloggs.fred

PADS can output a file that names all the parts and their coordinates. One of the guys wrote a program that converts that to the pnp machine format. A little manual editing is usually needed, apparently not much.

We do have to assign part numbers to feeder locations. I want to have roughly 30 feeders that never change. #1 will be the universal bypass cap, 330nF 0603. We need to have a meeting and assign the rest; then we'll try to design around those parts whenever possible.

A 1K quad resistor pack can be connected to make all sorts of resistors and voltage dividers. But doing that can make a schematic look really ugly.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

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John Larkin

Is that an Epoxy floor or just sealer? Looks sharp.

Cheers

Reply to
Martin Riddle

As much as that thing costs, one would expect them to do translation for you, sheesh. Isn't the SRF of the 330nF 0603 rather low for bypass?

Reply to
bloggs.fredbloggs.fred

Fred, you are an idiot. No, actually an imbecile. Your post was 324 lines to make that reply. If you can't find a free way to post in an appropriate manner, and can't afford better, then either ask for assistance or please go away. You are a PITA.

Reply to
John S

47K pullups, too. Maybe 33-ohm or 100-ohm series terminators, too. I use all of them by the boatload (though all 0402s). I tend to use different decoupling caps, though (several voltages for the larger ones). We have no limitations on the number of feeders, though (did at the PPoE).

Make a schematic symbol and footprint for them (at least the common ones).

Reply to
krw

The SRF of a 10u cap is even lower. But SRF doesn't matter; impedance does. And the impedance in the frequency range that mainly matters is dominated by ESL, which is about the same for all 0603 ceramic caps.

I guess we should use 1u, but 330n is sort of traditional now.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

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John Larkin

That's epoxy. Some guys came in and leveled the floor (it was full of cracks and things) and then poured the epoxy. Whenever I go down there, I want to dive into it.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

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John Larkin

Shiny! I hope it works out well for you.

W2K, woot! Unless it's new, you might think about imaging that hard drive sometime soon (Norton Ghost, Acronis TrueImage, Partimage, or equal). If it's a W2K-era hard drive, it's getting kind of hard to buy a PATA one at all... all the ones at the local computer emporium are "refurbished". Protip: people that build PCs into big machines invariably pick a motherboard with a BIOS or chipset that likes drives up to N GB just fine, but goes catatonic if you try to install a drive of N + 0.00001 GB or greater. (N is the size in GB of the last free USB stick you got at a trade show.) All of this is academic if you don't have the data to reload once you *do* find an acceptable drive.

Machined... polypropylene? Something else? Just curious.

The T and B zones are top and bottom?

Is that strap still seismic-approved after being dragged by the Jeep? :)

Matt Roberds

Reply to
mroberds
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Are your production volumes big enough so that the cost of the SMD has a low payoff rate or do you have another reason for investing in the SMD line? (inhouse control, cheap small series production)

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Does that quad pack have good yield in soldering? (I have heard of some people having problems with that, several versions, with either concave or straight edges)

Cheers

Klaus

Reply to
Klaus Kragelund

resistors and voltage dividers. But doing that can make a schematic look really ugly.

I don't see how. On the schematic the resistors are just resistors. If they are part of a quad pack you can call them R1A, R1B, R1C and R1D and give the leads pin numbers.

On the parts list R1 would then be a quad resistor pack and the (usually hidden) layout data on the schematic would assign the same footprint to each of R1A,B,C and D.

If you are silly enough to try to cluster them on the circuit diagram you may make life difficult for yourself, and you do have to keep in mind that they are all in one place when you create the schematic, but an ugly schematic seems totally unnecessary.

Quad and hex logic packages create exactly the same problem - in reality a non-problem if you treat your circuit documentation sensibly.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
Bill Sloman

r you, sheesh. Isn't the SRF of the 330nF 0603 rather low for bypass?

lines to make that reply. If you can't find a free way to post in an appropriate manner, and can't afford better, then either ask for assistance or please go away. You are a PITA.

On google it was two lines

"show quoted text" "As much as that thing costs, one would expect them to do translation for y ou, sheesh. Isn't the SRF of the 330nF 0603 rather low for bypass?"

When I posted my response via google, I snipped out most of John Larkin's c ontent, so I presume that Fred was not posting via google, but with a prope r newsreader, which is probably well enough written to do the "show/hide qu oted text" routine.

Your newsreader seems to be less competent. I can use Thunderbird to look a t s.e.d. as it shows up with my information provider (TPG in Australia) but they rarely up-date their copy of s.e.d. The most recent listing there is dated 27/08/2014 and next one is 18/08/2014, so I can't say what Fred's pos t looks like to Thunderbird.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
Bill Sloman

We use the 1206 quads with the mouse-bite connections along the sides. There are some here:

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I don't think we have any soldering problems with these. The last soldering issues that we had were with some microscopic SC79 schottky diodes and lead-free solder. We changed the layouts to use bigger diodes.

The problem with using r-packs is that it forces values and makes it difficult to ECO your way out of trouble.

But our placement cost used to be high, an will go way down with full auto. So, less incentive to use quads. Now, I guess we should minimize the BOM length, to reduce feeder setup time.

We really got the auto pnp for quality, not so much placement cost. And the semi-auto was hard on peoples' bodies.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

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John Larkin

I assume that the manufacturers have to be able to maintain this stuff. Or "hope that..."

Don't know. The same people that make our solder stencils make these carriers, too. I can't reveal where we get them... trade secret.

Yes.

The tanks are bolted to the floor, and there are soon going to be better straps to the steel beams. This is earthquake country, and we are right at the edge of the Mission Liquefaction Zone, basically sand that turns to mush during a quake.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

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Reply to
John Larkin

That's fine for one board with one type of paste. It takes some knowledge to tweak the process if you change a variable or two. With eight zones the recipe is a little less picky but it still takes some tweaking.

The PnP programming is fairly straight forward if you have just a few feeders (and can live within what you have) and aren't worried about efficiency (throughput).

You're venting the oven outside, too.

Frogs have legs but does wine have teeth?

Reply to
krw

This is the first I've heard of problems with R-packs. The biggest problems I've seen were with QFNs but that turned out to be a self-inflicted wound. The newer packages with wetable flanks, like the normal R-pack, should fix all of those problems.

I don't tend to use them because of the cost and occasionally I need to change one resistor.

Reply to
krw

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