Pick and place machines

No camera. You can manually adjust by locating the fudicial and then adjusting the x-y offsets. I will say this unit has paid for its self in boards out the door vs doing a manual p&p. The full vision systems are coming down in price and size. Maybe some day...

I saw a video of a similar one with a camera - it looked like it was slow but perhaps they were running it at a fraction of the speed to show the sequence.

--sp

If all you are doing is 0805 and larger passives, the board edges are probably good enough. But, I sure would not want to have to give up my fiducial sensor, it corrects the alignment between the routed edges and the actual pads on the board. It takes about 5 seconds for the sensor to scan two fiducials.

(When you get fancy with multiple boards/panel, that sensor on the CSM84 can also detect bad board marks and know to skip the individual boards that failed electrical test. I have not used this feature yet.)

Jon

Some of the machines with vision use "flying vision", where the XY positioner does NOT stop over the camera, the camera has a very short flash of the LEDs, like a strobe, to pick up the alignment picture. That has to be tricky to get to work with the needed accuracy.

Jon

I've never gotten quite that high, but certainly 35 or more is common on the stuff I build. Quite a few of them are wider than 8mm tape, and so take up two slots on the feeder rail.

Jon

Some machines allow the feeder rail to be mounted on a cart. You couldn't just pick the rail up, they are actually quite heavy with a bunch of feeders on it.

Jon

I normally run something over 100 parts on a board. We don't worry about the number of components, too much (certainly not enough to parallel resistors) or making sure all of one value are on one side. It's not going to fit in one pass at our prototype CM anyway and our manufacturing can stuff a lot more than we can use.

A lot of parts are wider than 8mm, particularly when you get into tube and tray feeders.

Wouldn't be possible to make a vibrating tray that you just pour the parts into, and let the vision sort out which needs to go where? (no caps, they have no markings). Vibrating, to turn the components over, that is upsidedown...

Cheers

Klaus

Might be a little rough on SO and QFN parts but it does sound plausible. Of course you'd have to flip parts, too. Perhaps it's a product?