$150 Pick and Place Machine!*
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- čas přidán 28. 08. 2024
- *If you have boards with a tiny BoM consisting of large parts not rotated from their original position in the tape - and have a vacuum pump!
Selling Lixie displays full-time for the last year has made me desperate for a PNP machine to help automate assembly a little bit. I've purchased the $150 Monoprice MP i3 Mini on eBay and printed out accessories to convert it into a rudimentary pick-and-place machine!
As I mentioned above, this only really worked because my board design only uses one type of part, which happens to be fairly large and also all have the same rotation, allowing for assembly by translation movements only.
The vacuum also never turns on and off like it would in a proper PNP, it is just set to be strong enough to lift an LED, and weak enough to drop it once the tacky solder paste has a hold on it.
Since there isn't even vision alignment on this basic machine, (no visual check of parts or calibration using fiducials) alignment of the tray is crucial, though easy to do. A problem I've accounted for here is that LEDs may be sitting crooked or at an arbitrary location in their tape tray. The visionless fix for this was to drop the vacuum onto the LED, then slide it diagonally into the corner of it's tray to get it in a known position/rotation.
There is a small 3D printed "pin" on the print head cover as well, which advances the tape a known amount (to access the next LED to be placed) which was also crucial to consistent alignment.
G-code was manually written for my Lixie board's part positions, no Centroid X/Y data here like a real PNP would have.
That G-code and that jig model only make Lixies, it was all manually designed just for these, so unfortunately there isn't much useful info to open source for you guys that I can think of, but let me know if you want any of the STLs or original Sketchup files to mess with!
![Prusa MK3s Pick and Place Extension [3D printed] 👌](/img/n.gif)
This is real engineering & problem solving, you should be proud of yourself
Well, thank you! If you follow us on Twitter, I'm building a full size PNP machine right now!
@@lixielabs can you do something likes this for beginners ?
I know I'm late to this particular party, but just wanted to acknowledge the genius of this solution! Very very clever!
=D agreed
So I came across your hackaday post a couple years ago while I was waiting for a Glowforge laser. Never followed up through the years. So amazing to see this project in its maturity. Your pick and place is super cute! Well done!
good job! the squaring up before pickup is very clever.
Using the nozzle to move the reel is genius. I wonder how well would this work with tiny smds.
Thanks! :) Unfortunately this method relies on many, many shortcuts and specifics to achieve a working result.
- The LEDs have only 4, well-spaced, large pads.
- They are all facing the same direction.
- They have a large top face and a square body that the nozzle can slip across to shove them into the corner of their trays to get a pretty consistent alignment without any feedback to the machine. (Open loop)
This is definitely a very niche hack, but could definitely be modified to accommodate very similar parts/board layouts!
Also, it took a lot of revising to find a design where neither the alignment pin, placement head, nor printer nozzle collided with anything they weren't supposed to, while still allowing the machine to complete a homing cycle without removing any parts - while keeping in mind the Monoprice printer's small 120x135mm travel area, minus ~30 millimeters on the x-axis due to the distance between the alignment pin and placement head. A very involved project, but I was super happy with the result!
Good job! Great hack. I'm building a lixie clock at the moment. Sadly, I'll be placing all my LED's by hand. Boo!
This is pretty fantastic.
This guy is smart! :)
yeah
It is simple no doubt,but it is fantastic at the same time!
Well done , i like the idea .
Thanks! I've actually got the first video up now of a series where I'm building a proper PNP machine on a budget, with a full dual-camera vision system, proper Juki nozzles, and (hopefully) automated feeders - if you want to check it out!
@@lixielabs of course!
I ' ve a little smd oven in my home lab , and to be honest i even had the idea to get a simple/cheap pnp to complete my setup, i could need one of this for few but important project...so i will!
This makes me want to add an idex axis to an ender 3 and use it for a vacuum axis to do pick and place into 3d printed parts
Well it does the job and you're not far off from the "real deal". every pick and place has a setup time for each specific board. I recon that to P&P another board you have will require the same phase - change in gcode, change in components. you got the crucial part to work and that's awesome! as long as this automation saves you time - it's worth it! will be awesome to see if you ran future upgrades or different pcb setups.
Simple and nice! For the next video please put the camera in a tripod or something for a stable image, I feel dizzy... :-D
There are ceramic hot plates capable of reflowing the board (unlike the pcb heated beds used for 3D printing)... You can reflow the board directly on the machine (put hot plate under pcb with some metal bracket, should not touch plastic parts). Then you will obviously need a way to feed more empty boards.
Really great use of technology and your brain 👍
Something else I don't get, which is a question related to your LED board rather than the PNP - It looks like different rows have different numbers of LEDs? It looks like the front digit is illuminated by 1 LED, the middle two rows by 3 LEDs, the back row by 1 LED, and all the rest get 2 LEDs? Why? Or am I missing something about how it works?
This was cool to see. I like the innovation, and for small runs and since you had most of the tools already, makes a lot of sense. However, I've been noticing a number of companies (JLCPCB comes to mind) offer innexpensive pick/place and even soldering for low added cost as you order the blank PCBs. Some questions come to mind - CAN these services work for you (I expect yes) and how does their PRICE compare to having to do all these boards yourself? Your labor isn't free but I suppose you could figure out what they cost compared to how many hours you spend. I love innovation like this, but sometimes you need to make business decisions when running a business, which it seems you have with your Lixie displays. Thanks in advance for any thoughts.
awesome work - very innovative!
It isn't pretty, it isn't graceful but it is genius! Nice job.
Genius! You rock!
Man!!! Verry cool project! How you turn off/on the vacuum during the pick and place?
Good woork
Very Cool
Watched video two times to make sure and you don’t show any valve to control vacuum and I see double sided tape on the pcb so it’s not working for real. Did you add something? I think that you could use cooling fan signal to activate a small air séléniums to release your part and it would be easy to add to you gcode!
Awesome!
Great hack dude.
How did you program the gcode I'm interested in making something similar to pick up components and tin them then return them to the tray. How did you make the printer interact with vacuum pump?
The Gcode was written by hand via manually moving the head around with the knob (usually called "Move Axis" in your printer menu)
The pump in THIS case was always on, and the sticking power of the solder paste or tape is able to remove the part from the nozzle, but you could use a PowerTail switch and the M42 Gcode command to switch a GPIO on and off. marlinfw.org/docs/gcode/M042.html
If you don't have a free pin on the printer's controller to use, you can steal a fan's GPIO and switch the pump using fan speed 0/255 commands.
Hi Connor, have you made any update to the project?
I'm actually in the process of updating it now! There's a new series of mine where I'm converting an old laser cuttter to a personal PNP machine with all of the proper bells and whistles. :) czcams.com/video/2VLEc4uzk0s/video.html
Very nice project ! Would you send me the .stl file for the feed-rail, please? Regards Michael
nice! i always wondered.. When you have your pcb with tha parts on.. How do you go to the reflow oven withou moving and misaligning the components?
Nick St The solder paste stenciled to the pads before hand has a similar consistancy to peanut butter, so it sticks the parts to the board!
Connor Nishijima Thanks!
Olá como faço para contalo?
woah its a backwards monoprice select mini.. strange
Yeah. It is kinda weird...
Great job can you let me know the firmware you used.... thanks.
Firmware was the default version of Marlin that came with the printer, it was just running hand written Gcode designed specifically for that board/jig.
@@lixielabs That's excellent, but when I use marlin in my machine please have a look..czcams.com/video/oHTzcLUDKEI/video.html, it didn't work, how can I disable heater in marlin, I really don't have experience with marlin... Please don't mind my english.
How can I change configuration, if you send me confuguration.h at zgulkhan@gmail.com
101 things you can do with a cheap 3D printer.