Home made pick place SMT machine

20110829

Full machine post conversion from DVD drive head actuators to pneumatic cylinders

Rear of machine

201108728

Youtube video

20110628 Upwards USB camera for head offset calibration 

pickplace-usb-camera-up.jpg

late 2010 images

20110101-camera-1.jpg20110101-front-1.jpg 20110101-front-2.jpg20110101-front-3.jpg20110101-rear-1.jpg20110101-rear-2.jpg20110101-rear-3.jpg 

 

20110908 - Improvement iteration complete

Details here

A minor change to allow calibrating PCB origins using a nominated PCB pad

20110829 - Improvement iteration complete

Details here

Hardware status:

  • Converted feeder banks to pneumaticactuation (was recycled DVD drive mechanisms)
    • Added 24V PSU for pneumatic valves
    • New heads, pneumatic solenoid valves & 4 x Mosfet driver PCB
  • Updated PIC18F4610 firmware for driving the above
  • Replaced upward USB camera normal mirror with front surface mirror
Software status:
  • Add head down / up buttons to Mach 3 VB dialogs
Right head array before
and after (far left head array still DVD drive actuators in this shot):

 

20110824 - Improvement iteration complete

Details here

Hardware status:

  • Added breakout PCB to interface PIC18F4610 PCB RE4 to Buzzer & RE5 for driving Vacuum pump SSR
  • Updated PIC18F4610 firmware to allow driving RE4-5 above from Mach 3 using current M90001 & M90002 macros
  • Added XBox 360 controller for jog control
Software status:
  • Excel generated GCode setting buzzer above off at start of a rotation pick place
  • Excel generated GCode setting buzzer above on at end of pick place for a rotation
  • Add Buzzer on/off vacuum on/off controlsto Mach 3 VB dialogs
  • Added 'last action' text to all Mach 3 dialogs

 

20110728 - Improvement iteration complete

Hardware status:

  • Added small & large bump centering pits, (one per head to minimise travel)
  • Turned the Y axis ball screw in the lathe as it was supplied with the end machined off center (musta been done in a 4 jaw chuck), wow, so much better now
  • X axis is so bad, I replaced it with a 1/2 10 acme lead screw with delwin nut, again, so much better
  • Added steel plate & magnets for holding PCB's as pin system wasn't accurate enough

Software status

  • Excel generating GCODE for pick place operations using left 4 heads/right 4 heads and left & right side feeder banks
    • No PCB array function for now
  • Mach3 VB dialogs for left & right side heads & feeder banks:
    • main dialog:
      • quick setting / checking primary & PCB offsets
      • initiating each rotations run
      • managing feeder component counters
    • feeder calibration dialog
    • head calibration dialog
      • calibrate head offsets over G55 camera
      • calibrate bump centering pits from downward camera
  

 


20110605 - Improvement iteration complete

details here

New Mach3 dialog (unpopulated):

 

Hardware status:

  • 8 heads on the machine
  • 1 large vacuum pump

  • feeder banks on right & left

  • USB camera mounted on gantry with heads downward looking for manually setting

    • left feeder bank origin

    • offsets of left feeder bank feeders from above

    • PCB origin per rotation

  • NEW USB camera looking up for calibrating head offsets from downward looking camera

Software status

  • Excel generating GCODE for pick place operations using left 4 heads and left side feeder bank only
    • No PCB array function for now
    • totally revised output structure and flow to be kicked off by VB dialog below
  • NEW Mach3 VB dialog for left side heads & feeder bank only:
    • quick setting / checking offsets
    • resetting component counts for restarts
    • initiating each rotations run

 

20101102- Iteration complete

This iteration is for major hardware redoing of the heads, primarily to facilitate adding 4 right side heads as well as improving existing 4 heads

Note: 4 x right side heads all electrically functional and Mach 3 macros for both z movement & vacuum toggling updated but not used as ran out of time to do Excel GCode generator changes

Hardware status:

  • 8 heads on the machine:

    • 4 left, 4 right

    • NEW control PCB for 8 x steppers

    • NEW 2 x 4 way mosfet switching boards for vacuum solenoids

    • NEW 8 automotive air solenoids (1 per head)

    • Remade all head spring U holders (better accuracy of drilling to reduce slop)

  • NEW 1 large vacuum pump

  • feeders on right & left

  • USB camera with heads downward looking for manually setting

    • left feeder bank origin

    • offsets of feeders from above

    • First PCB in an array origin

Software status

  • Excel generating GCODE for pick place operations using left 4 heads and left side feeder bank only

    • PCB arrays working fine

Prior iterations:

Hardware status

  • 4 heads on the machine

  • fishtank vacuum pumps x 4 switched by solid state relays

  • feeders on right side only

  • USB camera downward looking moves with heads for manually setting

    • left feeder array origins

    • offsets of feeders from above

    • First PCB in an array origin

Software status

  • Excel generating GCODE for pick place operations using 4 heads and is doing PCB arrays ok

 

 December 2010:

On this page:

  • Goal
  • Base functions required

Goal:

A low volume SMT Pick Place machine to place

  • 0805 C, R & LED's
  • SOT23
  • 1.27 SSOP
  • 0.65/0.63 SSOP (Might be a stretch)
  • 0.5mm pitch TQFP (Might be a stretch)
  • 1206 / 3218 and larger caps/leds
  • smt electro caps
  • some other larger parts ie Voltage regulators etc

Speed needs to be getting towards 1000 components an hour to be competitive with manual placement.

Note that there is no automated vision system.  The machine simply follows a predefined sequence of instructions.  The sucess of this approach depends on the accuracy and repeatibility of the machine.

This requires accurate calibration and for this purpose where-ever possible we use the web cam attached to the front head array to perform calibration of offsets.

Base functions required

A Pick and Place machine provides these base functions:

  1. X Y head movement
  2. Z movement for pick & place
  3. Vacuum on off for pick place
  4. Component feeders
  5. Component centering
  6. Component rotation

Initially we will address 1-4 above.

For 4 we will do for components supplied in 8mm tape only (initially)

For 5 we will rely on sufficient accurary of the machine to not address this in this phase of this project (But it is a current background task)

For 6 we will manually rotate an array of PCBs as necessary (The eventual solution for 5 may address this requirement also, but we may just rotate the PCBs automagically in the future)

Of the functions above, only 1 is provided by the stock CNC Router / Stepper controller PCB purchased on EBay.

We will use Mach 3 to control the machine.

We will use Mach 3 with GCode generated from a MS Excel spreadsheet.

Mach 3 communicates with the CNC machine via the parallel port.  To enable us to provide functions 2-6 per above, we will breakout unused Parallel Port pins to our own interface PCB.

 

Physical layout

20110830


20101202 Changes per layout shown below..

X axis will move left to right for positive, Y axis will move up for positive.  Camera location has changed as well to between the heads.


Hardware interconnections

20110910 As it will be after next change iteration (Finish converting all 8 heads to pneumatic)

20101230