Homebrew Surface Mount Pick and Place Taig Mill Conversion

The above link s for a clip of my CNC Taig mill setup as a surface mount Pick and Place machine. It's slow, but it's more fun watching it do the work then it is to do it by hand! Notice how it picks up the parts in one orientation, and then rotates them to the correct destination orientation. It then "centers" the part in the "centering pit". Also notice the way-cool http://www.HighTechSystemsLLC.... Modular Work Holding System that holds the PCB down on the HighTechSystemsLLC.com tooling plate. It makes clamping the PCBs down a snap!After being on http://www.hackaday.com for a few hours, my web site (www.ciciora.com) got shut down due to too much bandwidth! So I transfered the videos to YouTube and provided a link to it. Please see www.ciciora.com for more details.

Channel: Howto & Style
Uploaded: June 6, 2007 at 1:15 am
Author: SteveCiciora

Length: 02:20
Rating: 4.67
Views: 27277

Tags: and CNC DIY Homebrew Mount Pick Place Surface Taig

Video Comments

diemicro (June 29, 2008 at 2:06 am)

slow .....but hands free...rock on brother

raulgigea (June 2, 2008 at 10:37 pm)

Did you also built a feeder for the parts or do you manualy put the stripes of components there?

matt9741399 (April 2, 2008 at 11:41 pm)

I really like your method for aligning the components. Does it work well for bigger packages like TQFPs etc? Would you need to use a bigger nozzle to hold such parts?

cnightwing (March 30, 2008 at 5:36 pm)

What software are you using for placment of the parts?

Erikdb (March 26, 2008 at 9:34 am)

Remember that if this thing uses an hour to P'n'P a PCB, that's really not a problem since it can work day and night. Once you have (access to) such a machine anyway there's only the power costs and no further investments, and (ideally) it works for you 24/7 while you can do something else...

cutterschoicenotmine (March 10, 2008 at 12:24 pm)

Whats the quicker method, stepper motors? low torque high speed ones? I used to work with a Pick n Place, it was only a small 4 boards at a time one, very noisy but quite fast, lots of errors tho.

SteveCiciora (March 10, 2008 at 12:03 pm)

The clicks are air valves turning off the vacuum and then giving a puff of compressed air, so the part doesn't stick to the tip. Yes, it's slow (only due to my CNC controller for my taig; it works "good enough" so I have not improved it yet), but it was a fun project, and it's still faster than me doing it by hand. Thanks!! - Steve

cutterschoicenotmine (March 10, 2008 at 6:40 am)

I also guess that someone has to be present to click return to spindle or something like. I hear a double click after every component placement. But still, good work!

Kostagh (February 29, 2008 at 7:49 am)

Soooo slow!Better have this done industrially by a pro company.It's merely useful as an exercise. I mean "wonder if I could build that..." kinda thingy..

IVisitedTheHTLLienz (January 28, 2008 at 7:23 pm)

I really like the sound of the machine... this is more than just noise - this is art!