Dispensing Paste With My Pick and Place! 

Be sure to use lead-free solder when getting into the habit of licking spilled paste.

I like how the words "almond butter" slowly turned into "almond paste" by the end of the video. Great job Stephen!

I love the design. It's the same design that I settled on when I converted a 3D printer to print cake icing. To refill the syringe I had a set up almost exactly like yours but with two modifications. 1] add a channel to the plunger and a little M3 bolt that lines up with the channel to the top of the syringe. It will stop any twist. It won't twist at first but it will eventually. 2] to refill it run the stepper in reverse and use the syringe to suck up the solder paste from a designated location.

You're going to have to run the PCB assembly line backwards: bread through the reflow oven to toast it, then to the P&P to put a perfect Nutella grid on it.

I like your juvenile enthusiam, it remember me at your age... now i'm 64 and if I we'rent in such bad health as I'm now, I would continue to do project as you are doing... and if you we'rent 400 miles from me, I would give you a complete PNP machine with all feeders and vibrators and nozzles... actually I have no choice to scrap it as nobody want to buy a 1990 machine even if it's still working well. I bought that one 15years ago and produced more than 3000 pcbs for different customers since then. It's a V1.0 of Juki machine before they use that name, Amistar AR-5500. And the beauty if it, it work's on a single phase 220V, nice for a heated garage... And as I was starting my first production, (and I have no garage at the time...), (and machine had a mayor bug- reason why I paid it only few thousand with oven,conveyors...), I practiced an opening directly in my rear house rooftop to be able to enter it in my basement... I called a crane company and all the stuff entered from a flat truck bed over my house to my new fresh rear opening... I informed my curious neghbors I was entering a new kind of SPA in my house... It was and always still not permitted to do any commercial work in a house here... After searches, I found the bug to be cables ripped off in the main x axis carrier. I replaced all them and I had a full operating machine! 12 years later, I had a collegue who wanted to be part of that but on his commercial site with more recent SMT machines... with vision... Amistar had vision but only for feeder calibration and fiducial recognition before assembly time... We bought two 2001 huuuuuuge Universal SMT's... 'huge' as they occupy tree times more space than mine... and almost 3500lbs each instead of my Amistar, around 1300lbs... And even if I had the strange idea to enter them in my basement... cutting roof hole that size was simply creazy and they operate on three phase 220V... We've got fooled by vendor as both machines had numerous bugs and more than 50% tools required complete ovehaul... Feeders on a Universal are built of crappy thin steel with (garantee to worn fast )aluminum slides compared to my good old feeders in solid stainless steel, practically undestructible... and so easy to adjust compared to that almost unadjustable crap... So after a year of constant work, we were able to do what we were supposed to do... Production! Sure, Universal is very fast compared to my old two spindle one but a setup before production is taking ten times too... and you need two machines instead of one as they are wasting so much space with feeders and vibrators that your 64 usable slots become full very rapidly... And I'm not talking about stupid limitations... like the impossibility to calibrate slot 1-2 and 63-64 as calib-head camera can't go there! You should calibrate in slot 3 and hope that moving in slot 1-3 it still working!!! It's supposed to place 0201... forget that... 0603 is minimum practical size as with my old one... Oups, sorry, sooooorrrrry! I over "gossiped"... Anyway, I would like to tell you that you have a bright future ahead of you! And compared to me, you have access to so many things that we could only dream about in my young 1970 years... But, also great care if you are using leaded solder paste... it's very toxic and anything you do to avoid spilling, you will find some in your rice crispies, beleive me, I experienced that so many times and it cost me a kidney... until I weared full protection... a bit late... Now we have access to test kits to verify lead contamination, discovered that I had spreaded lead on all rooms... with my shoes... Take care, and have lots of fun!!!

You can use smaller (3 or 5 ml) luer-lock syringe to increase precision and use the luer coupler to fill syringe, easier and less wasteful

For program options: I have written something like this a couple of years back called rpt2pnp, you find it on my github. It assumes a compressed-air operated syringe, so you might need to change the generated GCode a bit to extrude-motor instead. Also, it reads KiCAD RPT files not gerbers. But might be a good starting point.

Awesome work! Nutella would be a better analogue for solder paste. Tastes better too. Although lead is pretty sweet.

I'm enjoying your PNP build videos. I'm going through something similar myself at the moment. FYI, a less-complicated, and more precise way to dispense viscous fluids is by using air pressure on the back end of the syringe. Check out the Nordson Ultimus as a reference. All you need to make that at home is 2 solenoids (compressed air & blow-off or vacuum), a regulator (probably want about 10psi), a way to control the timing (ie, how many milliseconds to dispense), and a source of pressed air. BTW, be sure to pay attention to the storage requirements (refrigeration), shelf life, and dispensing temp of your solder paste.

What comes through my mind: 1. You get after flow because of the air bubbles inside. You need an air free fill 2. You can buy air-free factory filled cartridge (expensive, little choice) 3. You could fill from 500g jar to a filling syringe, then to the production syringe, then de-air in a small vacuum chamber 4. Solder paste is way thicker I prefer lead-free water soluble solder paste. You can clean your modules in a dishwasher (minus switches)

Consider pre-filled syringes as you won't need to worry about air bubbles as they are factory filled. Make a plunger pusher and you can change the syringe when it runs out, instead of messing around trying to get air bubbles out of your syringe. You could mount the plunger mechanism on the side of the machine and use a thin pipe to the delivery head, it would be more expensive but it does mean less of a top heavy assembly. Commercial machines use a syringe attached to a jet print head to dispense droplets very quickly like an inkjet printer.

Stephen, you are a legend! Nice work. Love your attitude and how structured you work. 🚀

Nicely done.

Hello from Brazil Stephen ! Thanks for the amazing content

Fascinating, I built a pnp solder paste discpencer several years ago and the dispenser mechanism looks nearly the same XD Good Job!

Really good Job! Congrats

Looking forward to seeing it with actual paste! Loved the video, as always. Keep it up

So clever man!!!

while you're doing almost all things like crazy hack, try 5watt laser's spot to solder components pick,place,solder Whole setup in one line

You might want to try dithering the drive. By constantly moving the moving forward and backwards slightly, it keeps the paste in a kinetic state. Your currently breaking from static to kenotic states.

Substituting almond butter for Solder paste !! -- what an idea !! 💐💐👌👌 I love you and your idea.

Young man...thanks for sharing your great design and project....;-)

Nice job dude 👍

You also use a level sensor to stop it when it's out or tells you when your out and in to be refilled.

Nice job dude! Keep pushing

This is epic. Keep it up! ❤️

Absolutely love it and your positivity! Really interested in the whole project, time to go back and do some binge watching :-)

ooohhhh yes, love your videos

I don't know if it exists yet, but we as the Open Source Community need to make a standard system for toolhead mounting and/or quickchanging.

Ahh, I love those amazing videos. Thanks for uploading so regularly.🤙

AWESOME!

With that weird move before the syringe started extruding your design - I think slic3r added a standard nozzle wipe Gcode to the beginning of your generated gcode! This is such a cool video! Can't wait to see the Nutella ☺️

Nice effort! I just really think you underestimate the paste stencils. they enable you to place exactly the right amount of paste, which is crucial for proper reflow soldering of many components. maybe not for big rgb-leds, but certainly for ICs and smd diodes. I'd much rather see you spend more effort on the pick and place itself, than a solder dispenser in between... just my humble opinion :)

congrats! looking forward to more progress :D

Awesome progress! Originally found you through Reddit via your first Glowtie post and have been keeping up with your pick and place machine! Loving the videos and the energy - high quality, always! Would love to collaborate on something sometime in the future if you’re interested! Excited to see where this goes!

Do you think retraction amount will need to depend on how far the plunger has been plunged? Maybe vary by a percentage of length remaining in plunge?

Great work - love your enthusiasm. I'd love to see you add a triangulated laser height sensor at some point to compensate for board warpage. It will be very helpful as you try smaller dot sizes and board to needle gap becomes very critical. You might look at getting some different types of plungers to try from EFD - those rubber ones have way too much friction. Be careful not to go too small on the needle size, and maybe try some tapered stainless or even tapered plastic tips - the solder particles in even the finer mesh pastes will plug up even a short, small ID stainless tube really quickly. Pay attention to the metals content in the paste - for dispensing you probably want to be down around 85-86 percent metals. The pro dispensing equipment uses an archimedes pump fed by a pressurized syringe (ex: DL Technology), or a simply a syringe/needle with switched air pressure and a venturi vacuum and needle valve to provide a little suckback when the pressure switches off (ex: EFD 1000XL). That simple switched air setup can be further improved by adding a microcontroller and a little bit of code to change the valve on time slightly as the syringe depletes to compensate for growing air volume behind the plunger. Several modern dispense controllers have this now but the Cadillac is the Musashi Engineering SuperΣ CMIII. Lots of people turn their nose up at time/pressure dispensing but you can't beat it for easy syringe replacement, cleanup and ultra small dot capability.

love it

Time to make something like this for my old Delta 3D printer!

the end there was the real reveal - this whole project was about making breakfast from the start!

Being an analytical type of guy I quickly decide to hit subscribe because I saw an oscilloscope and storage boxes in the background. I know right away this will be good ;)

I am very interested in this project. Ever since I bought a 3d printer I have been wanting to add a circuit dispenser as a second or third head. Being able to make 3d circuits opens up so much design possibility.

Loving the videos. loving the excitement.

Well that went very smoothly, probably because you didn't use crunchy almond butter : p Great work!

To remove the stepper motor weight from the gantry, you could use a remote drive extruder setup like the zesty nimble used in 3D printers. One easy way to get the cable is to look at old car speedo cables which have a square end.

Solder paste, The forbidden peanut butter

I tried this as a hand tool with those small metal gear motors (you can get them with a long screw as shaft and use it like an actuator) - however actually pushing solder paste thru this small nozzle needed a lot more force than i thought.. but it depends on the paste too. In a real world application it’s not as useful as it seems.. just look at the pad count and compare it to one swipe with a stencil, the stencil always wins;) But for a self milled pcb, this could be useful if you’re doing only one. Great content anyway! I’m also building a pnp with marlin (2) and dual nozzle design, but without automatic feeders.. it’s an on going project, but it’s already picking parts and checking them with vision. Im looking forward to see your feeders in action!:)

There are some tools out there which can import Gerbers and spit out an STL, which you can then pull into your slicer to create the GCODE. "PCB2STL" is one I found w/ a quick google search. Another approach you might be able to work with can be found at github kirberich/gerber_to_scad which has python code to import the gerber for your solder paste layer and exports an OpenSCAD file, which can then be turned into STL for your slicer. I'm watching your work pretty carefully as I really want to build one of these myself. Thanks for all your videos and development work on this project!

awesome

love ur passion and excitement, great effort buddy, keep the good work up :)

that pump mechanisim is super smart

FlatCAM has some great solder paste dispensing g-code generation tools. It steps through incrementally smaller nozzles to optimize time spent on different levels of detail. Check it out! Great open source project.

I think I may have a way to generate the g-code for the solder paste easily. For my CNC machine I use a program called ESTLCAM. Simply import the DXF and generate the tool paths for the solder mask.

I think flatcam has a solder paste mode. Maby you will only need to modify the gcode with a postprocessor that you can make in Excel

Get an auger type valve with positive air displacement it’ll help with accuracy

Stephen, great job. Look at inkscape, has gcode plugin but will need some modifications.

Oh weird, my supercon shirt has partially lost its print in the exact same spots :D

take soldermask layer.. track all cutouts.. make sure everyone pads gets a dot and the size the depends on pad area.

This channel is so underrated. I'm just waiting for it to blow up, maybe a collab with a bigtuber some time!?

Dayyum son! 👏

pro tip... wolfram alpha then type solder paste viscosity

Whatever Stephen's on I'll have some :)

Stephen.. you're crazy! You think its fun to write software that calculates where to put the dots? oh man.. hehe.. You're very talented and it is so fun to watch your videos, both your style of editing with music and all. Feels like your videos are only a minute at max.. So fun to watch, can't wait for next video!

Amazing as always. :)

Hi, do you have cad files for the printed parts?

you shouldve used a syringe to put the almond butter into the syringe. wait

And two materials may have the same viscosity, but a different "cling factor" (made up term, to refer to the way some liquids or semi solids will stick together, even if they are a runny liquid. Like hot syrup.)

10:28 dude you've got to make that candy

Interesting😍😍

I think inkscape may work for creating the toolpaths

10:05 wonderful

Have you considered using a pneumatic solder paste dispenser instead of the stepper motor?

an old video, but a an interesting topic, any movement on implementaion with the pnp

howw to add that dispenser to the lumen pnp ? is that possible with openPnp?

Would a geardown be of use for obscene precision? May be of use for Lab-Bots.

Might want a pelteir junction to temperature control the paste.

of course this should work. this similar design is OLDer already. nevertheless i subscribed. its fun to see an maker with passion.

Oh, you could try to make your own cupcake sprinkles. :)

I'm sorry but, do you have a servo horn necklace? Because, I think that is genius.

Use your pick and place to align your stencil/board for printing

I'm wearing the same shirt. I'M WEARING THE SAME SHIRT! Whaaaaat.

Future reference: Order syringes from ebay or aliexpress. They or super cheap that way. Sure they take a while to get delivered (especially right now with this whole virs stuff) but they are usually worth the wait for the cost savings. I bought like 1000 dropper pipettes from aliexpress and they will probably last me the rest of my life or until I inevitably burn my house down doing something stupid... again.

Depending on the solder paste you get, and the size of the nozzle you'll be using, you will be surprised as to what kind of force you need to apply to squeeze something out of the syringe. I don't think the 3d printed parts are going to hold up for that task. you might even need to get stronger syringes so they don't break... I still prefer to do stencils, as it is super fast, clean and consistent and allows for extremely tiny pitch components (0.4mm pitch QFNs, 01005 passives, fine pitch BGAs, ...) to be soldered reliably. I have not seen an affordable paste dispenser that can reliably squeeze out such tiny amounts of paste...

11:20 what about using piezoelectric dispensers?

that dot matrix looks great just saying. i think it was just the almond butter.

The profesionals ones use neumatics for driving the paste tube

0:19 how does solder paste turns in solder when heated??

next up: automated peanut butter sandwich machine

If nothing else, you can decorate cakes, haha!

To remove the excess weight and need for constant refills, you could use a peristaltic pump to pump the solder paste from a reservoir to the nozzle

You're all set for printing easter eggs! Use Nutella instead!

The viscosity of the medium shouldn't be super critical, as long as the two mediums are roughly similar, it will just be a rotation=volume calculation.

Have you tought of using compressed air like they do in professional solderpaste dispenser? If you want I have an old manual pnp with solderpaste dispenser and i can share what I'm able to understand doing reverse engineering on that

so now put royal icing and make actual Sugar Dot paper!!

inkscape? Last I knew it had a gcode generator.

You: "Solder paste was too expensive, so instead I went for almond butter." Me: i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/mobile/000/018/489/nick-young-confused-face-300x256-nqlyaa.jpg

Pick'n'paste

This channel is amazing but you are always high for no reason :D When you are being serious you are still awesome, there is no reason to put more effort on it sir :) BTW if you mount your stepper driver horizontally then you can "press" the syringe with a cog setup, this way you can add more solder paste in just once.

A 5s clip saying "these were FDM, and these were SLA printed” would be appreciated, when applicable.

I believe pneumatics are often used for solder paste extrusion, which might be easier to mount / dismount. There's a mikeselectricstuff video that touches on this (although this was for hand assembly, not pick and place) ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-pdGSFc7VjBE.html