Holy crap that's cheap. $40K Australian for a full production line. At that price even I would consider getting a full setup. If you mill your own boards you could design in the morning and be shipping a finished product by the afternoon.
Dave, could you make a video about why DIY P&P are "toys" without the feeders? You spoke about talking about it at the Amp Show, but I missed it (and probably many others from RU-vid too)
Still feels SLOWish and TOYish to me. I dont believe the 0201 part either and maybe it can do 0402 with drops and assistance. I have a dmm novastar LE40V single head and its faster than this, with mechanical centering. The CPH they quote is prolly without any of that slow vision centering, in which case youll have a lot of bad placements. 48x 8mm slots is not a lot at all, when you start adding 12/16mm that number is cut in half. Nice expensive toy.
I have one of these for low-volume production. 0402 is hit or miss for me, 0603 is very repeatable. I've had some issues with the 16mm feeders not properly feeding, and that takes some work to resolve; Neoden actually sent new feeders that were designed differently when I contacted them about that.
how is the programming interface for these? How long would you think it takes on average to program it to assemble a small board containing 25 components 0603 and sot23's ?
VoltLog In my experience if you have a proper placement file ex from Altium, and you don`t have to exchange feeders the programming and putting in the components is about 2h. Whit full reels is easy peasy, if you have only chunks, gluing the foil to reach the peelers takes a bit more.
I have a TM240A and I've been thinking of getting the Neoden 4. When you say hit or miss for 0402, is it dropping them everywhere or are they just slightly misplaced and needing occasional manual realignment before reflow?
@Kean Maizels I'd say it misses more than it hits, kind of leaving a mess of parts in the quantity that you want somewhere on the board. I wouldn't recommend going under 0603 with it. @Voltlog It's not too bad for most jobs. If you're an Eagle user github.com/rayshobby/neoden4 helps a ton. If you're an Altium user you can just export a standard placement file, and it's about an hour or two, depending on complexity. I wouldn't recommend switching parts too often, because it's pretty cumbersome with this machine.
I have been running Fuji and Mydata machines for the last 10 years and feeder failure is just part of the job. If the feeders didn't fail what would I do all day?
Affordable is a DIY cnc (I have seen them doing a couple of hundreds). Otherwise just let it do by 3rd parties (in China). Although the price is ok if they REALLY mean all the feeders working. They can cost you 10 grand each. (For no reason, nowadays it can be done cheap by the right stepper motors) . The thing is, assembly plus shipping in China is so cheap. Since most order PCBs there anyway, it's a difficult market to compete. Interesting thought though! 👍
We have the Neoden TM240 at work (older model without vision feedback). The hardware is mostly decent. It works well up to about 0805, I have done 0603 and 0402 with it and it does not lose that many, but you have to spend a few hours calibrating it and not touch it for the entire run. But the software... Oh my. The firmware of the device crashes if you load too many lines of code (it reads .csv files for programs), or if you try to use both pick up heads at once, or if you dared load too many files onto the SD card, or just randomly. The PC software is a joke, I usually have to resort to manually writing each program line in a job. The hardware looks similar or better in this machine, but I hope they have improved the software.
A full production line from paste to reflow with parts for less that 50K is making this kind of investment for in-house board production very attractive.
I have two of these and they work very well down to 0603. I do not attempt QFN or 0402 parts any longer. For the price these are great little machines.
Looks good for an affordable pick & place machine. Now considering this is for low volume stuff, how many boards would you have to do to make it worth spending 10-15K on this machine? You would also have to consider maintenance and works hours for programming the machine, even if you do it in-house. When all expenses are accounted, I'm not sure it's still advantageous or by how much...
I have a lower cost version CHMT28 was about 5000CAD when I got it a few years ago and it was worth the investment as one of my boards has 300 to 400 SMD parts and while it can not place all parts mostly just the passives it still invaluable as I will not be able to do that manually even with my low volume hundred's of boards in total. Say I will only make 500 boards ever with this machine that will be about 10CAD per board and while pick and place will do 300 parts in 5 to 6 minutes depending on board it will take me much more than that and chances I will place a wrong part in some place are high for me compared to the machine. It is far from perfect and takes some time to setup and supervise. If you want to outsource the assembly of low volume 100pcs or so for a complex board like mine it will already cost about as much as I paid for the pick and place. There is also the risk of fake parts if I outsource so it may be even more costly. I'm thinking of eventually upgrading to a vision based machine but I can not afford one at this time.
