Running Multi-Feeder Jobs! 

hey Ian, caught you here

Where's the other 1.5 minutes?

@@kestvvv 8.6mm, very nice. Lets see a picture of it. I've been 3D printing my own but its 20mm for an 8mm feeder.

I don't get why he uses stepper for that - odrive servos are cheap too but with much higher speed and probably even better precision. If you search for odrive pick and place you probably get what I mean.

yeah, my first thought too. Affix some cover tape so one doesn't need to feed until cover tape reaches spool.

It's a shame I wasn't watching for this stuff about a year ago, probably $200 worth of this could be designed out. Some good ideas but seems to be 'designed toward the $10,000 and $15,000 pnp machine' ideas, where they've done a lot of extra things I'd consider unnecessary especially for a low cost design. There's a better way to arrange the rails, and cut of 15 or 20 percent off the floating rail's weight with the same reach and better accuracy. Kinematic tool changer set up so you can take off the head and put on a laser cutting head, and probably light CNC capable. Double rail both sides, for up to 128 feeders. (Realistically I'd do 64 on one side, and not have to access the other side of the machine unless I really needed more than 64.) Dallas is great but expensive, instead of their $1.30 part I'd use the Microchip 22 cents part. I'd design the pad to take all 3, Dallas form factor, TSOP, and TO-92 for whichever is cheapest at the time. Non-intelligent floor, not sure what the purpose of having an essentially '3rd party' knowing and communicating really is, I'd bypass it entirely. Feeder motors separate from the cassette. Only need as many drives as you're using, while having lots more parts with the cheap plastic cassette part ready, just snap off one and snap on another. No motors or electronics sitting around wasted if you have a lot of different designs, but still quick to change and use parts. Rest of the plastic cassette printed, with the ID chip in that part. Print them, add chip, and they stay married to your part reel forever. Snap them on and off the feeder motor board. Positions picked up by the head, no need to keep track of what's where manually. Head goes down the line touching the ID chip pads, and knows exactly where parts are. Swap 2 feeders it can pick up the changes. Only needs a simple switch for 'something changed', the head can pick up what went where. I'd look at a part tray attached to the head. Go to the parts, pick one up put on the tray, times 8 or 10, then go place 8 or 10 parts. Much less wasted travel. You could go slow and still beat 'faster' machines. No up camera. 4x down cameras, 90 degrees around the head. Align the parallax so your positioning is dead accurate. 4 pics your aligned correctly, place, then 4 pics and you know the part is aligned correctly. I'd realign the feeder design so the pickup area is directly over the rail, that's what needs maximum accurate position. Then push everything else down, so it hangs like an upside down U over the rail, with the side 'in' as short as possible so there can be a second inner rail with nose to nose feeders. Those are just the main things I'd rearrange off hand, probably forgetting a few bits here and there.. Well there's the obvious other thing, easily squeezed back in to a $30 BTT SKR 1.4 turbo board while still retaining basically all the functionality. If you haven't guessed, I'm looking at doing exactly this. Can't escape $200, $250, or $300 worth of hard parts, rails bearings etc. But I'm pretty sure you can make a $400 to $600 unit that will actually be better than some of the $10,000+ machines. 4 cross aligned cameras and get a parts tray working and it could be very nice.

Rs485 , a differential signal so the signal can travel far without getting corrupted. I used it on my 30' robot hand video. It worked 50' + away.

@@TheRainHarvester Ah, thanks! That was quite confusing to me.. Perhaps say the "eight" for clarity? I don't think it is common to omit it. :-)

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