Upgrading the Pick and Place Frame! 

Is there a "rating" to look for? (Like mm²/AWG for square area and thus current handling but this time for use in a cable chain?)

@@wi_zeus6798 I have no personal experience with them. But in my opinion ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-ZPWoC3N0epM.html explains the issue with drag chains (and other cable management methods) very well. (In the context of 3d printers but they're not that different from a pick&place machine.)

@@trilader thanks, a good video on that topic

@@trilader I know that there is a spec available for cables (maybe individual insulated wires) that guarantees that they are fit to be used on industrial robots, where they get bent a lot but don't necessarily rub against other materials (don't know if it's part of the spec). But these cables are pretty expensive

While that's certainly useful, what would be the additional cost over traditional steppers and cheap drivers?

@@wi_zeus6798 Yes: Odrive: $119USD, motors 2x @ $30USD each, minimum. Encoder for each motor: Depending on what you get can go from $10-30+USD. You'll get very good performance, however, vs a stepper motor 2x $15 + 2x $5 for a driver.. certainly is cheaper.

@@wi_zeus6798 That will greatly increase the cost of the overall machine yes. The steppers he uses are priced at $8.50 a piece, while a good hobby brushless motor costs roughly $60. Then you have to buy encoders for each motors, so between $10 to $20 each, and finally the ODrive board. The board costs 119$ on the website, and can control 2 motors so it would be enough for the X and Y axis. But as it's a fully open source project, all the schematics and PCBs design are published. Maybe he could produce a cheaper board by doing it himself. There could be two tier of the pick and place machine. An entry level one with steppers, and an advanced one with brushless motors for faster board assembly.

@@codanael I you / someone really wanted to, the necessary parts could be added to the control board of the PNP, as an alternative version. Personally I would not want to spend the additional money since I know that I'd not be able to run the machine at these speeds. It would be too noisy. But that's something not everyone has to care about. Also, the additional cost is quite high

I hope he is looking at the Samd21 or Samd51 chips, I have been using those for all my projects now, and they even run FreeRtos on them. They are great!

I suggested STM32 because the ecosystem is really inexpensive ($11 dev boards, $2 chips, free IDE from ST and Arduino IDE support is out there, cheap toolchain) and pretty powerful, but SAMDs would work just as well. There are plenty of beastly little ARM Cortex MCUs out there that could run this thing without issue.

TBH I suspect that there's a reason commercial PnP machines are Cartesian and not coreXY, although with his having open-sourced the whole thing, someone may already be working on a different drive system.

it's called the Omnivice! it's the best thing ever: kit.co/stephentherobot/my-maker-essentials

I don't know if this would lend itself to a coreXY versus Cartesian, just because of the need for more rigidity in coreXY to prevent the machine racking during operation, plus coreXY is a slightly tougher drive system to both design and code for. It might be necessary to double up the front and back rails, and/or bolt the whole thing down to a giant plate of material (e.g., plywood sheet), in order to reduce flex if using a coreXY drive system. Plus, if Stephen designs his controller to allow that functionality, setting up accel/decel curves should allow for pretty fast traversals even on a Cartesian machine. My desktop CNC mill is Cartesian and thanks to accel/decel curve setup it'll move over 20m/min during rapids.

@@OddlyIncredible You may be confusing corexy with h-bot; corexy was used almost as a successor of h-bot for 3d printers specifically because it avoids the issue of racking. I still think it would be non ideal for this, as its belt runs are exceptionally long compared to cartesian machines and this is a Quite large machine, and there is more of a susceptibility to small positioning problems as it uses both forward and backward bends in the serpentine belt runs. (this is also a problem with h-bot)

Only noobs put heatshrink on solder joints. Real geeks leave them bare so you can clip probes on it, or solder on extra bits later. 😋

marcus. Pratcher VEVO we all do, don‘t we? And it’s going to be fucking awesome!

What?

Are you talking about his touting his sponsor? PCBway does make good boards - my main go-to is JCLPCB but PCBway is also good, especially for weirs shit like his belt-drive/optical-pickup board.