Homemade SMD Pick and Place Machine - complete cycle
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- Опубліковано 10 лют 2025
- A complete cycle with solder paste dispensing, placement, reflow soldering.
There are still some issues regarding placement accuracy of the small parts. The bridges at the 0.65mm pitch part were expected.
More details on my website: www.vbesmens.de
![My New Pick & Place Machine [Liteplacer]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/U1FCAFfndcw/mqdefault.jpg)
With great support from Volker, I finalized my machine in Jun/July 2014.
It´s not an easy project and it´s not cheap.
I already made hundreds of PCB´s with thousands of components placed.
The machine is running perfect.
Once again Volker, Thanks, Thanks,Thanks
How much did it cost to make it?
sir,,,its good to hear that u made thousands of pcb's,,,,,but kindly tell us the price of the machine,,,,we r from poor country,,,,,
Who is Volker 🤔
You bring HOMEMADE a whole new level, sir! Respect
To be frankly I can't believe this is a homemade machine :)
It's extremely cool!
очень круто! ;-) yep, very cool pnp machine!
HOMEMADE??? That looks pretty damn pro in my book.
how the hell does some one build this in there home wow there brains must be amazing.
I thought the same
@@nicholasantony7665 how do people design them in the first place? Or 3d printers and cnc machines?
But yeah, its incredible stuff!
@@LittleRainGames It is quite simple. The biggest problem is control of machine like this.
Almost every part of this machine is easily purchasable, and even cheap - stepper motors, transmission, belts, controllers for motors, guides...
he live sin a machine shop,! thats logical
AWESOME ! your professionalism is on display and is very impressive.
It is now 4 years later than you posted this video.
Can you post a update on how it is working now ?
The setting the zero for the IC's was brilliant.
Others mentioned that doing every other pad for solder might help with the bridging.
I do not know the issues, but thought that backing off the pad in alignment with the pad might have any solder paste trails fall into the board, and that going from pad to pad may be faster, but the solder trails would fall onto the adjoining pad.
Opo opponya kop Oppo oko Poo OOO
Ini masih
Karena e kok Lo seng Lo
Ini adalah kondisi Popo
You have an amazing machine! I run a 3 machine Universal Fuzion SMT line for a living and the only difference between mine and yours is speed, and $250K per machine. With equipment like that you need a simple screen printer to apply your solder paste. Great machine!!!
+Mike Endersbe
Could you explain what a screen printer is?
Solder paste printing process involves a metal screen that you lay on top of the PCB, with tiny cutouts at just the right locations, then the solder paste is uniformly applied to the area which then fills-in the holes where the solder must go on the board. So instead of the 1st process shown in video where the paste at each solder joint is applied individually, all solder joints would get the paste in one step with the printing process thereby reducing the cycle time drastically and boosting your production output :).
ua-cam.com/video/3UtFCX5MdCc/v-deo.html
That is quite a piece of engineering. I was expecting a modified 3D printer picking from a tray or something.
Incredible!
Is that modified? 3-D printer? ID is not really good enough to even function. This is kind of the bare minimum standard to make one at home.
Very professionally made machine! I love the way it manipulates with IC's. Keep up the good work.
Wow. I was getting ready to turn my Shapeoko 2 into a PnP, but now I have to add all the features I see here. Very, very nice!
Amazing machine, really. If you add small pillars underneath the board, about 10 to 20 on correct points, such supports will prevent the PCB from bending every time each component being placed on board.
What an amazing machine! Thanks for sharing! Any chance you'll put up more videos of it on action?
Stein-Erik Dahle There will be some more videos in the future. I am currently very busy with other stuff. So please be patient.
Im looking forward to that!
Hacía tiempo que no veía algo tan espectacular. Enhorabuena por tu trabajo.
I think you could have some reasonable wins if you sorted the paste dispensing points by their X and Y coordinates. Since it doesn't have to pick anything up, that would likely be the most efficient way.
You are fully right - Another thing on the software ToDo list :-)
also, did you ever sort out the moves for bringing a part over the alignment camera? seems like there were some easy wins there: combine the separate x and y moves into one diagonal move, and run that initial part rotation during the move instead of while stationary over the camera before it activates. i'm also curious about the pauses between each move in general, is that to prevent vibrations from from one move messing with the subsequent move? it seems like most of the Z move (aside from the bottom few mm) would be pretty insensitive to vibration so i wonder if it's necessary between xy and z moves. i'd be curious if you could even start the z move slightly before the xy move ends, as long as xy is has come to a stop for the last [part height + max part height + some margin] of z travel (and leave enough time for any vibrations to dissipate before contact). i imagine that latter part would be a fair bit harder to implement though!
@@spambot7110 There's actually a reason why it doesn't rotate while moving with bigger parts. They are much more likely to fall off. Notice also how the speed of the motors is reduced when carrying larger parts. I think before inspection it's intentionally avoiding going over the PCB in case it does fall off or fail inspection. If it fell off during movement over the PCB that could knock other parts out of alignment and be a mess for the operator.
I have always wanted to buy a 3D printer.. couldn't afford one since in my country everything in 10x the original price.. so i built my own. This video is inspiring
I just received this on my recommandation and I find it amazing ! Great job !
Unfortunally your last video (this one) is 4 years ago, are you going to make more video to show your talent ?
that's an incredible machine, I can't imagine how many hours you spent on that! congratulations.
Tutorials would be awesome! BTE that perfectly illustrates my idea for my stockless online shop
Klasse Projekt. Hut ab.
Macht richtig Spaß der Maschine zuzuschauen.
Ok this is great, always loved the idea of this being part of an electronics workshop, I've never seen an inexpensive version of one, it may run at a few hundred times slower speed but its not for mass manufacturing anyways...so cool!!
Actually it does not run that slow... most pro machines only have ability to pick 10 components at once (10 nozzles) and also cameras directly on head to align components while travelling, but travel speed can be sped up only until physics permit it - weight of component, suction of nozzle etc makes a huge part in it.
you made it on your own , that's damn impressive !!!!
The scanning part is the best. Awesome vid so satisfying to watch!
You are an iron man. Awesome. Gonna start my journey building one. Deadline. One year. Thanks for the inspiration.
Awesome project. Why do we make effort to have the pnp dispensing paste? The silk screen method is quite fast and precise. Even if my pnp could dispense paste i'd still use the silk screen i think.
Habe ja schon sei einiges gesehen, was pick'n'place betrifft. 2014 veröffentlicht, wow, ist ja schon ne Weile her. Auf Deiner Homepage scheint der Automat nicht weiterentwickelt - trotzdem eine excellente Arbeit, die sicher viel Zeit beanspruchte und offenbar derzeit sein Bestimmungswerk verrichtet. Ich selbst besitze zwei Automaten von Autotronik, ok das sind Industriemaschinen, weiss wo die Probleme bei Bestückern so sind.
Ich muss ganz ehrlich sagen, Respekt vor so einem beeindruckenden Stückwerk - hast das echt komplett selbst entwickelt? Grandios!
Mittlerweile gibts ja aus China kleine Bestücker für n Appel und n Ei - so etwa 4000 Euro. Mehrfach habe ich überlegt, ob für Einzelprojekte, die ich gerade im LED Bereich habe, ein einziges Gerät angeschafft wird und dann tagein, tagaus nur am rödeln ist. das was Du hier zeigst sieht sehr solide aus, hast schon Einsatzerfahrung? Ist denn eine Produktion des Gerätes geplant? Oder doch nur ein schnuckeliges Einzelstück? Was sehr schade wäre...Es gibt mit Sicherheit einen Markt für so ein Schmuckstück, wenn es sich nachhaltig produzieren liese.
Jedenfalls meine Neugier ist geweckt - planst da noch mehr in der Richtung - oder wars das?
Absoluter Daumen hoch!!!!
You made a wonderfull work and you share it on your website for free. You have all my respect for that, you are amazing !
I have wanted to make one of these for a long time now... haven't had a project that needed on until recently.
a couple friends told me I'm stupid for wanting to make one. but this so shows it can be done.
if your willing to, I'd love to have a chat about some of your design aspects :)
omg the tool change is awesome
i wonder how suction head held at all...
Hi, it is a fantastic machine you have put together! I am interested to know how successful have you found the paste dispensing if you include the place and reflow process? Your needle size seems spot on for the parts you show but the pcb has some far smaller pitch parts than that needle could print for. How do you deal with that?
Absolutely undeniably cool. I want to know more about the xy axis alignment.
Im crying watching this :'( What an insane homemade assembly machine!!!
I had no idea pick and place machines could also place solder paste. We screen them by hand with laser-cut stencils. Definitely a lot faster and more accurate.
Which is faster and more accurate?
This one is a home-made one, the regular P&P machines can work much faster.
Plus, you won't need the laser-cut stencils, solder paste locations can be easily exported from the board files.
Plus, you don't need humans ;D to some extent.
Ah, I thought that machine was working at it's max speed. I suppose with the added ability to place, it's better than placing by hand. I both screen and place by hand, it is exhausting when you have to make more than 6 panels of something.
@@SirBrittanicvs Stencils are better than this method for volume. However, one off this method is very much more preferable and very much cheaper. I have read in other comments that he should use a sort routine of all the XY coordinates to greatly speed up the process instead of processing the corrdinates in order of their creation by the program. In addition, turning the sensor on before the arm arrives and putting in a small delay once it arrives would help speed up alignment. Finally, I read that staggering the solder blobs would prevent bridging. All in all, this is a fantastic device! Leave it to the internet to come up with even more radical solutions to making it faster.
On the stencil front, you can actually make automatic stencils...I thought of a way using an inkjet printer. You take the pad layer, export it to some software which inverts the image so most of it is black except the pad. Then you print it out onto an aluminum sheet. Then, you dunk it in acid. The exposed metal will etch away leaving a perfect pad stencil. Then you use the vacuum assembly to place the stencil over the board, and then use the standard drag method to get all the pads. This would of course, eliminate the resolution issue entirely, but is considerably more complicated to incorporate into an automated procedure. However, if both processes were managed by a master controller routine, with the separate operations modularized and performed in sequential order, indicating to the master controller that the process was complete, then the next phase, placement, could begin. Like a 4 bit (00 01 10 11) signal, which would only take up 2 GPIO pins to indicate to the master controller what cycle to do next. Initialize, stencil, placement, and one more for something I probably didn't consider. IDK what setup he has though so...
Awesome project. Did you make it by yourself? One of the best I ever seen.
Dear VBsProjects, great video, we are also working on a opensource pick and place machine.
Awesome..any updates with this machine in 2021?
Does the rapid displacement of the gantry not vibrate the pcb and displace the SMD's?
You need carrier support the pcb not to be flex. Anyway, its amazing DIY. Next stage is the oven?
That is really cool. What are the LEDs doing to the components when the arm moves it over them? Do they heat up the contacts to help place them against the solder paste?
Very nice how much does it cost
ich überlege grade ob es möglich wäre das mit mach3 zu steuern, und statt der kamera eine konische schablone macht, welche beim hineinfahren das bauteil grade schiebt, könnte man diese maschine nichz als kleinserie bauen ? habe die chinesischen geseghen, die arbeiten nur vom Gurt, aber deine nimmt auch das offene Magazin
Great Job, beautiful machine & Free Sharing ! Great Again
Nice job. But always get 5cl rum before you start to make modifications on the board with bare hand 8:05
I saw that too . I was like "ah now I understand why he made this machine" lol
Great job .. I wonder what type of motors are you using in X Y Z .. they are very smooth and fast .. Is it a servo motors or stepper.
And could you please tell me the name of the cam or write the link cause I wanna buy one :)
Excellent work Volker.
For the small pitch device, how about staggering the paste spots ? This might avoid the bridging you are experiencing.
Very nice. Our compliments to Volker.
Hi Bob,
a great idea. I will try that. The dot size limitation is currently limited by the ball size of the solder paste. I will try and get paste with smaller dots some day.
VBsProjects Just have it move a little higher before moving to the next pad. Nice work.
+VBsProjects a fux pre tratament on board dont fix theses bridges?
Yu know fux is nerver too much :P
+Bob Beattie
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Reply ·
This is incredible, you are a genius
excelent, can i using eagle project or proteus, or only altium can using this machine ?
That's Awesome! but why wouldn't you screen print the paste?
You are genius ! Respect
How much does it cost for this machine? I'm disabled and must work from home. This would help me significantly. Thank you
Your paste dispenser seems to work really well. Does the temperature of the paste matter?
The PCB needs support underneath. It is flexing on each solder hit. Not really a problem but maybe put some foam underneath it so it has some give but is flexing less.
Its so pretty! How much did it cost to build? I would love to build one some day.
Unbelievably coool.
Do you use servos or microspepping with encoders?
Outstanding work! Wish you all best
Hello, i wants to purchase this machine plz let me know what is the procedure
Try lowering your Y axis as much as possible, you are wasting a lot of time there. Other than that - very impressive! I worked with such machines and know how pain in the ass is to get whole system work reliably. Amazing job for DIY!
Great work. And making it open source, Thumbs UP!
are all axis use belt or leadscrew? thanks
Great project! I have a question, how does the effector know where to place the SMD? Is everything hard coded such that the coordinate of the SMD is known and the effecetor just travels to that specific location?
Every new PCB comes with its own set rules. God level precision needed here.
How does that quick change system work? Are you using air pressure?
Great machine design and build. What did it cost to prototype? And did you 3D model the design?If so, what 3D modelling program did you use? Perhaps designing and fabricating a solder paste stencil would be a better solution to 0.65mm pitch (and all other) devices.
Wow. That's quite amazing. In a way, it reminds me of the LASER machines I used to operate at my old work.
Very wonderful . How much it cost
And what is the model
Now you should write a piece of software, where you can input PCB schematics and it can figure out from that where to put the pieces, Did you? or did you have to pre-program every move?
+Daniel Pierce PCB CAD software generates gerber files, and an interpreter translates everything to g-code for the robot. Idk whether or not he's using an off the shelf control program / interpreter though.
good job! how long did that take you to make?
How did you get the X-Y Alignment? is that IR?
Its just a camera
excellent work, but i would rewrite the code that dispense the paste; it should do like a printer, starting from (0,0), and doing line by line (the step is dynamic) to (X, Y), so it should never travel back and forth.
But why?
I would like to understand what problem he faced.
About the printer, he is "printing" the pad with tin paste instead of ink (I'm not talking about pieces placement)
nope, you can still use the same coordinate method, you just need to order the point in a different way; by one axis, and by by the other with a stable sort algorithm.
Mauro lesto I saw the same thing, I used the Morton distance to order the tasks on my milling machine recently, the problem being a traveling salesman, you need some heuristic (and that was the easiest one to develop to be honest). I would also try to fly the components in a succession of cornu arcs to avoid stoping when changing direction.
nraynaud1 i'm NOT talking about component but about applying *solder paste*
for component i can understand its difficulty
IceTurf if you disagree can you tell me witch algorithm would you use and why?
yep, me too
Awesome! Really cool.
What is the software do you use for it? I mean to generate gcode.
That's pretty damn impressive. How much did it cost in materials?
Hello. I'll build a semi-automatic P&P machine and I've a question:
Wath is the right vacuum ratio for the pump and does it have to be regulated (in kpa)? (it's welcome if you have some references)
This is awesome and all but if you shop around for a bit you can pick up used pick and place machines for a song, and even if you don't like the software re-braining them would be far easier than all the work you have in this.
Did you make this device or did you buy it?
This is a fucking beautiful thing you have built
Edit, I thought they were steppers, project page says servos
I LOVE it im so ecited to make one like this so how it cost for u bro
Как распознается первая ножка микросхем, если камера смотрит снизу? Снизу нет маркера, можно развернуть на 180 градусов и тоже будет правильно.
Может ли устройство брать детали из кучи? Для этого позиционирование будет очень важно и может потребоваться вибростол.
can you explain to me what the lights do? I would like to build one myself.
I'm did't imaginne that this machine can mading at home!!!! It will be a helpfull if you share how to design it in detail ... thank you very much.
Please help me, what is name of motherboard used in pick and place machine and can communicate with openpnp?
Please help me 😭😭
Wow.. this is... Homemade... I'm speechless
This is an awesome build ! Thanks for sharing !
Awesome! Only a question, the hole with light is for?
I think it's a camera. Picking up those (big) components from the tray probably adds some unwanted offset; the camera allows the system to determine how off center the chip is and moves it a few micrometer to correct the error.
Don't you have problems with the PCB bouncing like that?
That's incredible. Great Job! I wanna build the same.
Seriously amazing stuff
Could anyone tell me how that "dispensing needle x-y alignment" thing work? First time I've seen that one. What kind of sensor are those lights?
there are still many pins and connectors to solder on your board. How do you solve that?
He could do pin in paste or switch to SMD components. Or he country just hand solder those.
In major Chinese factories, through hole components are placed per hand on an assembly line and then automatically wave soldered. Apparently that's cheaper and better, as it's quite reliable and it only takes the workers a handful of seconds to populate the through-hole connectors on a PC mainboard, which has quite a few of those. After wave soldering, there are still some defects in soldering of through-hole components that are touched up manually. Of course SMD production is fully automated and very reliable like you'd expect.
I'm going to build one of those to automate production in my joule thief factory.
*Awesome* - But two things still kind of annoy the crap out of me watching this:
1. It not always using both the X and Y axis at the same time in order to get to the desired location faster.
2. The randomness of it's movements when dispensing paste and parts ( going A, B, D, F, C, E... instead of A, B, C, D, E, F... ).
I agree, except for when its moving IC to the camera. i wouldnt want my parts to fall onto the board screwing everything up.
This is insane. What are the lights for ? the leds ?
i think they are laser diodes to heat the leads on chip
Hello, would you like the structural schematic of the machine?
damn how much time did you spend on doing this
5:07 what machine actually doing with component some pre heat ?
I think the orientation is manually programmed, since it starts reorienting before the LEDs turn on. What it is doing is realigning the XY axis due to having to travel so far to grab the ICs. You'll notice it moves ever so slightly on the alignment with each return trip. It's using a classic LED/photo resist detection mechanism. the inner LEDs passing through indicates bad alignment. The outer LEDs being dim indicates bad alignment. left side is passing light? move left until the GPIO pin is logic high again.
how does it could found where is key on chip?
And there I was, happy because my lm386 amp worked
Lol.
very cool machine, nicely built!
Respekt! Deutsche Wertarbeit. Hast Du die Firmware für das Maschinchen insbesondere die Ausrichtungs-Einheit selber erarbeitet?
Ich möchte bald so was ähnliches produzieren. Kannst Du mir für die Steuerung Literatur empfehlen, so dass ich das Rad nicht komplett neu erfinden muss? Am liebsten währe mir auf Basis von AVR Microcontroller. Da habe ich schon Erfahrungen sammeln mit anderen Projekten können.
Für eine Antwort währe ich sehr dankbar.
My brain almost ate itself thinking about how these machines are made
hey awesome too good i love it!! i wonder how you could came up with something like this, well done man keep it up !!
perfect job but , iit would be better if you use stencil to place solder past , way faster so you save time and use it for placing the parts.
Hello
Congratulation on building this amazing machine!
One question though, I see that with some parts the placement nozzle hovers on a depression with a bunch of flashing LEDs. Is this an alignment test?
Can you briefly explain how it works in principle?
Thanks
PS
I hope you can sell lots of these, you really deserve success.
alignment test
Davide Spano those led lights are heater
I haven't seen anyone answer this question, so I'll take a stab. They are optical sensors. I imagine on the top side there are photo resistors to tell the controller that the alignment is okay, or not. There are two sets of LEDs. if the second(inner set) set gets through then it knows it is not aligned, and it also knows which direction. it can then move the direction where the LEDs are passing through until you get a logic high again on that line(the inner LEDs are no longer visible to the top). Once there are no LEDs from the inner portion causing photo resistance, the device is aligned and can continue.
I think it realigns for the ICs every time because the arm is traveling so far to pick them up. When the arm travels too fast and far, they tend to have some momentum(they keep moving even when you cut power) which throws off the alignment slightly. Calibrating on each return trip ensures that this doesn't get too far out of whack. If you watch closely, you'll see that on every return trip to the alignment LEDs, it has to adjust slightly before continuing on to place the component which strengthens my belief that this is what it is doing. It also wisely uses this opportunity to spin the component if necessary. I think the spin decision logic is manual and based on the orientation of the chips as they came out of the reels.
@@peterlamont647 I was watching that portion of the machine and process carefully, and had initial questions: wait, is that a heat lamp? But your explanation makes more sense for proper part placement without adding needless thermal stress on the parts, which the whole board will get sent through to cause the solder paste to reflow anyway.
Quite likely a bit of LED quadrature encoding used there.
@@peterlamont647 it's probably not using photo resistors, it's probably just using a camera. computer vision systems are pretty common, even before the current AI nonsense. was definitely a thing even back in 2014 when this video was made.
As for the purpose, if it was because the arm itself was losing alignment, that would be a huge problem, repeatability in machines like this is critical. note it places a whole bunch of passive components no problem before getting to the ICs. These sorts of machines (along with CNC, 3D printers, laser cutters, basically any kind of robot doing any sort of precise work) use either stepper motors (open loop control, each stepper pulse = a very specific known distance), or servos (closed loop control, encoders give continuous positional feedback) to maintain positional control at all times. the real purpose of having the alignment camera: the chips are sitting loose in trays that have a bit of wiggle room, so you don't know their exact position when you pick them up, and the leads are close enough together that the small amount of wiggle can mean a short circuit or even the pins ending up on the wrong pads. compare that with the capacitors being placed earlier without going through the alignment process: they're dispensed from tape which holds it a lot more snugly, and it's just got 2 contacts that are pretty far apart compared to the IC leads.
Which companies Paste was it?
It can do both through hole and smt cool.
Very impressive. We should all envy you.