Hi Welcome to the Eev blog an Electronics Engineering Video Blog of interest to anyone involved in electronics Design. I'm your host Dave Jones Hi I Thought we'd quickly check out a solder paste dispensing machine. It's an automated dispenser. Don't confuse it with a pick and place machine which is totally different.

This doesn't Place Components All it does is Place solder paste past Place solder paste onto a board. Now if you check it out here this this is The Jig It's a Martin brand it's made in Germany and uh, these are the fixed uh test jigs. but the board can basically be any size which fits in here and you'll see that these little clamps are just magnetic clamps like that that you can actually uh, set your board onto in any position any position you like really on this panel and then it's got Control software over here and you set up. uh the you.

You set up the reference points based on the based on the fiducials on the board which that's why you put fiducials on there not only for the pick and place but uh, if you've got a machine like this which automat automatically dispenses the paste, then you got to have those fiducial marks. So you set uh, usually two opposite Corners like that and then it knows where the reference is and it knows. You import the uh paste file and it knows where to dispense the paste. Now here we've got a standard um and that's actually a camera.

It's a USB interface uh camera. So it treat it as a USB camera device and that's what it uses to uh, find the fiducials and actually visually align stuff And then we've got the uh paste tube here which has different size uh different size attachment nozzles for it and there's an air hose uh system which H over here which is used to actually dispense it and it comes with over here a companion. What is this Baming! It's a uh, it's like a a a compressor um kind of thing or a compressor, a pressure regulator controller. And because this is only a temporary uh setup, we don't have a factory um air system.

We're actually using just an An air compressor here running off the main. so it gets quite noisy when it's actually running. But this is what you need. You need a compressed air source to actually control this thing.

Now it's um actually if you if you look at the mechanical oh there it goes. See, it's pretty noisy. but if you look at the Mechanicals here, it uh really is quite simple. It's just an XY um XY dispenser and the pace can actually move up and down as well.

Um, but it just uh. basically just an XY plotter table with a past dispenser. Pretty darn simple, but this, if you have to ask the price, you probably can't afford it. and if we just take a closeup look at the machine here, you can, uh see the nice.

There's the stepper motor for uh, that direction there And around here is one of these uh, flexible, uh cable, um guides that travels with the with this arm up here. and there's the other steeper motor up there and it's It's pretty simple. There's a there's a valve regulator there for the pressure. It's got a control board up the top there, but as you can see, there's not really much uh to it.

There's another steeper motor down there and uh, there's not much to it at all. The only thing that comes out is the uh paste itself. You just lift that out. It's got a little o-ring and there's the air hose you want.

Do that. faming. Can we take that out? Awesome! There we go and there's our little past tube and you've got different size, um different size attachment nozzles. They come in little uh jars here like this, but um, see that one.

Yep, that's the type six which is the finest. M Oh that's the finest paste. Okay, so they come in different uh grades of solder paste. Yeah on the uh bot you can see see the the size of the paste.

5 to 15 microns? Awesome. They're the. They're the little individual solder balls I guess are 5 to 15 microns each? Fantastic. But apart from that, it's a pretty simple, uh, simple device.

really? Your board can be placed on there. It's got a couple of these, uh, fixed locations. but if you wanted to I guess you could drill Custom Jigs in there and stuff like that. But these little magnetic um board holders are really quite neat and it's pretty simplistic machine, but it works and it's very high.

Precision Very well engineered and of course it's important to store the paste in a fridge. So we've got a companion fridge to it as well and these are the individual uh paste uh tubes which then you attach and you have to clean the nozzles as well, but these must stay in the fridge. They must be kept at a constant temperature otherwise they will go off. and I think they probably have to stand on their end too.

I'm not too sure, but uh yeah, that's an important part of any uh, pick and place machine or any uh Reflow solder process. And it actually comes with Cam software as well as the uh solder, Pace control um software and Alignment software and this is where it's like a it's like a Gerber um cam um actual software and that loads your board in like that that loads in your uh Gerber paste uh file which your um PCB package will actually uh, output that and you load it into this and you can either do individual boards like we did here or you can do the entire panel. Um, but it just uh, it's pretty flexible software, but that's what you get when you um flexible and Powerful software you get when you buy these really high-priced uh, past dispension machines or a pick and place machine and of course, the Um application. It can read in the Uh Paste file directly from Um Alum Designer or any other Uh program, but you need to convert it into its own Uh format.

Up there, its own file format. It's a linear umer a liner data file and that actually converts it into its own format so it can control the machine. So even though this machine is pretty uh simple, it is quite expensive and high-end Because the resolution is very large, they claim it can actually go down to Um 015 uh components, not just 0402 which is what we're using on our board that the size of the 04 02s can do 0105 or 02. oh sorry 01, Yes, uh, o5 I think it is O2 01s And that's the resolution that it's actually uh capable of doing so even though it's incredibly simple.

But um, there's also a problem when the components are too close on the board if they're actually spaced too close together. Um, even though it's capable of that sort of uh resolution, Um, you will have problems on your board and well, you might have to clean it and start again, or it may just not be possible to actually solder paste dispense that board at all and you may have to use a traditional um uh solder paste uh solder paste stencil approach to uh doing doing the paste. But uh, there's an automated uh paste dispensing machine for you. Okay, that's the camera on the screen.

That's the camera looking down at the board down there. this little. there's a little USB camera on the side. it's just a USB device and there's the past dispenser and we're just aligning it up ready to dispense the paste if you use Mouse controller.

Yep, uh, click on that, you can see the step size is being changed. Got it? So you can move to all right? So we've chosen that pad down there. Normally would choose a fiducial mark on the board, but we've just decided to use a pad for the purposes of today's experiment and we'll select that as the reference point and let's go. And we're going to select the second reference point up there, which is Led number two.

Do it Okay, Set our reference points there. we go. It's just doing a test and it's dispensing the paste onto the board. It's uh, hard to see.

sorry I can't focus in any better than that with this camera. But uh, trust me, it is putting the paste onto each individual pad and then you can place your components and put them in the Reflow oven. Neat. Yeah, there we go.

Now we're doing the BGA. That's the fun part. There we go. You can clearly see the pace being dispensed.

It's pretty noisy when the compressor's running. There you go. You can clearly see the pace being dispensed. onto each.

BG A pad. Isn't it neat? I Love it. And correspondingly you can see on the screen here the ones that have already, um, been done are in purple and it's in process until it completes the board. I Like it.

It's really neat and you can see the paste which is, uh, only. we stopped it halfway through and you can see the paste is dispensed onto those pads there on the BGA pads and the individ idual ones as well. but they're a bit harder to see. They're 042 components on that board, so pretty darn small.

And there you go. We've got our uh, our board with our solder paste dispensed onto the individual pads. Now all we need to do now is take this to our pick and place machine. You've got to do that pretty quick, probably under an hour, otherwise the past, uh, just dries up or does whatever and it's no good anymore.

So you got to rush this over to the pick and place machine which is already pre-loaded pre-programmed and you just, uh, need to set the reference uh marks again and then it places the components interesting. See you, Yeah.