Hi Yes! I kind of look like Foo. Anyway, what we're gonna take a look at today is a do-it-yourself pick-and-place machine from a company called Light Placer. Calm them if it's kindly written on the side of the box here. Well, it's pretty much a one-man band.

Juha Kusama if I'm pronouncing that correctly. I'm sure I'm not. Anyway, he's on the Eevblog forum and he's He has his own company selling like high-end audio products and things like that. but he decided to quite some time back to do his own do-it-yourself pick-and-place machine.

There's quite a lot of people are doing, but now he's releasing or it's already for sale. I think a kit for a 1,300 US dollar pick-and-place machine. So I thought we'd do an unboxing of it. can't build it here.

Unfortunately, that will be have to be a whole separate video and then I'm not only building the thing but then also using it as well. So thank you very much for sending this in. It's awesome! I've always wanted to sort of play around with the do-it-yourself pick-and-place machine, but I'm you know. I've been quite outspoken about the value of picking place machines.

they. I I think they still have a very niche window of usability. You have to, sort of, you know, have just the right type of boards that you want to assemble with the right number of parts and the right volume. Otherwise, you know you're often either better.

if you've only got like one board. for example, you need to assemble with you know, 30 parts on it or something. Well then just do it by hand. There's you spend too much time setting up and around with your pick-and-place machine, you might as well just do it by hand.

It's actually quite quick, but if you've got a board or a panel that's got, you know, 500 parts on it. Well, you know, doing it by hand might be a bit tough in. yeah, solder paste might dry out or something like that by the time you get around to placing all your parts. So hey, it might be worthwhile to set up your pick-and-place machine to do it.

And but if you're doing a run of 20 panels or something and your bottlenecks going to be your workflow, not just the picking place, but your workflow in terms of you. Alvin and pay you note and you can't just go paste all your 20 panels and then put on through your pick-and-place machine. Because then we solder paste to dry out and know it all. the workflow thing.

You're better off just shipping them off to your local assembly house to do it. So anyway, it's gonna be really interesting to look at a do-it-yourself pick-and-place machine. Are they usable? And you know, do they do a reasonable job for the money? Won't know unless we build it up and do some practical examples. So they'll be follow-on videos for this.

This'll just be unboxing figures. Well, it's quite exciting. Look at this big Toblerone bar anyway. Um, this one can do so he claims down to like Oh 402 parts.

It's got vision placement as well, just some USB web cams and stuff like that but that's great and it basically just I Believe there's no bass in here either. You've got it like you make your own bass and you just screw down all the all the XY stuff like that. So all the UM shezzy is basically in here and it's just like a a you know a frame with all the linear motors and stuff like that. So well let's take it apart and see what's in here.

So as I said, our 13 hundred US dollars about 1200 euros or there abouts and you get the full kit. Although you don't get everything that's like, you get most of the stuff. you get the cameras and all the motors and all that. you know everything else.

but I don't think you get some of the guides and and things like that Anyway, they're all individually cardboard wrapped. that's good and all got to me intact by the looks of that stuff and make it all the way up. he's in Finland by the way so we can make it all the way from Finland to Australia. So down as far as you can get then I think we're doing pretty good.

That's it. That's all that's in there. so these will be all your. there's a maker slide.

Yep, so these are all the all the slides that we've got. and let's take a look inside the box, see what else we've got I might have to. Yeah, I'm gonna flip this around. These things are particularly faster.

This one's not particularly fast. Most do-it-yourself ones I've seen are not fast like. This one is claimed between 200 and 400 components per hour, so you know it's definitely not professional level. Oh Nope, definitely not professional level.

Peek in place machine. How do you? what do you will open this thing? But the big thing that makes a pick-and-place machine really usable of course is the feeders. And no, this one does not have any feeders, doesn't support anything so you can't use your existing rules. you just have to cut them out and just lie them, stick them down on the table and like anywhere on the table and then the camera comes across, finds them, book, picks them up, and stuff like that.

So the closer you put your strips to your strips or components to your board, the less that the head has to travel each time and you know the hence. why do 200 to 400 components per hour which is not taking place. Machine Here We go, there, we go. He's from my temper in Finland Thank you very much Job Zhuhai, He's a juku on the eevblog.

All right. I'll spare you the unboxing of the rest of it, but it is this box of goodness. Everything is individually labeled em 510 low head, screw it, look at their spaces. We've got micro switches big-ass once.

we have got ourselves a manual pick-and-place tool, but maybe it uses the head from that. maybe you have to. it uses the suction cup from that that might be might up it's going to label. this penny is not very useful, but the rubber cups are aha so we're going to use the rubber Cup for that.

And yeah, we got all sorts of Wow really going to town, good work on labeling em fires everything the there's a little built pulleys for the linear rails and Wow yay haha look at those bearings. so uh, how many bearings are we got? ten of them? This is fantastic. Well done I Like it. Oh man, don't lose any of it.

And we've got linear bushing slide bearing units. Oh man. look we've got some of a custom they might be custom made angle brackets Springs Awesome. Oh man, there's good instructions for assembly in this.

and guess who gets to assemble all this? I Thought these cables snakes were optional extra actually. I Love these things. These is just beautiful. Yeah I don't know if they're actually included or not.

Don't quote me on that. now. these are optional extras apparently. I Got a screwdriver by the way in the optional extra one.

Awesome. talks. So fantastic. but I don't know why sort of the post assembly extrusion nuts and things would be optional extra don't quite get that.

And we got some motor porn. for you motor aficionados, we've got NEMA 17 XY stepper motors here. There we go for those playing along at home with the model numbers. not sure what brand that is Anyway, this one is the rotation motor.

It has to be a smaller. well it can be smaller so it is smaller. Osm is that the menu factory? Anyway, that's for the rotation of the head and then we've got our big worm drive. Look at that yeah baby! and let me show you something really cool you can do with stepper motors, just short all the leads together so red to red, green to green, etc etc.

and we're going to smiley face that if I turn this nice and slow, nothing's happening. But if you start to turn them fast it should actually track one-for-one he go Beautiful! No, no magic, no external power supply. We're just obviously generating a voltage with our first stepper motor which is enough to energize second stepper motor and the amount of you know the speed it takes to get up to the actually turning the other one can determine how good a quality the motor is need. And as far as the camera vision system are goes, well, just yeah.

cheap as chips. USB Endo scopes we can get on eBay for right next to nothing so we actually get two of those. So there's going to be two cameras on the thing and we've got some LED rings as well. They look much bigger so there must be some sort of mount - you know, plate to mount all this jazz on.

But yeah, that's that's all you need these days. It's easy to add like vision. easy and cheap to add vision placement. do I do it yourself.

pick and place machine these days wasn't the case like you know, 10 15 years ago. And here is the rest of the mechanical goodness. We've got ourselves our our slides here. We've got two long ones, one shot.

well add two really long ones, two shorter ones, and one really short one. So there you go. We've got ourselves our extruded aluminium t-slot things there, and some y-axes tube okay, no idea how where that goes. but anyway.

I'm that's basically it. That's the unboxing for the light placer and there's their address light Placer calm if you want to check it out. So this was just an unboxing video. sorry I can't really do anything else I'm exciting with it today, but Dave too is going to build this up or David as he doesn't like being called Dave does he? That's correct, You're right.

All right, it's gotta be David All right. So yeah, he's going to assemble this thing and we can do some future videos on it. It was just a relatively quick unboxing. Catch you next time you.