Science/Engineering/Technical forums

Doug - I have a need to build a pick & place machine and thinking of using some old salvaged printer motors driving the slides - have you any experience off?

Hi, There are several things here that might be useful .-bill

Thanks Bill - excellent.


PS are you in the UK?

Hi, John I believe. No I'm in the US. I live about 100km from Doug. I've Been to London and Oxford (My Son interned at Oxford and My Daughter in London one summer). I'm of Scotch Irish descent, so I'll have to visit the Mother Countries someday. I feel as if I am very familar with England as My Wife and I love to watch Midsomer Murders, Inspector Lynley, and Foyle's War on the "Tele". -bill

Ahh - that clears up some confusion here

And let me add, it's one of the harder 100km to traverse there is -- across the mountains the "wrong axis" so it's not just hopping on a superhighway, but rather a lot of extra miles in twisty roads you must go slowly on while going up and down in altitude a couple thousand feet.
I'm grateful Bill is willing to drive that fairly often, as it's quite a challenge and takes a long time to do, not to mention petrol and tire wear That man gets around a lot more than I do.

And yes, Bill, you're right, starfire is John Hendron.

Hi Doug and thanks for the moan response - so far I've got two linear slides ( read wardrope sliding door slides ) and a string of steppers both mono and biphaseic but have not worked out the glue spotter yet. -getting there.

Here's some words on my ill-fated attempt.

What I found is that it's easy to
A: get things cocked like a jammed window if you don't pay attention to having the correct number of degrees of freedom, and
B: you need to have a bearing on both ends of the acme screw and a flex coupling to the motor or it will jam from the slightest mis alignment.

I spent awhile on this, but didn't need it so badly as to be worth the hours I was putting into it at that point, and there are now
fairly cheap 2 axis drives around anyway, so when I return to that I'll use one of those most likely.

A jewelers (or Dremel) drill press with a little work might do the up-down axis. I used the drill press, spring drive down, solenoid up, worked fine.
But I kept doing the wrong thing with the main axes and getting them to jam, which is fatal of you're using steppers and feedforward control -- you can lose position and not know it.

I intend to use a IR photo diode index and locate this referance point at the start and several times through out the program on both exis.

The other problem is that I must first spot several points with solder paste before placing the component and this means locating the paste dispenser over the points before positioning the component with a vacuum grab. Also the grab has to locate over a component supply tape to lift the component and the traverse distance to the placement kept to a minium.