General Help

[NIJI99]

Hi, I recently purchased a very well used but well maintained RV4S. I had it demonstrated working perfectly. I just wondered if there are any RV4S guru's living close to me in South Somerset, who could go through a whole job set up. so I could take copius notes. 2 x 2 matrix of 60mm dia boards, about 30 components, 3D printed strip holders for the larger stuff, needing feeders set up properly. There's petrol money available if local. Thanks.

[Gopher]

The manual http://electricstuff.co.uk/forum/index.php?&topic=170.0 is basically the training they would have given you and fairly comprehensive. There are a few secrets on this forum as well as tools for skipping programming form Gerber data, but I think you might find its simpler than you might imagine.

[NIJI99]

Gopher, many thanks for your reply. I have a copy of this manual and the original one. Things that are causing me problems are my job has components which are in strips of 12mm, 16mm. 24mm. I 3D printed a pocketed equi-pitched jig (16mm x 11mm - 4 x4 matrix) but can't seem to get the gist of setting this up as a passive feeder properly. What steps do I have to do to ensure that the head moves onto the next location of the same component for board 2 of my 2 x 2 matrix and so on. 

[Gopher]

Well its been quite a while since I've been anywhere near one, but presumably you have created custom matrix tray roughly following pages 11+ with reference locations. Then when you setup a job you fill that tray with the requisite part just like any other feeder, trays have a few extra options which are of course a little quirky. IIRC every "pocket" is pretty much a lane so one matrix can have multiple part numbers loaded in it (I can't do that on Essemtec). There's a rotate 180 on refill option to cover the fact the arm might only reach half a tray and so you aren't refilling but turning it round, that option might drive you nuts, it doesn't always seem to do what you expect. Otherwise it should be much like using the other feeders, I'm sure an active user will chime in soon if I've forgotten something key. Otherwise perhaps you could describe exactly where its behaving badly.

[NIJI99]

Many thanks for your reply. I have moved on and am placing components both from the 10 lane feeders and my 3D printed jig for the job. One thng that I would like to clarify, is that I set up a new feeder as a matrix, entered the dimensional offsets x and y for the lanes. Set reference 1 and 2 then had to set biases for each component. I had a ssumed that the software would have calculated that. Is this correct to have to set all biases or did I set my lane offsets incorrectly ? Big learning curve !