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My machine was misbehaving again,
traced the issue to the PC power supply    ( it was ancient )

The symptoms if anyone gets the same, were  occasionally failed boot up  and occasional failure to run apps...  Once it was placing, it seemed to rum OK.

It seemed more like a corrupt disc, but despite various attempts to fix it, the problem persisted until I swapped out the PSU

These old machines take a bit of nursing sometimes.. !

I'm trying to set up a very simple feeder

It is strips of a reel of LEDs too wide to fit any of my feeders ( about 1 inch wide)

the component pitch is 12mm and the strip I can mount is about 20 units long..

I can't seem to find the documentation on how to set these up..
I've had a play but don't seem to be making progress... 

Any tips ?

Chris

ps, after the rewire and a new PC power supply, the opd lady is performing faultlessly. !
its just me thats need a hand !

Nice update on requiring your machine. Given me a little bit more motivation to put it higher up the list of things to do. It's a good idea to inline connections to the connector already there.

Cheers Trev, And the good news, she is behaving much better after the rewire, she did need the tool positions re calibrated using my two ball method as she was not releasing tools after all the disturbance, but properly placed about 60 boards with no errors and no repicks.   

Chris

Its an old thread, but I finally bit the bullet and rewired the arm on the machine I use...

I only found one fault and two almost fault,

The solid Blue wire was broken inside ... again  ..  I'd replaced part of it where it goes through the wrist joint, but this time it had broken where it goes through the elbow joint.

One almost fault was two out of seven strands remaining on one of the solder bucket terminals on the back of a D connector.

The other almost fault was that where three earth wires connect to a single solder bucket, the joint was tenuous at best and fell off when touched.

For this rewire, I used a 40 Way Pin PCB Female Socket Header Connector 2.54mm and cut it down to the lengths of the plugs..  3 x 4 way  1 x 8 way and 2 x 5 way   

The new wires were soldered on tugged to e sure they were on well and heatshrink applied..

Under the deck, where the wires were easily accessible they were soldered to the Header socket or the "D" type solder buckets,  but to be honest I cheated and connected inline to the quite a few of the wires on the larger "D" type as they were close together and a bit fiddly..  since they never move in that area, I thought it was a safe compromise.

I made one mistake on the bottom 4 way on the arm but found it by using a continuity tester to check my spare machine against the rewired machine. It tuns out it had been repaired before and the repairer had changed the wire colour inside the main column !!

If I were to do this again, I would be more methodical and map the wire positions on the arm to where they go in the various connectors under the deck..

Anyway, after all that, ( it took about 10 hours altogether) I'm now confident that there are no wiring faults and I'm hoping that the intermittent faults I'd been having are a thing of the past !

FYI there are about 23 wires that pass through the arm, I didn't have all the various colours, just 2 sets of 12 colours and some permanent markers.

For some insane reason I chose one of the hottest days of the year to do it, very relieved its over and the she still works!

Does anyone know where the permanent feeder #indexes are stored ?

I get a bit frustrated that I manually edit them, they work OK but they are not stored for the next run,


A second issue is that my windows 98 seems to crash to the extent it turns off the machine if I try to use file manager..   anyone know a fix short of re-installing ?

Chris

I assumed the problem was slipping of the o ring on the pull off tape, particularly on all plastic jobbies..  a possible solution would be to increase the diameter of both the spool pulley and the bottom pulley and use a bigger o ring,

Otherwise, a formulation of O ring that is grippier..   

I've tried using Platenclene on the o rings and that helped,

I have noticed a build up of cover tape debris on the o rings so regular cleaning helps.

But I've more or less given in to using fishing weights for many of the feeders..  Its not too bad for components where theres just one per board, but for some boards I have up to ten of the same component and short of locating the machine in a shot tower, its a more or less continuous repositioning of the lead weight.

I'm managing OK with modified metal nozzles, not broken one since I started using them..

Serviced a couple of feeders yesterday, cleaned out a dozen or so components that had worked their way inside and found another issue which might be useful to know,

The home position microswitch was out of adjustment, ( don't ask me how, it was locked down with two lock nuts !)

The problem was that the carriage was starting with the pins halfway down the slots and ending with them just touching the end of the slot

It took a while to work out what was happening ( the symptom was that the  pins were not dropping before the carriage started back to the home position, this in turn was pulling the tape back with it and causing a miss-pick )

but a bit of adjustment and with the help of Mike's feedertest utility ran several hundred tape movements on each pin with no problems.

The microswitch is glued in with epoxy, so not looking forward to changing those when they eventualy wear out ! ( I didn't check the spec because the part number is covered with epoxy , but lifetimes vary from 30,000 to 10,000,000 operations,   I just hope its the latter !)

Thanks Mike.

Can you run feeder.exe on a different PC to the one with the RV software installed ?

would be much easier to run it from an laptop on the workbench

Chris

I've always had issues with various tapes feeding,  sometime adding a fishing weight to the carrier part, sometimes abandoning the cover tape take up spool and draping the cover tape over the top and adding a weight.

One thing I tried recently which seems to help a bit is covering the parts of the parts tape path after the parts are removed ( eg the inside of the front cover of the feeder, the bottom corner of the feeder and the edge of the table)

Just plain old Teflon / PTFE self adhesive tape  ( ebay item  333966417304 )  it has a low coefficient of friction and it may be my imagination but it does seem to work.

Chris

https://youtu.be/0Wu516kW94U

Trev

Looking very nice

Simply bearings have the small "O" rings for the number something head ( the one I use for 14 pin DIL chips) on a lower price at the moment

BS607 1mm Section 2.54mm Bore NITRILE Rubber O-Rings

https://simplybearings.co.uk/shop/product_info.php?products_id=82331

Been a while since I posted ( been busy with work life and scuba diving ! )

but today besides the Royal Mail outage and Paypal playing up, the RV decides to drop parts all over the place.
Couldn't figure it out, but the vacuum pump didnt sound quite right..

Then, the vacuum pipe came adrift from the head and i realised the problem,
the vacuum pipe had cracked through where it enters the head block and had been leaking,

I wouldn't have found it, but was luck I suppose that it let go altogether and started flopping round.
lost a few boards, but she's working again now..

Its been a while, the RV4s has been happily doing its thing ... until today !
I have gradually been accumulating parts to do a bit of an upgrade, but not got round to it
Interesting seeing what has been happening while I've been making boards..  some good stuff going on !

today, half way through a batch of 96 boards, the "O" ring on the nozzle I use for picking up 14pin SOIC decided to disappear completely...
so  it looks like I'll be hand placing the rest.  :-(

Its the nozzle third from left top row..    the smallest with an "O" ring

Ive ordered  1mm Section 2.54mm Bore EPDM 

does that sound about right ?

Chris