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The RV1S is still available to pick up in the same location, but I won't be able to demo it, because I moved out of UK. Will be going on eBay soon.

Every day the price is going to go down by 100

It's now £800

Hi! Moving out of country so have RV1S for sale. Was used in production until I purchased a new Chinese machine two years ago and it has been sitting there as a backup since, but never had to turn it on after I switched to the new machine.

I have 9 feeders that came with it, lots of spare parts, nozzles. I upgraded PSU on this machine with the help of this forum and PC which runs 98 so supports USB flash drives. Will also provide the original PC running 95 as a backup.

Not sure about feeder types and their condition. Will very likely need servicing, because I only needed and used three out of nine. There are:

- four 10 lane
- three vibration feeders
- one that has 4 small lanes and 3 larger
- last one has 3 very large lanes.

Can be seen running in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JovNFbyKL1U

Available in Hitchin, Herts. Would need to be gone before 28th of September.

Won't sell separately, want £900 for the whole lot or highest offer. Can't do VAT invoice, because it was purchased personally before the business was set up.

I've been reverse engineering the code from time to time whenever I have some spare time. I have quite good knowledge of how the software is structured now internally and I am able to extract functions into pseudo readable code, then convert them manually into something a bit more understandable. Calibration code was my next step, but it is quite difficult without actually seeing what the machine does during calibration as I need the jig. It's mostly being limited to finding the pieces of code that represent events on the machine like displaying dialog boxes.

Spiyda, can you please let me know the exact steps that don't make sense to you and I will see if I can extract the logic behind the code on the machine. Maybe with combined effort we might be able to fully reverse engineer the functionality?

spiyda, how did you work out your fid camera calibration settings?

Mike, did you notice that my comment is also gone? Very odd.

Anyway, if the software is not using inverse kinematics then it makes sense why there has to be a calibration grid. It does introduce quite a bit of error and makes sense why you would be having these issues. Will go into more depth to see how fiducial camera coordinates are mapped to head coordinates within the software.

Mike, you are right. Placed another board with different locations of the fiducials and had to the same procedure. I think that by experimenting this way I might be able to calculate values which will eventually work with all boards. Just getting slightly closer to understanding the machine bit by bit

The problem as I understand it is that that calibration is a map of the differences between the fid cam position and the nozzle over the  bed, due to the arm geometry, so the error varies depending on the   absolute position. I always find significant differences between offsets for different jobs.

If I understand correctly, when you place a camera module, you would still have to rely only on manual fiducial adjustments? The automated system sort of relies on the offsets of fid camera calibration.

Yes - I've   never used the auto fid correct as it's rather fussy about lighting

[Fiducial Camera Offset Calibration]

I think I have figured it out! It's not perfect, but it works very very well. First of all I noticed that there is a pattern when I change the fiducial camera offsets, but only when the Y is set to zero. So I thought that if I can get as close for both fiducials as possible to be in the same position even though they are offset, I should be able just to set the board biases to a constant value and always rely on the fiducials! Here is what I did with my machine.

Fiducial Camera Offset Calibration

I'm assuming you have everything already set up and ready for placement.

• Open RvPlace
• Place a board with fiducials to the right top corner of the placement are
• Manually align the fiducials with your eye and nozzle 1
• Write down your current fiducial camera offset values (just in case you want to go back), set Y offset to 0 and don't forget to click the apply fid button
• Place all -> Fiducial Correct
• The fiducial alignment window will come up twice just like I've shown in the first post
• Check to see the displacement of the two fiducials and how far off they are
• Open calibration and set the value of X fiducial camera offset to either + or - 100, divide this number by two when you can see that displacement overshoots to the opposite direction
• Note that when you are changing the camera calibration, both fiducials will move in either direction!
• Go back to (5) until the fiducials align, don't worry if they are offset from your original location

After this your fiducials might be offset, but when the machine looks at them, they are offset at exactly the same position both on X and Y. One tip is to use exactly the same focal position for the fiducial calibration, because fiducials slightly move as the camera focus is adjusted. My fiducial camera offsets are X=-1620 and Y=0.

Board biases

When you are confident that the offset is exactly the same, just calculate the offset by moving the arm in the Fiducial Correct window and calculate the steps of the offset. They should be the same on both fiducials. Mine were X=156, Y=6. Put those values as negative into PCB setup window for board biases. It is very important that the biases are negative to the values you calculated when you manually adjusted the position. For board biases I entered X=-156 and Y=-6.

For example if your both fiducial board offsets are X=-100 and Y=20, then you should put in X=100 and Y=-20 into board biases.

Notes

I think that my machine's fiducial calibration file seems to be OK and it's just the camera offset that was incorrect in my case. Alternatively I think that if I manually offset the values in the fiducial calibration file by the amount of offset I currently have, I wouldn't have to deal with board biases, but it's just not worth the time :-)

If anything out of my instructions doesn't make sense, just drop a message here and I will clarify for you.

[Issue #1: Fiducial Camera Offset is incorrect]

Trying to get my machine set up and fiducial camera has always bothered me. I haven't been using fiducial camera and just manually adjusting the position for the board. This worked OK, but I want to get this sorted.

My panels have only one set of fiducials for the whole panel. When I setup the board and position the the ref 1 manually, ref 2 is always spot on. This is how much off is the fiducial camera for bottom left corner:



This is how much it's offset on the top right corner:



If I align the board with fiducial camera, my placement is completely off.

I understand that there may be two issues.

Issue #1: Fiducial Camera Offset is incorrect

I've been trying to set up the offset by entering various values in the fiducial camera offset settings, but can't seem to get even close to making both fiducials work. If I set up for one, then the other one is way off. Does any one have any suggestions on what would be the best way to calibrate offsets? From my experience even the location of where I'm calibrating the fiducial camera affects the values I have to input in the offset box.

Issue #2: Machine needs grid calibration

Doesn't that mean that the machine needs grid calibration? Out of frustration I even started reverse engineering the code which does calibration grid with some good results. More about this in a separate thread.

Jason, mine has only a switch for the front door which lifts up to access the pick and place area and that only slows the machine down, but does not stop it so not ideal. It does not have any other door interlocks.

Mike, makes sense regarding contacts sticking. I would go with very high quality relays anyway.

On a side note, placed more than 6000 components yesterday with absolutely perfect placement at full speed! Had so many issues and now they are all gone: I can just start the machine and leave it to do it's job while I'm working on other stuff instead of constantly standing next to it and monitoring.

I have a few things still on my list to do:

* Rewire the connector on the box for feeders. The 220V wires going inside the box directly to the feeders are just too thin. I think the whole machine was wired with something like 28AWG for power and data wires. Already received the parts and crimps from RS so that's going to be my next mod before working on the next batch of PCBs.
* Feeders need servicing. Already received new O rings suggested by Mike so hoping that it will improve the performance. Will do some cleaning too. Feeder disassembly is a bit of a pain. Will see how they perform after I rewire the connector though. Current symptoms are: failing to pull back the cover tape, jumping back after index.
* Do the power shut down mod when fuse or PSU fails.
* Not sure if needed, but I would like to add a few PC cooling fans inside the box to cool down stepper motor drivers. They do seem to get very very hot... Machine works fine though.

BTW, this is how the main wires to the diode bridge looked like before I decided to start modding the hell out of that box...

Oh, found them in this thread:

http://electricstuff.co.uk/forum/index.php?PHPSESSID=4d9c2b9d15017b83239ff8a834920f8e&topic=107.0

Thanks for the tip!

Interesting idea. Mine was pretty much the same, except I wanted to cut the power with relays to each VCC-X, VCC-Y, VCC-RZ. Is this what you have in mind?

IN - signal wires coming from the connector to the computer
OUT - signal wires going into the Sanyo-Denki boards
VCC1, VCC2, VCC3 - separate PSUs I have
VCC-X, VCC-Y, VCC-RZ - power supply wires to Sanyo-Denki control boards

Does anyone know the feeder connector and socket part numbers? Can't seem to find them on RS website. It seems that the socket on the main box for the feeder plug has the wires crimped to the female pins and I want to rewire that connector, because the wires which carry 220V are too thin.

Hm... wish I had your advise before I installed the fuses

I currently have 1.5A on the R and Z each and 3.15A on X and Y each. Just ran the warmup procedure and all seems well, but the risk exists. Will try to find out if I can find some sort of safeguard to shut everything off automatically if any of the fuses blow. I'm currently looking into using an Arduino with three relays. I would rather have the fuses in place just because each PSU is rated at 9A and the total drawn from each one looks like not going to be more than 2.3A. If I understand correctly when there is a problem, PSUs would shut down only after the current reaches 9A and I certainly don't want that!

Mike, I noticed your two toroids in one of your videos. Guess if it works for you then there is no point in upgrading. 

Replaced the veroboard with a proper 12V power supply for the LEDs which seems to work great. Doing final update to the machine and installing fast blow fuses as per your recommendation in one of the threads. Measured all axis power draw and here are the MAX readings:

Z - 0.97A
X - 2.32A
Y - 2.23A
R - 0.90A

Bought a bunch of fast blow fuses from Maplin with the following ratings: 1.6A, 2A, 2.5A, 3.15A, 4A and 5A. Which ones would you recommend placing on each axis? Don't want to go too low in case my measurements were incorrect, but would also like to be on the safe side in case of a short to ground like you had. Going to be placing fuses on each axis separately.

This actually raises anther concern. Let's say one of the fuses on Z axis blows for any reason. Then the whole Z axis will drop and the head could start smashing into anything on the machine while X and Y are still operational. Same thing applies pretty much on any of the axis. Is there any way to detect that a fuse has blown and there is not power supplied for the controller in order to shut down ALL axis immediately?