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Bargain!

Hi. Did you get my messages?

Hi Trev,

Thats a good question.
I am thinking initialy I am after a few boards to try out and tinker with.
If this works out well then I would probably want to retrofit most of our feeders down the line.
I have a cache of chinese arduino megas collecting dust in my stores from old venture which would be ideal.

We still use our RV a lot for certain jobs and I am on a bit of a mission to fix or improve a number of the known issues we suffer with the feeders which prevent an operator walking away from the machine while it is running.

It would also be nice to add some features to the feeders which would make life easier.

Don't waste your money until you have proven the machine will do what you hope. Am sure you will have it apart a few times as your project develops.

I spent money on stuff thinking it would be a good investment only to find a project takes a different path and you end up wasting money.

I have a few feeders that are already wired up and some spare boards. Might be useful having some already fitted for reference and to enable you to experiment before taking apart your feeders? And to have some more feeders.

I would likely sell these relatively cheap if you are interested.

Do you need any other spares whilst at it as I am having a final clear out and may put some stuff on eBay in the new year if I can't sell them to someone on here for a good price.

I would be really interested to see your progress with this. Be interesting to see what repeatable placement accuracy you get.

Hi

I used the board on several feeders and it performs fantastically well. I think I placed 1000s of 0603 leds and jumping was greatly reduced. Some feeders have the pins at the front ( grey feeders ), some have them at the back ( blue feeders ). I found on the grey feeder some times the action of the pin would also contribute to the bouncing. So if you have blue feeders then I think it works better. It might be other things too but I think that's what I found.

The solution I used as I was investigating the problem and using the boards was to wire the transformer inside to power the control board but then I used an external supply to power the solenoids. This allowed me to monitor them and see what voltage worked best. Reducing the voltage to experiment with the pin impact. I think though in the end I settled on 24V and it was find for a lot. With the transformer, the voltage is all over the place and I think too high most of the time.

Also I found that when you start to slow the feed speed down, the solenoids are energised for longer and the transformer voltage is too high to turn the solenoid on for that long. 24V enables you to slow things down and not overheat the solenoids.

The software for the controller is Arduino based and had a menu to control everything. I ended up putting a panel mount usb connector on the back of the feeder and I would plug into that to configure it from a terminal programme.

It was always a work in progress but was at a stage where it was working. I do have some boards and would be happy to provide all the source code and schematics so you could modify/adapt it to your own needs.

How many boards would you be looking for? 

I have some of these available, make me an offer. All came from working systems.

Hi have a control box for sale. This has 3 RSP-320-36 supplies in it. I have not used it for a while but I am sure this is the one I used as my daily driver for my machine. Having these supplies in it means you can do merge moves on placement without worry of voltage dips. I think it is one of the reasons placement was actually quite accurate for me.

The supplies themselves cost £50+VAT new alone.

I am sure it is all working but it is sold as seen. I cant upload any images as it says site if full, contact Mike. If you want to message me your email address I can send images.

I have a PC for sale. It won't have a hard drive in it so it's a computer to setup from scratch but it has a DSP card and the graphics grabber card in it. Open to offers. Looks to be in good condition.

Make me an offer.

Anyone interested in making me an offer on a DSP card?

Yeah I have a set available. Anything else you need?

I have quite a few feeders in variable condition that I am looking to now get rid of pretty dirt cheap if anyone is interested.

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.

Just some input on feeders. The Rv feeders for the most part are okay for paper tape but are just not reliable for anything else. They are terrible. They are just not reliable enough.

In the end I designed a conversion board and my machine now supports Yamaha CL feeders. These are brilliant and it's meant I can turn the machine on and just get on with populating boards rather than wondering if a feeder is going to mess me around for an hour.

It's taken a bit of time to fine tune the setup for the CL feeders but it's definitely worth it.

They do take up more space though than the Rv feeders. Maybe 7 cl feeders take up the same space as Rv feeder.

Today I pushed through with an actual build. I did 1900 components in total and the feeders worked really well. This was a mix of paper and plastic tape. They all worked great. 

https://youtu.be/SAtt8Z9p8Kw?si=0atCEg5JaawddgL1

I am trying to figure out how to document the build as it got quite involved. I might put it all on GitHub and provide a link.

Getting there slowly. Ironing out a few things but cl feeder is working.

https://youtube.com/shorts/2iVKTT58kOs?si=msGTPVX7_IefT1JM