Complete Beginner Information ?

[Gopher]

On a std clamshell printer the adjustment is the alignment/registration method, with the eurocircuit one its the pegs, and even it has adjustment to ensure the stencil is parallel to the board from what I see. If you have neither system then you end up using blind luck judgement and -- sticky tape?

[Tandy]

Going through a list of project ideas one has a 28-pin microcontroller that comes in SPDIP/SOIC/SSOP could an RV handle that, presumably it wouldn't manage 44-pin TQFP or QFN ?

[Mike]

Fine pitch stuff can be hit & miss - on  a good day & following wind I've done 64 pin 0.5mm pitch QFPs and QFNs with minimal manual tweaking, but it doesn't always work out & sometimes needs quite a bit of post-placement nudgery.
I'd guess it's down to the right coincidence of  calibration, general mechanical repeatability and/or being close to the limit of the vision system. 0.65mm QFPs and SSOPs are generally not too bad, most of the time.
Other users here can probably advise better on what to expect.

I think the RV, especially the RV4, still represents the best price/performance you can get at the lowest end, and is at least as useable as anything you'll get under £10K. Small size and no need for air is also a plus.  
If you're debating whether to get into assembly, An RV is a pretty low-risk way to test the water, and will give you you enough experience to know if you need something better, or if in-house assembly's not for you.  

Incidentally, on the subject of low-end machines, the Mechantronika looks quite promising, and probably the closest thing to a modern RV-class machine. I think I've seen a price of 20KEuro but not sure if that was with or without feeders
http://www.mechatronika.com.pl/content/view/21/4/lang,en/
Anyone have any experience of these?

[phonoplug]

Tandy - are you in Headington? I'm only in Kidlington. If you want to see an RV working you could pop round when I'm running some boards. I've got a 11k part build to do probably next week if thats any good.

[Gopher]

Heh I think I pretty much just echo Mike with some of this.
The Mechantronika machines do look interesting, I haven't seen much comment on them other than other people asking the same question, the disty would almost certainly hook you up with an installation or two tho'. The main RV contemporary is the Quad 4c, the faults and fixes for which seem to involve bizzare codes in multiple files and rom chips all over the machine, fun.
I used to place such things with our RV it is certainly more than doable. When you get down to things like 0.5mm pitch , you may find you need to give some things a little nudge with some tweezers before reflow and you may also need to adjust the placement location to compensate for drift in the RV. It could well depend on how lucky you are with your RV. The same would be true of many older budget placement machines, they mostly lack any encoder for precision work. Where I used to find consistent issues was with much higher pin count devices, with those a little excessive twist could result in a lot of tweaking and a lot of shorts. At 0.5mm you really want to get your pasting right as well as the stencil and footprint design, always check the default libraries they can be utter tripe. You will find QFN's more forgiving than QFP's

What an RV does not do :
Rotations in steps other than 90 degrees
Panels of mixed PCB's (you have to treat the panel itself as a single board)
Large PCB's - you should find a diagram in the manual)
Devices under 0402 (Personally I would not like to have tried 0402 either but I was spared that)
Take into account device height when choosing its placement order
Use bad mark or badcheck fiducials
Placement simulation or manual teach
Maintain any form of part number database

What it struggles with:
Fine pitch devices
Tall wobbly devices (see Phono's query about Electrolytics)
Inconsistent lighting
Really accurate placing where you have parts close together
Large devices in tubes. (this isn't an RV fault, vibratory feeders are crap no matter who makes them)

[phonoplug]

You can place parts at angles other than 90 degree multiples. I build some boards (feeder controllers for Vivo/Intelligent Drives machine actually) that has a LIF connector at some odd angle, 25 degrees I think:

[Gopher]

Tricksy! how did you do it? I only ever used RvGerber and at the time it never proved to be a common requirement.

[Mike]

What an RV does not do :
Rotations in steps other than 90 degrees

I beg to differ

[Gopher]

Rephrase it is! RVGerber doesn't. You can add extra rotation in RVPlace, although I suspect that is not how these were acheived.

[phonoplug]

You can do it in RVgerber. Place the part as normal. Hitting space will of course rotate it in multiples of 90 degrees, but if you select the placed part and right click you can them enter the angle in tenths of a degree:

[Gopher]

Hah! Now who feels dumb, was that documented? It sound like something I should have found by mistake at least once.

[phonoplug]

Is hardly anything useful about the machine documented??!

Hey if you've never needed it, you've never needed to find out how to do it!

[Gopher]

I needed it in in 2012, the year we got rid of it.
Oh and I think it was suggested for a product that never happened in like 2004. I don't do circuit design but I understand layout programs tend to hide custom rotations deep in convoluted menus so they don't get used much. If you intended to flow-wave surface mount however it is in important feature, as IC's meeting a wave head on turn into a bucket of shorts.
Ah yes documentation and software completion, IIRC one of the buttons in that menu you show right there does not do anything.
For the record I will point out our £100k Essemtec machine has buttons in the software that when pressed  say " This feature has not yet been implemented" but they have been releasing a version or 2 a year and I am at least 2 behind the current release, its quite possible they now do things.

[Gopher]

There are a few other machines that may be affordable, a Dima Optimat has been on offer from quite a few brokers for quite some time it is quite possibly always the same one. It may be that by now a lower offer would be accepted, we were offered one on a must go quickly price with a pretty hefty collection of feeders for similar money to an old MyData. Dima machines don't seem to be very popular over here but they seem capable enough and I seem to recall the current Dima distributor saying their guys had been getting some training on the older kit.
You will also notice a few Contact 3's, I think the manufacturer website lists these as having limited available spares, they do seem fairly common.
Shawline also currently lists an Essemtec FLX, this is a popular Essemtec model and very compact, it probably depends on what feeders they can offer with it, feeders from Essemtec are not cheap and you will struggle to find 2nd hand ones. Sites I visited liked their FLX's but it is worth noting that the site that placed a lot of 0402 did say there was quite a bit of tweaking going on using that platform (they were I think pretty large heavily populated boards). The FLX was their high end model until they introduced the Paraquda and Cobra, lower end models take different feeders (slower and less accurate) and start dropping down the drive system quality (encoders, servos, motors etc).

[Jason]

of course if you do direct creation of the transfer file from your cad package using the PCAD or Eagle exporters then it's a whole heap quicker to do odd rotates.