RV4s on ebay

[Mike]

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Versatronics-RV4s-Pick-and-Place-/160478908846?pt=UK_AudioElectronicsVideo_Video_TelevisionSetTopBoxes&hash=item255d49d1ae

not my listing - just spotted it.

[SteveW]

Yeah, that popped up a couple of days after I bought
http://search.ebay.co.uk/260658739101
Typical - still, at least my guy had slightly more believable photos & description, and seems to be a credible enterprise. We'll see, it turns up tomorrow, with any luck.
Quick introduction:
I'm new to automated pick&place, have been doing hand placement for ages, but volumes are constant, and it's a terrible use of my time, and my occasional minion has just had a kid, limiting his availability. I run on timescales that make the whole quote-kit_up-post_out-subcontract-post_back-test-pack-ship very unappealing. So, time to bring it in house. The RV1, I hope, will do what I need. Batches are always small, rarely more than 10 of anything. Mostly 0603, QFP, some 0402 & QFN. Want to be able to do moderate BGAs in house, but prepared to wait a while before braving that.
This is all in-house, not subcontracting, so data will be coming from Altium designer, using my own libraries. No doubt I'll discover that my external assembly guys have been having to fix up all the pick&place data for years, and hate me with a passion.

Obviously, a sensible person would have done some research before poking the buy-it-now button, but here I am. Expect a torrent of confused questions while I get my act together - this looks like a little oasis of Versatronics knowledge, which I'll try not to annoy too much.
(Is there a FAQ list? Or any hard-won lessons, things that I absolutely shouldn't do, for fear of destroying either the machine or my stock / boards?)

Cheers,

Steve

[Mike]

Feel free to ask - use the SW/HW sections. Your questions and the answers will be useful to others!
You will find the first few jobs frustrating to set up, but it gets easier once you get the hang of things.
A big pain is making sure the orientation of parts in your library matches the 'natural' orientation of the machine (0 degrees is with index towards you in RHS feeders), and the rotate directions are the same (e.g. PCAD2006 rotations in P&P report are antioclockwise).
This is a particular pain for previous jobs that have old library defs - I've now got into the habit of changing libarary parts as I go for new designs, and combined with my export utility, the most tedious part is now threading tapes into feeders.
Hint - get some 4mm wide double-sided sticky tape from ebay!

[SteveW]

Cheers! I'll ask questions as they occur - I'm not sure how much documentation will come with my new toy, I'll have to plough through that first...
What's the d/s tape for? Sticking extensions onto tape & covertape? I've got to admit that I tend to cut the tape well back, when doing manual assembly. I'll probably have to stop doing that sort of thing now. Still, I've got dozens of reels of pre-RoHS resistors I can practice on with a clear conscience.

[Mike]

Yes, and to stick the leaders onto the pickup reels.
Wide thin-film double-sided sticky tape (e.g. as used for carpet) is also handy to put on PCBs to hold components down when doing dummy runs during setup - much less messy than solder paste!

[Teuneman]

I found spraying a very small amount of contact adhesive on the PCB for doing a dummy run works. The components comes off nicely and it cleans off easily from the PCB with thinners and the expensive bits' leads doesn't get ruined so I can replace them in the tubes/trays.

[Gopher]

Why the dummy run? Omit all but far corners, make sure one tape will fail (or it will consider that board complete and annoy you), place, adjust pcb correction values according, unomit, production, no?

[Mike]

Why the dummy run? Omit all but far corners, make sure one tape will fail (or it will consider that board complete and annoy you), place, adjust pcb correction values according, unomit, production, no?

Yes, once you know all your libraries are the right way round, the rotations are all OK and the parts loaded work OK with the library vision settings. I always dummy-run with at least one of each part type other than resistors, and as my PCBs are often multiple small units on a panel I find it's typically easiest to un-omit one unit. More so when RV Place's screen redraw goes titsup. 

[Gopher]

Ahh the advantages my fairly limited introduction to new exotic parts . I do do a dry run for qfp's I must admit, because when you get trays from supliers that are not 100% full they seem to pick an arbitrary rotaion. That and the whole rotate waffle tray malarkey doesn't seem to remeber the setting day to day and the number in the corner means nothing.

Also interesting to note the bugs in the system hit people to varying degrees, I sure recognize the screen redraw issue but while frequent, it's not often someting that then causes me a problem.

Likewise the feeder indexing issue, 8 years before I ran into it causing me problems and yet like phono I have a product with 64 SOT223 devices which are loaded into the lanes right next to the camera (my original feeders never move) and never saw a problem.