Feeder setup - I'm confused...

[SteveW]

I only just put my sidescreen on for the first time, after daylight started sneaking past my cunningly taped on bit of A4 paper...
It's mostly trying to get my head into the right place that's tricky. The machine isn't exactly sitting in the middle of a nice open bit of floor.

I think I've found the issue on the nozzle snappage - another merged-move fiasco, it wasn't going for the part I thought, it was a 1210 for which I hadn't yet stopped merging. Is there anyway to turn off merging globally?  It took me ages to spot that some 0603 picks weren't landing right because the nozzle was bouncing off the stripper plate. That, or is there any way to explain to my machine that it doesn't have the feeders it evidently thinks I've got?

The fiducial camera does work nicely for spotting fiducials - however, today I'm doing a panel where I didn't put fiducials on the individual boards, and I couldn't be arsed to do the maths to use the panel fiducials. I thought 'hey, I've got some small compnents, and teh software lets me use them as references, that'll do, it's an easy board'. I then find the software doesn't run the camera for spotting those. Another 'whatthehell' moment? All it does is show me a black square. Goign back and checking on a real fiducial - all is well. Sigh.

Yeah, I do appreciate that there are always going to be issues with budget PnP - I'm entirely prepared to hand-hold it. (Heck, I've been using elderly test gear forever, and there's a Lotus Europa on the drive - I'm at one with elderly mechanical things giving me a hard time
I'm frustrated because it's all soooo close - but at least I've found the snapped off part of my 0805 nozzle, so can get these boards out without having to hand-place them. yay! Back on the roller-coaster.

[Gopher]

I think it has been suggested elsewhere the accuracy of the fid camera way out there is poor, I am inclined to agree. LED torch FTW, that said if the lanes are loaded with similar stuff, setup one with the nozzle, then for the rest manually type in the x biases using best judgement in the feeder dialogue boxes in rvplace. Its quite effective for me but then y is fairly static as almost everything is 0805 and I am just tweaking an already working setup.

I have several boards where there are no fiducials, a small pad or via instead usually does the trick, I always load top, silkscreen and paste layers into my tfr file so the machine knows they exist. It's not quite as good and its unlikely you can use auto fid correct but it works well enough.

[SteveW]

Yeah - problem is, I can't (well, don't want to) lower the nozzle onto a pasted pad for fiducial purposes. Maybe I ought to trust the boards are all the same, but that seems brave.

If I could see one lane on the troublesome feeders,  I'd be happy... I may have to post a photo of the corner I installed the machine into

As for Auo fid correction - I've never got that to work, and stopped trying. Maybe I ought to give it another go, but the manual setup is so quick, I'm not too fussed.

[Mike]

I only just put my sidescreen on for the first time, after daylight started sneaking past my cunningly taped on bit of A4 paper...

When playing with an IR camera recently I accidentally discovered that the sidescreens are pretty much transparent to IR light, so they may not always do the trick if you have daylight coming in.

As for Auto fid correction - I've never got that to work, and stopped trying. Maybe I ought to give it another go, but the manual setup is so quick, I'm not too fussed.

This does work but you need to set the threshold so it sees a clean pad, and it is quite sensitive to uneven lighting - I often just do it manually, still using the camera but using the 'use current position' button.
Incidentally, the software does adjust the pick position based on previous vision results (unless you have lock feeders set), so if the pick location is slightly off, it should gradually fix itself.   

[Gopher]

I must confess I stopped using auto fid correct years ago. It works if setup just right but its slow and if something changes like the FR4 colour, the light, exact tint of your tinning it can start wandering off looking for your fiducial before settling on something random, I much rather its done manually and 100% right every time.

[Gopher]

Does anyone sell replacement nozzles?
davidc here has some. If anyone's handy with a lathe, I have the engineering drawings for them.

Ooo drawings sound good, not handy with a lathe myself, but I know people that are. Having said that, the price in 2009 for tools from davidc was perfectly reasonable.

[davidc]

i have nozzles.. the camera is greyed out cos the machine u have cant use it for any function other than Fid alignment. that only came on on the later RV1sRv4s machines.