FAQ: Would you make a CNC upgrade kit?

[JuKu]

Many people already have a CNC machine, and have asked me about an upgrade kit to be added to an existing machine:

I am not planning to offer this, at least not at this moment. My top priority is to prepare for shipping the first patch of kits, after which I have some very useful features to add to the machine. So, for some time ahead, I simply don't have time to consider this.

Secondly, I'm not very convinced the practicality of this. The pick and place functions are rather involved, there would be a lot of work in converting the machine from CNC functions to pick and place functions and vice versa. Besides, I'm certain that you don't want to have pick and place functions happening on a machine that you have used to generate lots of small metal chips! On the other hand, converting a machine permanently from a CNC to a pick and place machine would leave you without a CNC, and I suppose there was a good reason to buy it when you did.

But this is only my opinion: "The entrepreneurs' freedom: An entrepreneur is free to do exactly what the customers want." So, if there is sufficient demand, I might end up doing a conversion kit one day. However, at the moment this is something I can't offer, even if I would wish to do so. I hope you understand.

[Spikee]

To be honest you might aswell pick one of those china cnc's from ebay or the shapeoko. It is quite hard to beat that price and those work without issues.

[WayOutWest]

To be honest you might aswell pick one of those china cnc's from ebay or the shapeoko. It is quite hard to beat that price

The shapeoko costs almost as much and only has three axes. A pick-and-place needs four axes in order to rotate the parts into alignment. Also the shapeoko has no vacuum, no pickup head, and no cameras.

Not sure which "china cnc's from ebay" you mean, but all the ones I've seen would cost more than the liteplacer by the time you're done upgrading everything.

and those work without issues.

Not as a pick and place they don't. How are you going to rotate the parts? And there will be plenty of issues trying to "bolt on" high precision elements like the pickup head and downlooking camera.

[Spikee]

I was talking about a cncmachine. Not using a cnc as a pick and place and visa versa.

With a liteplacer you might do very light milling but that is really all the construction can do.

Also do not want all that mess a cnc makes when you are useing it as a PNP later.

[mucek]

With a liteplacer you might do very light milling but that is really all the construction can do.

Hmm, you get me to the idea of perhaps putting an 1 W laser on Liteplacer ... Properly focused might be used to cut stencils out of mylar ...

[Mark Harris]

That would be super duper slow. We do stencils at about 15% power on an 80W Trotec. The trotec has vastly better positional accuracy too We find around 500dpi is the sweet spot with a 2" lens for ablating the material, and JUST out of focus. 1000DPI does the same job, but adds too much heat, so going a little out of focus gets the spot size wider (the trotec laser beam is very nice, so at 500dpi you can get fuzz if its perfectly focused)

Also, I've found that PET is working better for stencils than Mylar. Mylar's melting point is too low, larger holes seem to want to distort when engraving them away - so we have to switch between raster engrave and vector cut to go from tiny hole to big hole

[dmwahl]

A CNC head on the liteplacer could be useful to create PCBs,