bobc wrote:I saw that block and was quite interested, but before dropping $150 on it I was keen to see more specs, e.g. what dimensions, number and type of lanes. Hard to tell from the small picture.
Yeah, I agree. I took a gamble here and it turned out really well. The small lanes are standard 8mm (the size used for essentially all resistors+capacitors). There are four 12mm lanes, which is adequate. Unfortunately there are only two 16mm slots (the size used for SOICs with more than 8 pins) which is not enough for me. There's one 24mm slot (FPGAs, etc) but I never use it; anything in a tape that wide is expensive enough that I've probably only got a few of them and splicing on a leader is more hassle then just doing a cut-tape feed.
It has M6 tapped holes in the bottom for very secure mounting.
bobc wrote:
I am also looking at a Volker Besmen type feeder. I decided that the most critical part was the final delivery part, I attempted to 3d print but the accuracy is not there. It really needs to be machined, either alu or POM etc. The rest of the mechanism is fairly tolerant, apart from sprocket hole detection. I don't have facilities for milling, so an off the shelf part would be great.
Yeah, it's gotta be precise. Aside from the material block the rest of my feeder consists of extrusion beams and very weird-shaped PCBs. Some days I think I use PCB fabs as a cheap small-run CNC shop more than a circuit manufacturer...
bobc wrote:
The 28byj-48 steppers are cheap, but quite slow
That's okay, they only need to be able to turn about a half of a revolution in the time it takes to do a full pick-align-place operation on one part. And if they're even too slow for that I don't mind making the machine wait in order to have tons of cheap feeder lanes.
I do have four very-fast commercial feeders which I use for parts that get placed many times on each board (like 1uF and 0.1uF decaps, I go through those like water).
bobc wrote:
They are also unipolar, so to use them with common bipolar drivers they need the "cut the red wire" mod. I was planning to avoid the cost of a stepper driver and use a DC motor instead.
Right, the mod is very very very easy. On the other hand although unipolar wastes half the torque, it lets you run the motor with no driver -- just a quad high-current NPN bipolar, which most vendors throw in for free with the motor.
bobc wrote:
In theory, a stepper would avoid the need for a sprocket hole sensor, as it can feed exactly 4mm. But, I think that the alignment would drift over time as the feed is unlikely to be exactly 4mm, so it would need periodic alignment via some method. Perhaps by camera?
That's what I do. Detecting the tape holes is very easy EXCEPT for the obnoxious
clear plastic tape that Kemet uses. I cannot figure out what on earth they were thinking when they made that decision...
My solution isn't for everyone though. Having a few fast commercial feeders takes away a lot of the pressure to be fast-fast-fast. I'm happy with the compromise. I have a few fast+expensive feeders and an ocean of very cheap slow feeders so I rarely need to change reels, which I hate doing.