LitePlacer.com forums

I am really liking this thing. It looks to me like a possible solution for in-house manufacture of low volume stuff.

There is a real hole at this level - if you have a board of medium-ish complexity (say 200 parts upwards) and you just want make them 10 at a time, it's a problem. Hand build will take a lot of time. Not enough volume to be worth loading a commercial p&p. Plus, for that you have to buy by the reel - a real pain if your board only uses, say, 10 diodes.

So - I am wondering if, in this situation, it could (with a bit of work) be used with your boards in a panel, and have some kind of jig that allows you to load in the correct set of components of each type. So that when you want to make another little mini-batch of product, it can be set up and started off in a half hour or so. Then you do something else for an hour.

I know that at the moment the software doesn't handle multiple boards - but presumably there could be a way to treat 4 boards in a panel as one large one, given the x,y coordinates of each?

the trick would be to get loading time down to where small volume, responsive manufacture is possible.

Thoughts?

Hi,

Thoughts?

Well, that I don't see the difference much with the other thread here ? :
http://liteplacer.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=33

But say the subject indeed is about the "hole" as for the lower volume and real production instead of prototyping ... I concur. So about that subject :

We are in the same situation BUT I personally yet have to see whether there's really gain. We did not finish the LitePlacer yet and we actually bought it to find out ...

We sell a consumer product. This means that no customer is ordering 10 at a time. So what happens in practice is that you could make 10 at a time; say buy the components for 10 and assemble them all to stock. But that's still half-product when talking about the PCBs. Now let's say that 6 PCBs go into the end product. But of course no batch as such will be working for 100% so you miss one here and you miss one there. Btw this is high(est) end audio so even the smallest failure has to drop out. Do we fix that ? maybe when there's some spare time - which never occurs.
Practice now depicts that the "batches" you will make are completely dependent on the components on stock. What's on stock depends on how much failed plus -obviously- it depends on what ladder discounts could be obtained etc. (never the same for each of the components).
All this makes the *real* practice quite different : You produce to create some stock, up to on order (single piece). But, this is totally obviously because when you do all manually you can do what you want; only the "batches" as such may imply less (placement) error because you do it in a flow (can be all wrong as well, haha).

If you read the above carefully, you see that using something like the Liteplacer could be a pain like having a boat laying around somewhere and you go sailing with it ony because you have it and it could be a waste otherwise. IOW, when I have components stock for e.g. 3 PCB's it could be way too much overhead to set it up for such a small run. So what can happen to solve this ?

Have more components stock.
Yes, but THAT I don't like !

As I told in the other thread (the link I gave) our new (for the LitePlacer) targeted product a/o contains 244 smal PCB's for a 2 channel audio device. What I didn't tell in there is that one such a PCB contains 3 resistors of 10 euros pp (when bought in large quantities). Indeed this is about the multi PCBs to place in one time, but it is also about the quantity in itself which makes it worth while for doing other things in the mean time (placement going on). However, nobody is going to tell me that it would be quite efficient to buy even more of these resistors, which comes down to 723 x 10 euros for one end product.

It is really a psyhchological problem when we e.g. find out that 4 of the 244 PCBs have failed (10 or so components on them pp) and set up a run for say 20 more so the loading in itself becomes more efficient, knowing that I should have stock for a value of 24 x 4 x 10 euros = 960 euros. However, assumed I could know in advance (statistics) that 4 will fail, I for sure would have 4 x 3 x 10 = 120 euros spare on stock. And the time to make those 4 manually ? what about 5-10 minutes. And no way that the LitePlacer will be set up for that in 10 minutes and which is only about the placement.
On a side note : we never reflow so my mentioned 5-10 minutes includes everything (just hand soldered).

So you see ? I'm intrigued. Bought the LitePlacer just to find out, but obviously knowing in advance the large amount of placement / soldering which has to be done anyway (think 3000 components for one 2 channel end product). And to be honest : when not done like this the end product would be unaffordable (too much time on the placing/soldering although the latter would be reflow then).

The whole - again a kind of psychological - issue seems to be about that you are able to do all manually in the first place. So this is not about prototyping at all but *if* we'd do prototyping (which is a necessary evil of course) then we'd do that 100% sure manually (rough estimate : 100 times faster than setting up all for placement).

Interesting ?

Peter

Different jobs, different tools. I wouldn't start a machine for a prototype board with three resistors either. Prototyping danmcb's 200 component board would be a pain to to manually. I designed the machine after doing one 450 component board manually, so that I don't have to do that again!

The LitePlacer could help in dealing with very small production by supporting panels and supporting part trays. Both are rather simple: A dialog that asks for number of rows and columns and the separations, and the software has all the info it needs. Supporting part trays means only the capability of saving and loading tape definitions from user named files. Both sound like a good return for the effort and worth doing. Bit these would only make small series possible with LitePlacer, it still wouldn't be a very good machine for production.

The low volume smd placement field is indeed rather empty. I believe I have a decent attempt to cover prototyping, but I'm alone in this category. The Neoden machines seem to be good for small volume production, but they also are alone in their alley. The industry attention seems to be in big machines. Well, if that is where the big money is...

the way I see it is:

you order PCBs and metalwork in volume, because you get better prices. Same for components, in some cases. You may only sell 3 units a month, but if someone asks for 20, you don't want that to take over your life for the next 6 weeks. So it makes sense to buy 50 pcbs, and assemble them. With good design you can also test them so you have a stock of tested boards.

If you get a big order you can service it fairly quickly because the hard yards were done. Only the last 20% of build needs to be done.

That's my idea anyway - other products might have different needs.

===

The other thread is about using LT to place a panel. But that is not all that is involved in starting a job. You also have to lay out components and then tell LT where they are. I am wondering of that can be streamlined.

Then LT maybe becomes a very useful tool for responsive, low volume manufacture - because you can basically leave it run it and build up a stock of assembled boards when you are not too busy with other stuff.

But only if you can set up and run a batch job easily - if it takes 30 mins to start off a 90 minute job, not so good.

you need to get your components out from storage to your working area, there is no way around that. For prototypes, the current method is not bad, imo. To streamline that phase, conponent trays are the way to go.