LitePlacer.com forums

I am looking at putting a conveyor belt through the pick and place so that I can do higher volumes and not watch the machine like a hawk.

Currently I am building my first liteplacer and have no other experience with pick and place or opentpnp.


The cheap chinese conveyor machines look to be 3" tall at the conveyer part once frame stand removed.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/VEVOR-Belt-Con ... 4316658708

If I put a 3 " board on both sides to raise the machine (and down cam)
Could I feed the PCB on the conveyor and use a 3d printed guide to put is in the right X and put a stepper in to drive the conveyor instead of the motor in it (or just stop the motor).

Would LitePlacer be able to handle a little offset from the bed landmark?
Would a soft bed like a conveyor belt mess up placement?
Can liteplacer or openpnp do batch jobs of 10s of boards with some kind of signal to go/nogo to next board?

I am planning on using full reel feeders like the 0816 feeder instead of picking from the floor board.

Is this silly or could it work?

I could use 2-3 feet of conveyor to preplace solder pasted boards so I can be less attached to the machine.

Eventually I could build a stack holder / destacker to load in 20 boards or so that have been silkscreened and then do something else.

I have a conveyor PCB oven so that part is easy.

> Would LitePlacer be able to handle a little offset from the bed landmark?

Depends how much is “little”. As long as the software finds the fiducials, yes.

> Would a soft bed like a conveyor belt mess up placement?

I don’t think so. You’ll want to set the switch on the nozzle so, that there is several mm’s between “just touching” and switch triggering (you’ll understand this once you get to the setup). This way you can have a few mm play in the placement.

> Can liteplacer or openpnp do batch jobs of 10s of boards with some kind of signal to go/nogo to next board?

For LitePlacer: Not as it is now. If you can place a few boards on the belt, you can set the software to handle them as a panel. It wouldn’t be a big issue to add a “repeat” function, except for the signal to continue. “Press any key” or a dialog “Repeat job? Yes/no” would be trivial, but not what you are looking for. I would guess there are devices that can do the any key function?

> Is this silly or could it work?

It could work. I’d be happy to add the repeat function in exchange for a video seeing the conveyor belt system working. You provide the key press gadget.