27 OCTOBER 2013
The new diy pick and place machine needed a way to feed SOIC, TSOP and other tube supplied chips to be picked and placed using the machine.
After looking at a lot of commercial and diy solutions we decided to build...
24 OCTOBER 2013
The holders for the vacuum nozzles are now fitted to the pick and place machine. Our original plan was to have the motors mounted higher as in previous posts and use a magnetic holder to attach the different size nozzles...
17 OCTOBER 2013
We have started working on the vision system for the DIY Pick and Place machine. We are going to use two cameras, one fixed on the base with a led lighting array around the camera and a “flying” camera mounted...
12 OCTOBER 2013
After a busy week rebuilding the picker system with much better quality bearings and installing the home sensors to all the axises the DIY pick and place machine was finally ready to connect to the Smoothstepper Ethernet...
01 OCTOBER 2013
The feeder activator system to select the correct component feeder and then activate the feeder is based on the same system used on the semi-automatic pick and place machine we built before.
In order to save weight on...
26 SEPTEMBER 2013
Work is slowly progressing on the DIY pick and place machine with the pickers X axis having new parts machined this week and assembled and tested today.
Further photos are on my Flickr gallery at http://www.flickr.com/photos/brian-dorey/sets/72157635317638526/...
16 SEPTEMBER 2013
It has been a busy week so far designing different brackets and parts for the automatic pick and place machine. The photos below show the latest progress on the build and a video showing the picker Y axis running via a Smoothstepper...
04 SEPTEMBER 2013
After using our previous semi-automatic pick and place machine for a year we decided it was time to build a fully automatic DIY pick and place machine as we cant keep up with the demand for the Raspberry Pi expansion boards....
21 AUGUST 2013
Today I was trying to get a Netduino 2 .NET Micro Framework microcontroller board to communicate with the ADC Pi board which we build and sell for the Raspberry Pi.
Initially the boards didn't seem to communicate so...
17 AUGUST 2013
We recently had a hard drive failure on our Synology Diskstation NAS drive and the drive was making very nasty scratching noises so we decided to remove the lid and found that the hard drive heads had crashed into the platters...
25 JULY 2013
My new BeagleBone Black arrived today and the first problems I had when trying to install the drivers via USB onto Windows 8 was that the installer told me the following:
“The current language is not supported by the...
22 JULY 2013
It has now been a year since the first Raspberry Pi solar data logger was launched and over the past 12 months it has been running continuously uploading data from our sensors to our online reporting site at home.briandorey.com...
12 JULY 2013
One of our clients uses Google Apps for Business for his email and he used to have a Google Analytics account using the same email address as his new Google Apps for Business primary login email address.
It seems that if...
06 JULY 2013
After damaging the GPIO port on our raspberry pi while designing a new solar monitoring system we decided that it might be a good idea to build a buffer/level translator to protect the GPIO pins from over voltage and ESD...
29 JUNE 2013
Earlier this year I ordered a Landrover Defender Replacement HD (heavy duty) crossmember from blacksheepcrossmember.co.uk to replace the rear crossmember on my Defender which was rusting fairly badly on each end due to the...
19 JUNE 2013
Now we are doing a lot more work with static sensitive devices we decided it was time to update our workbench with an ESD antistatic mat and wrist straps to try to ground any static electric build-up before it can damage...