Ways to Improve the Speed of the Pick and Place Machine

In view of the importance of placement speed, manufacturers are trying their best to increase the speed of the pick and place machine. The methods used to increase the speed of the pick and place machine are as follows.

1. The structure improvement of the pick and place machine

(1) Use dual tracks to complete PCB placement on one track, and send the board on the other track, reducing the PCB transportation time and the stand-by time of the placement head;

(2) Combination skills of multiple placement heads, now there are double heads and 4 heads, 6 heads, 8 heads and other structures;

(3) Both ends of the arch structure are driven together to avoid the effect of the cantilever beam and reduce the mechanical stability time;

(4) Combined (or modular) multi-unit structure, focusing on mounting speed per unit area.

2. The placement head and suction nozzle skills of the pick and place machine

(1) Lightning placement head;

(2) Multi-nozzle structure-up to 30 nozzles on one placement head;

(3) Highly reliable and highly adaptable nozzles, which can mount components from 0201 and 01005 to 30mm×30 mm QFP components;

(4) Quickly replace the pick and place machine nozzle.

3. The movement drive and linear motor skills of the pick and place machine

(1) Choose vague control skills. The movement process is divided into 3 stages of control, namely "slow-fast-slow", which changes in the shape of "s", so that the movement becomes both "soft" and fast;

(2) The x-axis operation adopts a dual servo motor drive system with a fully synchronized control loop to speed up the movement;

(3) Select a patented linear motor with high positioning accuracy and high repeatability, high speed and high acceleration, fast and stable (up to 55ms), small working current, and  high-precision control.

4. The rapid detection skills of the pick and place machine

(1) Laser and CCD application cooperation;

(2) Dual cameras-chip components and large-scale ICs are tested separately;

(3) Fast image acquisition and conversion circuit;

(4) Advanced image processing and calculation software.

5. The feeder skills of the pick and place machine

(1) The feeding method of the intelligent feeder shortens the replacement time of components and manual errors;

(2) Non-stop refueling;

(3) Double belt feeder;

(4) Large-capacity feeder, some pick & place machine can reach 256 8mm feeder capacity;

(5) Replaceable trolley;

(6) Use woven bags as much as possible for devices with a lot of materials;

(7) Efficient bulk feeding.

6. The optimized placement program of the pick and place machine

Optimization criteria:

(1) The number of nozzle changes is less;

(2) The journey of picking up and patching is relatively short;

(3) Multi-head placement machines should also consider picking up more pieces at a time.

The pick and place machine operates the machine in accordance with the safe operation rules to improve the maintenance level of the equipment.

7. Software skills of pick and place machine

(1) Various forms of PCB files can be directly optimized to generate patch program files, reducing manual programming time;

(2) Choose offline programming for multiple varieties and small batches;

(3) Machine fault self-diagnosis system and mass production induction system;

(4) Intelligent operation system.

Precautions when Using the Pick and Place Machine

Processing Flow and Precautions of SMT Production

Features of the Multi-functional Pick and Place Machine