Manncorp 7700FV

[ralphstirling]

Ladyada,

Based on your experience buying and setting up your 7722FV P&P, how
do you think the new 7700FV with the cut tape feeders will work out?
We were on the verge of buying an Essemtec manual P&P with BGA
placer, but the 7700FV is about the same price. Have you placed BGA's
with your 7722FV yet? How long does it take to set up your 7722 for a new
board? We are concerned about setup time for onesy twosy boards.

Thanks!
-- Ralph
Walla Walla University, School of Engineering
College Place, WA

[adafruit]

we are going to place some leadless parts and we've seen a demo that this model can certainly place big BGAs but it really requires bottom vision. so just make sure that it has bottom vision!!!

to be honest, we're a bit non-plussed by the idea of -only- cut-tape feeders. from mucking about with the machine for a few days the amount of time it takes to set up a board seems to be equal to how long it would take to place parts for about 10 boards and the thing about cut tape is that its almost always for passives like res. & caps - and most boards that you'd want to p&p have so many of those that its like "why bother with just cut tape, you'll need to sit there and advance it" if that makes any sense...

but if you have the budget its at least better than a manual "pick and place"...

[ralphstirling]

Great info. Which method do you use for programming your 7722 - CAD
import or direct teach? How long do you think it would take to stick
a board in and place a single BGA or QFP using the direct teach method
(i.e., sort of a manual P&P mode)?

Thanks again!
-- Ralph

[adafruit]

either is about as fast, and you have to verify that you did it right no matter how its trained
you have to program in the tray and size and location maybe thats 1-2 hours (you'd eventually get better at it)
then for each board you have to load it in, re-align it on the machine and press go. i suppose if you're doing a lot it could be about 3-5 minutes per board.
really, if your project is making 1 or 2 boards of a design, an automatic pick and place is overkill. you could contract out the assembly for a lot less.
that said, if you have the budget, this machine will certainly do the job for you @ high precision!

[freaklabs]

Actually, after getting familiar with the machine, the setup goes pretty quickly. The initial setup of the jellybean components takes a while, but as long as you leave them in the machine, then you won't have to touch them again for a while. Training trays just requires training the first tray and then specifying the X/Y-pitch. MDC has a new cut tape rack where you just load the cut tape on the rack and train the machine for it. Haven't tried it yet but looks like it might be handy.

For onesy and twosies, it depends on what type of onesies they are. If its just a one-off board, then you may as well pay $50 for a paste stencil and hand place the components using solder paste. The benefit is that the paste will center components like QFNs and BGAs as long as they're pretty close. If your onesies and twosies are actually boards that already have been made, but people request them randomly, then it might be okay for a PnP. Once you have the files trained, then its pretty simple to just hit the button and go.

However LadyAda brought up a good point about just using cut tape. If you use cut tape for a lot of components on a board, you'll need to retrain the machine each time you use it. You may as well use reels for the common components. I try to avoid cut tape as much as possible because it slows down the automation.

[ralphstirling]

My past experience and word of mouth from others about Manncorp isn't very positive. Is it possible to buy the MDC machines direct from the manufacturer and bypass Manncorp? Or has anybody heard (or experienced) any good things about Manncorp's support?

-- Ralph

[adafruit]

My past experience and word of mouth from others about Manncorp isn't very positive. Is it possible to buy the MDC machines direct from the manufacturer and bypass Manncorp? Or has anybody heard (or experienced) any good things about Manncorp's support?-- Ralph

hi ralph,

first up, we wanted to thank you (and everyone) for all the great questions, comments and participation in this new forum for pick and place machines - this is a lot of fun and there's a ton of great information being shared, this new forum area is exceeding all of our expectations!

on to your question... we're not sure how the manncorp support is (yet) we haven't needed to call on them yet, but if and when we do we'll provide a full report here and in the forums. we were not able to find much about the service side from actual customers before our purchase. these pNp machines aren't really talked about in the outside world, it reminds us how mysterious laser cutters were just a few years ago.

as far as buying directly from mdc, it appears that is not possible at this time. if you're in japan "maybe" but so far we've only seen that it's manncorp and a uk distributor who can actually get the machines out. if anything changes we'll update our wiki:
http://ladyada.net/wiki/mdcpickandplace ... ere_to_buy

our rep at manncorp was chris, feel free to email him: Chris Ellis <cellis@manncorp.com>

they said if anyone picks up a machine from our referral they'd send us a feeder - we're not suggesting someone gets one just because we have one and want a feeder, do lots of research (and add stuff to the wiki / here!)

that said, we have found that you do need to know eveything you want -before- you call because they are distributors, not necessarily manufacturers or pick & place experts. for the most part they'll just point you at the website if you have any questions about the machine. chances are, between akiba & us we'rll be able to answer most questions

[freaklabs]

The original text posted here was deleted by me, Akiba of FreakLabs, due to complaints by Manncorp.

[gsattler]

I work at a small instrumentation design firm and we are looking into the Manncorp/MDC 7700FV/7722FV pick & place machines. We have a small number of engineers that work here as well as a few technicians. It sounds like the people at Adafruit and FreakLabs would rather not babysit a pick & place machine, not that I don't blame you....boring. Our preliminary plans would be to have the engineers setup and verify the pick & place machine, and then have technicians make the small production runs (they would otherwise be doing the placement and soldering by hand). With this in mind, would the 7700FV with cut tape feeders make a more compelling case with a limited budget? Our production runs are typically 5 boards of a few hundred jellybean components each that take a highly trained tech about a day to place and solder by hand. Are you still happy with your 7722FV? Any issues worth noting? What made you decide to go with the 7722FV rather than a used Fuji/Juki/Siemens/Panasonic?

[adafruit]

that may be OK just realize that you have to program in the machine for those hundreds of parts. that may take quite a while and there may be errors that require rework.

we use the machine for building not-particularly complex boards (so far) of maybe 25 parts max and then we do many runs of 50 or so - maybe thousands of each design over the course of a year. this is (in my opinon) ideal because i can run off boards quickly and load up the program. just have to set up the feeders properly.

but im just not sure that it would take less time to program in the parts and load the cut tape strips (and manually advance them when necessary) for 5 boards. if you can export the BOM directly in then probably its worth it. but that will take a bit of effort and tweaking

it pretty much boils down to whether you can automate the programming process and/or if you're using the same components over and over so that you can program in the cut tape strip locations and stick with them. you'll need a guru who gets good at it, which you can probably cultivate, who can sling some perl or python to massage the data. i plan to write scripts to that effect for EAGLECad but its not going to happen for a bit. if you can get that going then the machine will place parts quickly and with no mistakes. perhaps the key is whether you have hundreds of 10 part types or 10 parts of a hundred types

overall im pretty happy with the machine - mechanically it is very well made, the software and documentation is sorely lacking but it -does- work and we're trying to add to the documentation on the wiki. there have been a multitude of technical issues that take a while to debug and we may need to do some repairs on the machine. afaict these machines, in general, are just a pain to get up to speed, and its not specific to this one. just realize its not like a drill press, it will take a while to figure out how to get it to do what you want - you may need to invest a month to start getting 'time ROI'

[gsattler]

Thanks for the quick reply. I do primarily product design on the mechanical side of things and it took a few weeks for me to get online with my new CNC milling machine and associated CAD/CAM conversion process, so I can easily see that it will take time to get this thing up and running as well. After all my work bringing our mechanical fab side up to a circa-2009 process with CAD/CAM/CNC/Rapid Prototyping my boss realized that we need to really attack the electrical side. We are currently using PCB-CAD and are looking at upgrading to Altium Designer before the end of the year. Like you said, automating the BOM generation and getting that output to drive the pick & place with file massaging would be ideal. Anything will be a huge upgrade from hand placing and soldering a few hundred 0805 capacitors and resistors.

[gsattler]

Have you looked at this Eagle CAD User Language Program for generating centroid files?

http://www.screamingcircuits.com/servic ... aspx#eagle

It could be really useful for automating your CAD to pick & place machine setup and save you some serious time. I'm pretty new to this whole topic, I'm trying to educate myself on our process and how we can more easily go from idea->concept->circuit->pcb design->pcb fabrication->test->component integration->shipped product. I know Altium (and most likely others) have automatic BOM and pick & place file generation so I'm trying to make sense of all of that.

[adafruit]

yah, just calculate what are your most common components and then see whether reels or cut tape make sense.

[blogger]

take a while to debug and we may need to do some repairs on the machine

what did you break already?
just curious

[adafruit]

what did you break already? just curious

stop by the ask an engineer chat and you can likely watch what we break live!