Manual placement rate

Chat about pick and place machines, reflow ovens, assembly techniques and other SMT tips & trix

Moderators: adafruit_support_bill, adafruit

Please be positive and constructive with your questions and comments.
Locked
User avatar
lyndon
 
Posts: 281
Joined: Tue Mar 29, 2011 5:28 pm

Manual placement rate

Post by lyndon »

I asked this question over at Sparkfun but I think I'll get more responses here:

For those guys out there making SMT boards by hand, how fast are you placing components?
My average is around 15 seconds per part which seems awfully slow. Actually it's 30 seconds including syringe paste dispense on a board that's mostly discrete components, but I'm assuming a 50/50 split.

How fast are you averaging? What's considered a normal production speed for hand placement without assistive (manual P&P) tools?

User avatar
alphatronique
 
Posts: 231
Joined: Fri Jun 25, 2010 8:30 am

Re: Manual placement rate

Post by alphatronique »

Hi that have lot of parameter and variation ..

1-) if you do always same board
2-) clear RefDef or not
3-) complexity and number of different part
4-) etc etc ..

but 15 sec for per board for new board ,and down to 7 sec for knot and clean board may look not to bad

personally i not see difference that place by hand or whit manual pick place
and find funny sale person that claim that manual pick place do 1000 > part / hour ,that no sense

for speed-up you may improvise a stencil whit thin aluminium or plastic sheet and drill hole on it
that make better result that hand deposit whit syringe and much faster ;-)

mikeselectricstuff
 
Posts: 164
Joined: Fri Jun 11, 2010 9:21 pm

Re: Manual placement rate

Post by mikeselectricstuff »

With a foot operated vacuum pen, picking from tape which is laid out in the right orientation, you can get below 2 secs per part.
Most of the time for hand placement is finding and orienting parts, so laying them out for easy picking makes a big difference.
I did a video on this a while ago : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdGSFc7VjBE

User avatar
48x24x48x
 
Posts: 14
Joined: Fri May 27, 2011 1:50 am

Re: Manual placement rate

Post by 48x24x48x »

It depends on what your picking (passive, polarized components, IC).
I usually average at 3-10 s depending on what I'm picking.
And I placed all components in ice cube trays with labels, that make it a little faster.
Panel PCB will help too if you pick the same component type across the whole panel before moving to the next component type.

Lots of China factory will manually hand pick if your quantity is low!

User avatar
lyndon
 
Posts: 281
Joined: Tue Mar 29, 2011 5:28 pm

Re: Manual placement rate

Post by lyndon »

Mike,
First, that is a great video. It reminded me that I started building a holder for multiple cut tapes but never finished it. I gathered some more data and what I've found is that some parts are taking around 3 seconds to place, but yet my overall rate is averaging 15 seconds (measured over 4 boards) so at some point, I'm slowing way down. I only pick ICs and LEDs directly from tape and not surprisingly those are the fastest. The rest are in a single layer in trays.

My conclusion is that I'm slowing down when I get to some of the bulk parts (have to place almost two dozen 0805 resistors) because their orientation is varied and some are upside down.

Take home message: finish the cut tape holder, build a lazy susan so I can turn boards easily, and make better use of vacuum.

Locked
Please be positive and constructive with your questions and comments.

Return to “SMT (Surface Mount Tech)”