Lasercut strip feeder for your pick & place #Manufacturing Monday
Thanks to Felix for sending in his post about making a lasercut strip feeder for you pick and place. Check out more on his blog LowPowerLab.
Got pick & place? Cool. Got cut strips components but no strip feeders? No? Then this post is for you.
Problem: You need to assemble a small run of boards in your pick and place and buying full reels of parts makes no sense, instead you get a low count in cut strips. Strip feeders cost a lot, and they are not very special, just cold dumb metal. Of course, the manufacturer will sell you high quality feeders machined from aluminum/steel, but placing components from cut strips that already have pockets spaced evenly sounds like a very easy problem right? I mean you could just stick them on a cardboard with double sided tape and then teach the machine the first+last and it figures out the rest. That works but it’s a pain when you need to reload – you have to re-teach the machine since you won’t stick it exactly in the same place, you’re almost better off placing by hand.
Solution: So let’s make a strip feeder. I have lots of components that are less than a full reel (exotic resistors, transistors, crystals, caps, mosfets etc). Most of these are 8mm and 12mm tape, rarely 16mm. So it would be perfect to have a strip feeder that can be placed in a fixed position in the machine. To reload you just cut the pre-determined length, feed it through and align the first pocket to a marker on the side, reset component count for that row, and machine already knows where to continue, quick and easy.
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