Intrigued by this forum, I like to share my knowledge about commercial high speed pick and place machine and component feeding in particular.
Unlike my previous attempt to market a feeder, which fits all machines, now, I leave this task to my perspective customers.
Although I’ve seen Universal feeders on Siemens machines and vice versa, each machine vendor has its own line of feeders together with protected firm and software operating these feeders.
Also, pick position, physical attachment to the feeder table and electrical or pneumatic connection are different from machine to machine.
In order to keep the tape advancing and cover tape peel mechanic generic and obtain a key advantage to have only one style feeder in the manufacturing environment, which can be swapped from machine to machine, each machine requires its own adapter and specific control electronic. .
I know, I’m an idealist and above-mentioned will likely not happen, but universal chargers on mobile phones give me some hope, the industry may consider my concept.
For most of the single nozzle pick and place machines feeder tape advancement doesn’t have to be much faster than 200 to 300 ms. Multiple nozzle heads could pick from the same feeder, by either advancing the rotary head or the X-axis for in-line nozzle configuration in much faster than 200 ms. In order to compete with Siplace feeders and the Hover Davis copy clones, my feeder should advance in 40 ms. At that speed the component should be covered during advancement and keep particular the small components in the pockets.
However, this is meant to be an open source project, my gear motor has the capacity of advancing the tape in max 40 ms, but I’ll leave this to my customers to regulate the motor speed and component cover feature to their liking.
New in this particular design is the method of tape advancing. As far I know this method is not patented or was not, when I did a quite similar patent in the year 1999. Patents don’t mean very much anyway in China and only if the copied product is exported from China, I could take some legal actions.
I mentioned this topic already in another thread. If you pull too hard on the cover tape, you’ll move the tape out of position. This led me to the idea the tape can be advanced by only pulling on the cover tape. Of course, I’ve tested it and it works very well.
The sprocket wheel is free spinning, but have slots or holes in order to detect 2 mm advancement.
The peel off is designed such, that the small plate with the groove wheel forces the tape down to the sprocket wheel also compensating different thickness of the tape material such as paper and plastic. Two pinch wheels transport the cover tape. The pinch wheels are forced together under spring tension and should allow for thicker splice tape, but will likely stall at cover tape knots.
I haven’t done a complete BOM yet, but I think I can easily beat all feeder prices out there by factor 3 to 5, plus I hope to get some feed back from the hobby and after market.