New Pick and Place machine arrives at Castle
 

New machine is being installed in our Kansas facility as I type this --

Universal Instruments GC-120 Genesis
Quad Lightning head (30 placement spindles per head)
Linear VRM motor drive (no screw drive)
132,000 parts per hour placement maximum

http://i37.photobucket.com/albums/e9...t/IMG_0273.jpg

ooooh, machine porn! :smile:

It's a better reason than ever to take a couple-hour road trip for a little tour...

you KNOW I can't wait for production to start again!!!


Gonna have parts flying everywhere! It will sound like a Gatling gun!

Good time to make a bigger v4 MMM with no fan.. oh and a higher BEC output.. and waterproof :mdr:

Will this lower the prices on your products at all? Before or after you pay off that machine? I'm no expert on fancy machines but it looks like that costs a lot more then a nice angus steer; and there's no question which I'd rather have.

How much does an Angus steer cost?

You could probably get one for around $1000. If you just want to cheap cow to show off to the guys at the CC shop, you could probably get one for under $500; However, its angus FTW!:yipi:

Well then, that machine cost about as much as 350 angus cows (not the cheap ones... ) :lol:

dang, thats not bad. I was figuring you dropped closer to 1/2 or 3/4 mil.


Can it pick and place the meat on my sandwich?

That is such a naughty pic, it being all open and stuff.

EEwwww... You would have to get the meat in really small pieces, and then put it in a tape or matrix feeder... And I don't know how well the conveyors would work with bread...

The reflow oven would make a nice pizza though. As long as you didn't mind the fumes from the flux.

So the linear drive probably increases speed and accuracy quite a bit over a screw drive? I am sure there is some kind of high resolution encoder detecting position?

That's a nice machine, I can imagine the excitement right now in the shop!

Pardon my ignorance but what exactly does this machine do?

Puts the parts on the circuit boards for the castle controllers!

It assembles really good miniature sandwiches!

Yeah, the encoder is a 1 micron resolution laser linear encoder -- you can just make it out in the picture -- the rule for the encoder is a 24K gold strip just under the head assembly on the linear slide. It's exposed so that it can be easily cleaned.

The main advantage of the linear motor is lower part count, lighter weight, and faster response. The head can accelerate at 9Gs at full speed, and still reach a 3 sigma placement accuracy of 10 microns.

Note that the heads on this machine are located on the INSIDE of the gantry -- not on the outside. Our old machine had the head mounted on the outside of the gantry. That's why it looks like there are no heads mounted on the gantries. (The gantries are built generic, so that they can be mounted on the outside for single beam models, and on the inside for dual beam models.) This machine operates on two circuit boards at one time, each board has two heads building (one picking and one placing) at any time.

Dadx2: This is a circuit board assembly robot. There are four machines in our production line -- the first is a stencil printer (DEK Horizon 03i) which prints the solder paste (microscopic solder balls suspended in a sticky flux) onto the circuit board (kind of like stencil printing a T-shirt.) The second machine is our new machine (Universal GC-120), which is called a "chip shooter" -- it takes parts from long tape reels and places the parts on the circuit board. The third machine in our line is a "flexible/fine pitch" placer, which we mostly use for large, odd shaped components and for placing microprocessors. The last machine is the reflow oven (Heller 1707EXL), which solders all the parts in one operation -- it's like a giant (20' long) pizza oven with 1 degree C accuracy and 7 temperature zones (to slowly raise the board temperature, and slowly cool it to prevent chip damage.)

I'll post a little video of it once it's running. So far today they have installed the machine, run electric and air to the machine, leveled the machine (1 thousandth of a inch front to back) and calibrated the gantries. We should be back up and running tomorrow afternoon. :smile:

Sweeeeeeeeeeeeet machine Patrick. Look forward to seeing it run

From my limited knowledge of machines that's exactly what linear drives are, much faster and very accurate.

Pdelcast thanks for the details I assumed it had something to do with the ESC production line but was not sure how it fit in and exactly what it did,,,now I know. Looking forward to seeing the video of it in action.

Does it have a cup holder?

So, will this increase your production now? by how much?

looks like you need new solder paste printer to feed this monster and new reflow oven to eat its outputs.

Lower cost is nice but not always the ultimate goal. I don't know much about running a business but when investing in new machinery that increases production and gives a higher quality product, the consumer benefits from it even if the price stays the same. The company can benefit from higher profits which can be reinvested in more high end machinery to produce even higher quality products still at the same price. Or invest more into R&D to come up with better, more powerful products (with no fans and better switches :mdr:) for the consumer still at the same price. Anyway, thanks for showing us the progress, I worked in factories for 20 years and I like this kind of stuff.

Nothing wrong with paying the same price for a higher quality product. :)

I agree...a better product at the existing price, now you are talking!

^^ It is kinda cool when a company buys new equipment and doesn't pass the cost down to the consumer. :yes:

thats cool, it would be neat to see a video of all of the machines in action for thouse of us that live to far away to come see them

Installed, ready to rock and roll. Quad beam Genesis GC-120 with four Lightning heads. The fastest pick and place machine available today.

BTW, the machine we replaced was a single beam Advantis GC-30 with one Lightning head. Today we built control boards for Thunderbird ESCs -- the old machine took over 8 minutes to do one array of boards (48 boards,) the new machine took about 2 minutes 30 seconds to build an array. (4416 parts total -- throughput of about 100K parts / hour)


http://i37.photobucket.com/albums/e9...t/IMG_0277.jpg

my god:surprised: 2min30:party:

video video video of MMM's

Hey pd ever think of making an esc out of fets like http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v2...s/Fetblown.jpg sure this ones dead but what do you expect when a EMI kickback of 3kv and 20a shorted arcross while switching a direct feed from a wall out let, but anyways I mean these things would make a mamba system next to industructable, with ratings of 340v @ 100A.

So do I!


Cool machine Patrick. Hope it works well for ya. Nice price too! I'll give ya a canada flag button and a WOW 2008 foam finger for it!

did the castle gang have a part ass machine prior to this perdy new one?
must be able to make some the company's output a lot more efficient:yipi:

now...since it's an electric machine...MAMBAFY IT!!!! :rofl:
1,000,000 parts per second FTW!! :rofl::rofl:

They may look indestructible, but in reality they are not suited for the type of controller we build.

That is a 200V, 46A (rated) FET you have pictured there, with a resistance of 55 milliohms. (in practical terms, this FET can handle about 10 amps with a large heat sink -- about 5.5 watts of waste heat.)

The FET we are using in the Mamba Monster is a 30V, 191A (rated) MOSFET, with a resistance of 2 milliohms. (in practical terms, this FET can handle about 25 amps with a minimal heat sink -- about 1.25 watts of waste heat)

We are using 36 mosfets (6 per phase-half) in the Monster, so the actual resistance is about .33 milliohms.
Using 36 of those IRFP260s in the same configuration would yield a resistance of 9 milliohms, and would need a shoebox sized controller... seriously.

At 150A, the Mamba Monster dissipates about 15 watts of heat from the FETs.

At 150A, the IRFP260s would need to dissipate 405 watts of heat. Ready for a 25 pound heat sink bigger than your truck??

And, it wouldn't be indestructible -- quite the opposite. The dies would run at VERY high temperature (due to junction to heat sink thermal resistance,) and the controller would have a short life.

It would, however, run at much higher voltages. So, you would need to run, say, 40S lipos (electrocution danger?) at low current (10 amps or so...)


In practical terms, the best configuration for an ESC today is lots of large-die, small package MOSFETs in parallel. The package we are using (SO-leadless) handles a huge die, but is packed into a small package. This allows us to place lots of parallel MOSFETs into a very small area, and maximize efficiency. Large die, large package MOSFETs like the one you have pictured would require us to use fewer MOSFETs per controller, and would have significantly higher resistance -- thus higher losses, larger heavier heatsinks, and lower efficiency. In the long run, this means higher cost, heavier controllers, and less power to weight ratio.

What we try to do in ESC design is minimize waste heat generated in the controller -- heat is the enemy of controllers. Heat losses are equal to (current squared) times the resistance of the MOSFET (this is known as "I squared R losses", often written as I^2R.) So in designing an ESC, we try to minimize R to the lowest possible level, while still making an affordable ESC.

No video yet of our new machine running (I have to figure out how to get a camera into a position where you can see something actually happening...)

But here is a video of an AC-30L running, which is the same as our OLD machine. The AC-30L (which we traded-in on our new machine) is a single head rotary drive machine with 30 spindles. Our new machine is a four head, 120 spindle machine, and is about 20% faster per head due to the linear drive.

Remember when watching this that our new machine runs like this one, but has FOUR heads working at the same time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEz4L...eature=related

And here is another video of a Genesis (linear drive) single head machine running:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wd-DU...eature=related

Sweet! It looks like a plotter, but in 3d. :smile:

I definitely have to come down there sometime for a tour! Let us know when everything is up and running.

Yeah, it does look like a plotter -- the difference being that the pick and place head and gantry weighs in at about 400 lbs, and accelerates at 9Gs... :yes:
The whole machine weighs in at a little more than 4 tons...

OK then, a weighty, speedy, precise, very costly, and really heavy-duty plotter. :smile:

YEp, that's it exactly. :mdr:


The frame has to be really stiff, so that the accuracy doesn't suffer (any flex in the frame would cause placement inaccuracy,) and really heavy so that the machine doesn't "walk" while building.


Oh, and BTW, we are up and running at full capacity now.

:lol: