Open Source Automated SMD Pick and Place Machine

Abstract

Surface Mount Device (SMD) is widely used in an automated Printed Circuit Board (PCB) assembling plant. Soldering SMD is a tedious and time-consuming process when it is done using bare hands. Industries require bulk production and hence it cannot be achieved by manual labour. For this fully automated SMD Pick and Place (P&P) machines are available in the market but the cheapest one starts at INR 15 Lakh (Yamaha yv-100x—Refurbished) and they are proprietary. Start-ups especially India based, find it difficult to afford such machine. In this paper, this issue is addressed and built an automated SMD P&P machine which is open source and far cheaper than the cheapest one in the market. However, the algorithm of the developed SMD P&P Machine and the one in the market remains the same but it functions differently and the steps are as follows; (i) Component are loaded onto the feeder tray (ii) Centroid file( machine file in ASCII format which comprise reference designator, X, Y, rotation, top or bottom side of the PCB board) is fed to the machine (iii) From the feeder tray component is picked by placement head using vacuum suction (iv) If the component is available in the placement head then correcting of component's orientation and alignment using image processing is done else placement head is made to re-pick the component from feeder tray (v) Properly aligned and oriented component is placed on the PCB by releasing the vacuum. The proposed model is open source in both hardware (Raspberry Pi & Arduino) and software which is user friendly and easy to customize as per requirements.