[hoopladler]

As a hobbyist, I'd like one. You could do projects using hundreds or thousands of devices that are -at the moment- out of reach not for reasons of price, but rather because it would take too long to assemble the devices in question. For instance, tagging and tracking wild animals, or getting really granular local climate data. Electronics just gets more interesting the more it moves away from the monolithic device approach, for me.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

Hundreds or thousands of something is typically not a hobbyist venture. Also remember that placing parts is only one step of the process. If you're going to automate assembly by purchasing a P&P, you should also be ready to do high-volume stenciling and have a fast oven. In any case, the time spent aligning the machine and setting up reels can be a significant fraction of the time to just place parts manually. In some cases, you could have placed parts for your entire run by hand before you finished setting up the machine!

Depending on how complex your board is, building, say, 100 units by hand isn't time consuming. I've soldered literally thousands of through-hole boards and SMT is much faster and easier to do by hand.

[jabl]

> I've soldered literally thousands of through-hole boards and SMT is much faster and easier to do by hand.

Sorry for going off-topic, but do hobbyists actually solder SMT's manually nowadays? Or does everyone use some kind of off-the-shelf/DIY reflow oven? And if so, are stencils obligatory or is it feasible to just apply paste manually?

I've been thinking of getting back (or well, properly starting if you will) my electronics hobby, but I've ever only done through-hole components. At least based on tutorials on the web, it's possible to hand-solder SMT's with some practice. But given how small e.g. 0603's are I guess that might involve an unhealthy amount of swearing..

[iliis]

We mainly do SMT at our hackerspace, as it is really is fast and easy to do by hand using a hot-air gun (e.g. [1]). Use a syringe to deposit solder paste (we have one which uses compressed air, very convenient! Something like [2]) and a binocular to see what you're doing and you will be golden.

[1] http://www.aoyue.eu/aoyue-int998-smd-rework-station-hot-air-... [2] https://www.aliexpress.com/item/220V-AD-982-Semi-Auto-Glue-D...

[hoopladler]

How does this compare to doing it with a normal soldering iron? I just ordered a bunch of surface-mount components - just because they were so much cheaper, but I haven't really got any notion about good approaches yet.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

I'd recommend that a beginner go with the iron. It's all too easy to overheat components with a hot air gun, unless you have one with excellent temperature control. Even then, you need to be aware of accidentally desoldering nearby components.

[hoopladler]

I've got pretty bad essential tremor (and bad eyeseight), so I was also wondering, what's a good way to keep the chips in place on the board? I was thinking of using a tiny dab of superglue.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

I do have a side business building custom electronics, but I think I still qualify as hobbyist :-)

I do both: for small fixes I solder by hand. Complete boards I usually use an old toaster oven, but often if the boards are really small, I use a soldering iron. I try not to go below 0805, but 0603 isn't hard.

I typically won't get a stencil for custom one-off jobs since they tend to be small and ordering them introduces delay. When I do, I use oshstencils.com. Had great luck with them and they are very price competitive.

[jabl]

Thanks for your answers, I appreciate it. And same to the others who answered my original question!

> I do have a side business building custom electronics, but I think I still qualify as hobbyist :-)

Taking this even further off-topic, could you elaborate a little? What kind of stuff are you doing? I imagine there is a niche for one-off or small batch stuff, but OTOH on aliexpress (or whatever) you can find almost every electronic gimmick you can imagine (and plenty you couldn't imagine!) for ridiculously low prices.

[couchand]

Use a toaster oven or a skillet, they both work great!

https://www.sparkfun.com/tutorials/60

https://www.sparkfun.com/tutorials/59

I've been skilletting my boards (fabbed by OSHpark) for the last few months, and it's really easy. As another commenter mentioned, use a syringe to deposit solder paste. It only takes a few boards to dial in the right amount to lay, and is actually surprisingly quick to place the parts (even 0603) with tweezers and then throw 'em on the skillet.

[marshray]

> Hundreds or thousands of something is typically not a hobbyist venture.

But isn't this just begging the question?

If hobbyists can make use of it, then by definition it's a hobbyist venture. Bringing down size, cost, and complexity is exactly the path by which so much has become available to hobbyists these days.

Wasn't that long ago that a laser cutter, heaven forbid a 3d printer, was for pro shops only.

[gh02t]

Yeah but I think there is a fundamental difference here. A 3D printer enables you to do things you can't do otherwise (fabricate custom mechanical parts). A pick-and-place enables you to do stuff you can already do with tweezers except in the most extreme cases. And likely do it faster than with a pick-and-place, because they require quite a lot of work to configure.

Edit: a good analogy is a homebrewer putting caps on beer bottles. You can do it by hand with a simple tool pretty easily - even capping 100 bottles at once is no sweat, really. It just doesn't make sense to have an automated bottle capping machine even if it was cheap, because it takes up space and ends up taking more effort to set up for a small run than it saves you. Pardon the pun, but the bottleneck lies elsewhere.

[birdman3131]

As far as bottle capping machines you end up having to make custom handling parts and those are not cheap. (The chucks alone run several hundred dollars each.) Then the parts to guide the bottles through the machine have to be made specific to the bottle diameter and height. this costs several grand. There is still a lot of adjustment even after this. And if you want to change bottles or caps then outlay a ton more cash.

Capping them by hand despite the time and effort makes sense until you can afford a significant outlay in cost.

(I work for a machine shop that makes handling parts and retrofits capping/filler machines for the bottling industry. I don't fully know our prices but most of them would be far outside the range of any hobbyist starting out.)

[hoopladler]

Well, you can actually do stuff a 3d printer does by other means. It just typically requires more skills, and often more equipment.

I think your analogy falls down because an automatic bottlecapper does the same thing as you'd normally do by hand.

The difference for me is that a pick-and-place machine is an enabler. It would enable hobbyists to take on large-scale, distributed electronics projects - for which, right now, assembly time is normally the bottleneck.

If all hobbyists were solely interested in producing consumer-style devices, like bad versions of phones, or home-automation systems, then a pick-and-place machine wouldn't be a good idea for anyone. But there are actually lots of hobbyists that do stuff like data logging, where assembly time is a major problem.

[gh02t]

There are hobbyists who might want to, I don't dispute that, but what I'm saying is there aren't enough. You need a pretty big critical mass before the economics start to make sense and something like what happened with 3D printers becomes possible. Projects at the scale you're talking about take a massive investment of time and skill independent of how long it takes to assemble boards, putting them out of reach of the vast majority of people simply because they don't have the time. Not to mention the cost of such a project; if you can afford to invest a thousand or more dollars in a hobby project then you can probably afford the tools you need to do it, too. Maybe I'm underestimating and there are tens of thousands of people out there wanting to build complex data logging networks with hundreds of nodes just for fun or some other equally ambitious project, but I doubt it.

> I think your analogy falls down because an automatic bottlecapper does the same thing as you'd normally do by hand.

That was my point. A pick and place does the same thing you'd normally do by hand with a pair of tweezers in about 10 minutes for a board of moderate complexity. Doing surface mount work by hand with tweezers is pretty easy. The only thing a pick and place enables is for you to do things at a large scale, because they have a substantial overhead to use that you only start to recoup around 50-100 units or more. Now, if we had some revolutionary device that you could set up in 10 minutes to feed dozens of parts and cost $500 then hell yes, I'd want one too. But I don't think that's possible at present no matter any economies of scale or design optimization, because a pick and place is actually quite a complex machine by simple necessity.

Not to mention that placing parts is only part of it - you still have to fabricate and drill the boards, load the machine, clean up any mis-places, reflow them in an oven, manually place any through hole or awkwardly shaped components and solder them, cut the boards, test them, program them, mount them, etc. A pick and place would definitely save you some time if you really want to do such a large project, but by itself I don't think it's gonna be enough to really make it accessible to an individual in their free time. I'm not disputing that they would be beneficial, just that they make sense for an individual working in their free time. Especially when you consider that contract manufacturing isn't that expensive, though it does come with its own set of hassles.

[hoopladler]

I don't think you're wrong.

I do think that a pick-and-place machine is probably more compatible with the hobbyist world than home CNC - given that CNC inherrently requires robust construction, and robust, accurate components are inherrently expensive. I mean - this machine looks more or less like a 3d printer with some reels, and a scanner. Once 3D printing becomes a cheap technology, things that require accurate repetitive movement become cheaper too.

I wouldn't be entirely surprised if stuff like small robotic arms become available to the hobbyist in the next 50 years or so, simply because being able to do arbitrary tasks with a high degree of accuracy is incredibly useful.

At the point where CNC, not as in cutting, but as in general computer-controlled movement, is an ordinary part of the workshop, I wouldn't be surprised if things like this ended up in hobbbyist spaces.

[hobofan]

> And likely do it faster than with a pick-and-place, because they require quite a lot of work to configure.

So lets figure out ways to bring down the amount of work required to configure it! ;)

[imtringued]

A "reel" library (tape library) is going to be very expensive.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

Not really.

The tool isn't the issue. If a hobbyist wants to play with a Pick & Place, go for it.

My point was that the typical hobbyist isn't going to be manufacturing 1,000 units of anything, no matter how cheap is to do. Once you get into those numbers, it's far more likely to be a (small) business venture.

[gh02t]

You're not gonna be able to pick-and-place anything with hundreds/thousands of parts at a hobby price point. Those kinds of machines are massive by necessity and hugely complex; I just can't imagine it happening for the very small number of people who would want to do something like that. If it did happen by some miracle, it'd have to follow from some sort of major technical advance.

If you're one of the handful of hobbyists that want to do such complex projects I think contract manufacturing is probably a more realistic option. Not sure if you've ever set up a PnP before but it's a huge pain in the ass. I'd rather stencil and tweezer as long it was remotely practical. They are utterly mesmerizing to watch work once they're set up however...

[CamperBob2]

You're not gonna be able to pick-and-place anything with hundreds/thousands of parts at a hobby price point.

LitePlacer is almost there. IMHO the key is recognizing that production-oriented machines need to be fast, while hobbyist/small-shop prototyping machines don't. If I need to stuff a complex prototype board with 500 parts, I literally don't care if it takes all day and all night as long as I don't have to do it. Obviously production shops don't have that luxury, but I do.

Really, the only unsolved problem (at least at the 0402 and up level) is loose part pickup and orientation.

[mng2]

Agreed. Being a human pick and place for anything more than low tens of parts is incredibly unfun, and paying someone to manufacture one or two doesn't really make sense. I don't care if it takes a few days, I'd rather not be sitting for hours wearing down my fine motor skills and eyesight.

[thesmok]

If it takes more than an hour to place the components, your solder paste will likely flow all over the board and it will be pointless to reflow it.

[CamperBob2]

That's not a big concern for prototyping. It will reflow just fine. There might be a few solder balls rolling around afterward, maybe a bridge or two. Most of the time, this means your stencil apertures were too big, or that the cut-rate Chinese solder paste wasn't the bargain that it looked like on AliExpress.

Slump is a problem if you're trying to run a six-sigma process in a factory, of course, but that's not what's being discussed here.