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Software and vision fussiness

A project log for SMT50 pick-and-place

Describes my experiences buying, setting up, and using the SMT50 pick and place machine

tim-wilkinsonTim Wilkinson 10/19/2015 at 17:030 Comments

It's been about 3 months since I updated, so I wanted to let people know the current state. Two things have cropped up recently: the machine software and the vision.

Software - no software updates. I'm not really surprised and I suspected I wouldn't get any going into this purchase. But there are bugs and it would be nice if there were updates to fix them. But, unfortunately, having spoken to the company, this is just not going to happen. Looks like they might have had a falling-out with their original software provider. I've not yet tried to contact the software maker directly, but I will probably do that at some point.

Vision - the vision has been particularly fussy recently. I'm not sure why this would be. The machine does align and center components correctly using the vision system, but it then mis-rotates before placing (usually over or under rotates slightly). I need to revisit the configuration here to see if I can work out how I made this worse. Until I have time to investigate, I've found placing without vision to be more accurate (which is just wrong, really).

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