Faducials on feeders

Mydata uses fiducials on their feeders. I am not sure whether or not your are familiar with Mydata feeders, but its pretty basic. The feeders are actually magazines made up of multiple individual feeders. Example: There are 16 8mm feeders in (one)8mm magazine. That magazine will have one fiducial on it. You initially locate the fiducial on the magazine and individually trim each seperate feeder that is in the magazine. If you need to pull the feeder out and replace a part number it is not really necessary to re-trim the magazine because it is located in position by locating pins. But if for whatever reason you decided to move the feeder to another position on the machine, or put the feeder on another machine all you have to do is locate the fiducial. You would not have to go in and trim each individual feeder. The locating of the fiducial puts a global offset in the entire feeder.

I hope I explained that clearly enough.

Regards

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Fiducial recognition on the Siemens machine works like the Mydata. Once you select this option, fiducials will be recognized when a new program is send. You can also select recognition as part of the feeder refill function mode. There is no automatic repeat recognition after feeder re-fill, because the machine does not "know" if the feeder was temporarily removed. Feeder fiducials improve deviations from the feeder table and feeder tilt. Once the machine "finds" the first component it will continuously improve the pick position by recognizing a component offset on the nozzle. I feel, this is a must have option for 0402 and smaller. The downside of this option is, that it makes the operator less sensitive for errors. If the feeder is tilted because there was a component under the feeder, the machine will correct for the offset. Because the feeder is not stable in this tilted position, you can expect many pick up errors despite fiducial.

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