Hello All,
I've just bought a Quad 4c pick & place machine. It's so close to actually building boards, but just doesn't quite get there. I was wondering if there's somebody out there with experience of these machines that might be able to help...?
The basic problem is that it'll pick up a component, and when asked to place it, will move over the correct position on the PCB, hesitate, and then move to the reject location and dump it. About every third failure it re-calibrates the nozzle, and sometimes gives me a "Run error #1" (Pickup assigned number greater than 127, or pickup entered in sequence was not taught). This error makes no sense as it's already made the pickup. Usually though, there's no activity or error at all.
Initially, I thought that this was due to the laser alignment failing. I could get parts to place with the alignment disabled, and they'd be rejected with LAE parameters set up. However, this isn't 100% - some aligned parts would place okay, some of the time.
The alignment works fine if done manually (function 31) with a component on the nozzle - size and offset are bang-on, although rotation appears to be a random number..
I've even taken the EPCU battery out to reset all the parameters to default, and then just changed the MOD codes that I know need updating.
Anyway, I messed around with it for a few weeks on-and-off, and made no progress. I've got a batch of boards to build, and the fallback plan was to build them with no alignment and fine-tune the positions with tweezers afterwards. Three boards done like this (about 600 components), and I adjusted one of the pickups (just changed the Y by 15 thou/mil on the PC), and now it rejects everything!
I changed this co-ordinate back again, and even tried the backup of the sequence. I've reset everything, and even turned the machine off for an hour, but nothing is making any difference - it won't place anything at all now.
What's particularly annoying is that the software is clearly making a decision not to place the component, but as far as I can tell there's nothing output and no error message to tell me why.
I thought maybe it's a vacuum issue? I've measured it at the nozzle and that seems fine. Vacuum verify is set low (100). I though maybe a problem with the transport? - if it doesn't think there's a PCB there... It loads and unloads boards fine, so I can't see this being the issue.
Other than this, everything seems to work fine. There's generally no error messages (unless I do something stupid!), and everything that should move, seems to move fine.
Any suggestions would be gratefully received. If you've seen anything like this before, I'd love to hear from you - even if you didn't fix it, you might be able to help me rule things out!
In the meantime, if anybody needs a machine to remove all the components from reels and dump them in a box - I can help!
Many thanks,
Steve.
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