I have an old Quad 100 pick and place from the 90's that currently is not working. We bought the machine for basically nothing. The reason we bought it was that it had a ton of feeders that work with a 4000C machine that we have. Before I take this machine to the scrapyard, does anyone think it's worthwhile to try to convert it with some kind of open source pick and place software?
The machine itself powers on, and I can get the head to move around. The issue is that this machine doesn't use a "computer" the way a modern machine would. It has it's own built in computer and it seems to run on some very old machine language...or something like that. Something in there isn't working but there is no real way to diagnose or fix it. From what I can see these machines were not common and Tyco/Quad/Samsung didn't make many of them, or for very long.
But since all the mechanical bits seem to work OK, I was wondering if it was worth trying to install a new computer and run some kind of open source pick and place software on it. All the steppers, switches, valves, etc seem to work fine. Seems like it would be a good starting point as opposed to building a machine from scratch. But I've never done anything like that, and perhaps it's just more trouble than it's worth.
We use our 4000C a lot and it would be kind of nice to have a secondary machine that could do some very basic placement when we have a board that needs more components than the 4000C can handle.
Just curious if anyone has tried converting an old machine to new software like this. I suspect that it's more trouble than it's worth...I just hate to scrap it since it almost works.
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