Salvaging A Commercial-grade Pick And Place Machine

Why build a pick and place machine from the ground up when you can start with a full featured, but non-functional unit, and bring it back to life. That’s exactly what [Charliex] is doing with this Juki 360 rebuild.

A bit of background is in order here. [Charliex] is working alongside other hackers at Null Space Labs to restore this hardware. The Los Angeles based hackerspace sponsored the hardware badges at this year’s LayerOne, each of which was hand assembled. They’d like to avoid that tedium next year, which led to this project.

The seller of the used Juki 360 listed it in working condition, but it seems that they were polishing a turd since it is basically non-functional. The link at the top of this post is the second testimonial of their work so far. It covers the use of an Arduino board as a replacement interface, as well as a bunch of sensor repair, pneumatic testing, and motor driver firmware tweaking. If you’d like to see the initial teardown and hardware diagnostics don’t miss the first post in their adventure.

11 thoughts on “Salvaging A Commercial-grade Pick And Place Machine

  1. Awesome. I have seen this before but this is a pretty involved build – I love the arduino replacement of the controllers. A HUGE ton of work remains though to get the functionality they seem to want.

  2. BiozZ: Hackerspacer: that’d be impossible, since it only happened yesterday! :)

    its actually the follow up post to first part last week, this time we actually replace the IO card and the computer, its now beyond the specs of the original machine and is controlled by an arduino/PC

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