[Mike] makes some very niche musical instruments, and the production volume he’s looking at means there isn’t a need to farm out his assembly. This means doing everything by hand, including the annoying task of picking resistors and other components out of bins. After searching for a way to speed up his assembly process, he came up with the Stuffomatic, a device that locates the correct component at the press of a button.
The normal way of grabbing a part when assembling is reading the reference on the board, cross referencing the value on the BOM, and digging the correct part out of the bin. To speed this up, [Mike] put LEDs in each of the part bins, connected to a Teensy 2.0 that has the BOM stored in memory. Clicking a foot switch looks up the next component and lights up the LED in the associated part bin.
[Mike] says this invention has speeded up his assembly time by about 30%, a significant amount if you’re looking at hours to assemble one unit.
If you’re wondering exactly what [Mike] is assembling, check this out. It’s heavily inspired by the Ondes Martenot, an electronic musical instrument that’s about as old as the theremin, but a million times cooler. Video sample below.
Nice. What method did he use to gain more pins? Shift register?
He used a MAX7219. looks like a SPI LED driver for up to 64 LEDs.
http://www.maximintegrated.com/en/products/power/display-power-control/MAX7219.html
Relevant XKCD: http://xkcd.com/1205/
So if you have more than 1000 users it is worth a lot to save them each one second.
Neat idea, but I see the opportunity for resistors to drop into adjacent bins when picking them at a rapid pace. I had (one of my many that will never see the light of day) an idea of doing something similar with a parts drawer cabinet where each drawer is actuated by a small RC servo.
I could see that. But instead of servos use spring loaded drawers and a solenoid like in a cash drawer. If you did the release right you could have rows and columns of solenoids. Where it takes 2 solenoid pulls to open a drawer, similar to charlie-plexing, but with hardware. really cut down on the number of solenoids (or servos).
The spring loaded draw idea is awsome, i especialy like the mental image of components flying through the air in a nooooo sort of moment :-)
About 30 years ago I saw a system for doing this – lights on bins, and a projector that shone an image onto the board showing where the part went. Used film for the image, and codes on the film edge for the lights
yep, seen the same thing probably around the same time,
each table had a “wall” of IC tubes an led for each tube and some kind of projector to show placement and orientation. They were making DDE Supermax servers, 68020 based I think
My boss did exactly that in the 80’s for a PCB assembly production line in the UK. It speeded up assembly and cut errors at the same time. Nice to see the idea taken to a new level with a micro managing the assembly sequence.
That could be done really easily with a projector and PowerPoint slides. The switch that activates the part bin would also advance the slide show. You could even project the value for double checking the part.
Very cool! There’s a nice video showing the building of a therevox here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjGICiH7jXY
Thanks for that. It is a nice video. It really shows he’s doing something he loves and isn’t just out to make a fast buck.
I wanted to do this at our hackerspace, have a spreadsheet that when you highlighted an entry lit up the drawer where it was (or supposed to be).. nice to see someone actually doing it !
I would suggest you don’t have enough LEDs to do this at your space. Then I realised you do.
dude, I have enough LED’s in my garage ;)
Oh man, I’d take 0805 over that any day if I had the choice. I ahve gotten so much faster at even just hand-soldering most SMT — not even reflow — than through-hole parts, especially leaded parts. No bending, and no cutting! Then again, having a tweezer metcal helps. A lot.
cmon at least 0603.
That was my first thought too. With SMT you can leave the board flat on the desk, no need to bend the pins, and the component bins are much smaller so they’re easier to reach.
So reading the label on the parts bin is 30% slower then looking for a blinky light?
Using a blinky light is quite a bit faster. Might be 30%… probably depends on how many bins and how they’re laid out. (and how you calculate 30%)
In warehousing, it’s called a Pick to Light system. Some of these systems also have sensors to verify that you reached into the correct bin.
We are building a few prototypes for http://www.flair.zone and needed to place some very fine pitch qfns. We hacked our 3d printer with an adapter to be used with a vacuum and used Pronterface to move the extruder assembly/vacuum system around. Its not as advanced as this setup but did help us to get some prototypes built. We have an ultimaker 2 but you could build an adapter like it for others.
You can download it from thingiverse: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:528114
Something useful this way comes!
X-Y with a single laser pointer comes to mind.
A shop I used to go to had this. You ask for a part, and he’d light it up with a laser.
Surprised me the first time he did it, damn that thing was bright.
Hey that’s not just any [Mike] it’s [Mike Beauchamp] – some of us used to keep the poor guy up at night driving an R/C car in his room via the internet. (circa 2000)
http://mikebeauchamp.com/projects/
Glad to see [Mike] is still hacking!
Good grief indeed it is. I remember that (and I built my own similar setup on my home server with IIS and ASP). He also had a atari 2600 on the web which was perpetually broken. Seems like centuries ago
Commercial version of a light up bin system used with testing and assembly. Nice to see a less expensive DIY version. Nicely done! http://www.cirris.com/learning-center/product-articles/testers/53-script-creation-developing-custom-test-applications
Rather than an LED in each bin, I’d rather see a projector or maybe a laser pointer indicate the part of choice. This could be cheaper and would most likely be faster to implement.