We run our pick-and-place machine exclusively for PCB Arts projects and products – no external EMS service. Here's what's surprised me most in the first months of operation.
Component management is a much bigger topic than I expected. Keeping track of which parts are where, what's open, what's committed, what needs to be reordered – and doing it systematically – turns out to be central. Both to keep the overview, and to run the process efficiently.
80 % of the time goes into setup. The placement itself is a fraction: the machine places 400–500 components on a board in 10 minutes. Loading the right reels into the right feeders, calibrating pick positions, verifying parts – that's where the hours go.
The machine has no intelligence. A modern pick-and-place is mechanically and optically extraordinary, but it has effectively no AI. In my view, there's a clear technology gap especially in the teach-in of pick positions, compared to what's possible today with edge vision. That has made the relevance of our own edge technology more concrete to me than any whitepaper could.
A typical EMS provider faces a new setup with every job – different feeder layouts, different parts, different programs. Because we only build our own products, the same reels stay loaded and the same programs sit ready. The 80 % setup overhead largely disappears in serial production. That's also why we don't open the line to external work: it would erase exactly that advantage.
The PnP is a major value gain for us, especially when you see boards with around 1,000 components, many of them 0402 and fine-pitch, populated with ease. That's when the potential of the machine really lands.
We've now completed our first complex production runs at industrial-level quality. The learning curve has been steep, and it will stay steep until we have a fully consolidated process for running small series efficiently and reliably.