I wanted to buy a pick and place machine to help me assemble a small batch of boards for my Blue Basic project. On the one hand the obvious machine to select is the TM240A which many hobbiest have recently purchased. It has the advantage of lots of community support and it only costs $4000 on eBay. This compares very favorable to US commerial machine which easily cost 10x that. While I can justify paying 4K for a hobby machine, 40K is another matter.

However, I've always been reluctant to get the TM240A because it lacks a vision system. After reading Felix on LowPowerLab I've become convinced that vision is essential to building boards reliably. So I spend many month hanging around on eBay before someone pointed me at Alibaba. Now Alibaba has always made me feel a little apprehensive because so many vendors don't quote a fixed price and because I kept hearing horror stories of people buying thing they never received (and PayPal not being terribly helpful when it happened). But despite these misgivings, I kept looking and one day came across a company called Hot Hot SMT Machine Company Ltd in China. They made a vision enabled pick and place machine for $5000. Okay, that's $1000 more than the non-vision machine, but it also came with multiple nozzles and, importantly I felt, software that ran on a PC rather than embedded in the machine itself.

If you contact Hot Hot, you'll probably talk to someone called Sunny. Sunny is super helpful and can provide lots of information about the various options available. The machine has a few optional extras which it's worth looking at. For example, I bought both a west feeder and a north feeder (the north feeder is extra). There are also a few things they don't list on the website that are important. First, they say you need Windows XP. That's really hard to come buy these days, especially if you're buying a new PC to run the machine (I bought a cheap Intel NUC which I highly recommend). Turns out that the software is quite happy to run on Windows 7. I can't comment on Windows 8 because I've not tried. Second, the list the machine as needing 220V but can be "converted to 110V". This sounds very scary but it uses a fairly basic switch mode power supply which a voltage selector switch on it. Just switch it to 110V and you're done. Third, you need to provide air to the machine which means you need an air compressor. These can be quite loud I discovered, but you can get a good quality ultra-quiet model for ~$150. Apparently you can go with a medical quality device for silent operation, but they're quite pricy.

Once the details were worked out, I placed the order! There's a couple of fees to be aware of. First, if you PayPal the money (the simplest and fastest), PayPal charge the vendor a 5% fee which Hot Hot will ask you to pay. Fair enough. There's also shipping costs. I suppose it varies depending on where you are, but for me it was about $800. That seems like quite a lot, but then it is a rather heavy piece of kit, and it is being shipped from China. But that's it. There are no import fees, duties or tarrifs. I did worry about that, but they never happened.

Next up - what happened during shipping.