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Component rotation

A project log for SMT50 pick-and-place

Describes my experiences buying, setting up, and using the SMT50 pick and place machine

tim-wilkinsonTim Wilkinson 01/14/2015 at 22:227 Comments

When I started using the SMT50 to place my first board, I didn't really have component rotation setup properly in the Eagle source files. To get it working I just messed with the Part rotation in the PCB on the SMT50 until it was placed correctly. Not really the way to go, but at the time it was one less thing for me to sort out properly.

I finally had chance to look at rotation properly today (I know ... it's been a while) and things are not as helpful as you might hope. There are three sources of rotation information which might be used when picking and placing a part. The first is the location of the tape; either in the north feeder or the west feeder. These feeders are at 90 degrees to each other, so tapes loaded in different feeders start with different initial rotations. Next, each feeder has the ability to set its own rotation as part of the feeder configuration. And finally, the parts themselves also have rotations which may be set.

After some experimenting I was rather surprised to discover that the only rotation that matters is the one set on the part itself. The position of the feeder is ignored, as is the rotation set on the feeder. This means that, after you load your pick and place file into the machine, you need to very carefully check every rotation of every part because which tape the part is fetched from is not taken into account when rotating.

Oh, and don't forget; the PCB itself can also be rotated depending on how you load it into the machine which will also effect the value you set on the part rotation.

One final detail. Rotations are anticlockwise looking from above.

Discussions

mariusg0000 wrote 07/06/2015 at 10:57 point

Hello Tim. Do you manage to work properly with rotation ? What version of OURSMT do you have ? If you use build in update option it actualy downgrade to version 2.673. On CD is version 2.678.

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Tim Wilkinson wrote 07/06/2015 at 22:33 point

Hey - thanks for this info - I will check my build later this week. Never imagined upgrading would downgrade.

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mariusg0000 wrote 02/02/2015 at 12:05 point

Hello Tim,

First of all thank you very much for your work. It helped me a lot. For rotation to work properly you have to go in Settings->Other and check "Effective on mount".

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Tim Wilkinson wrote 02/02/2015 at 18:29 point

Thanks for this! I seemed weird that all the rotations weren't respected. Glad I just need to tweak the options. I'll update the log entry with your info.

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mariusg0000 wrote 02/02/2015 at 18:56 point

Sorry to tell but is seems to work only with vision activated. Did you manage to use vision system with 0805 resistors and capacitors ?

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Tim Wilkinson wrote 02/02/2015 at 19:48 point

:-(

I mostly work with 0603.

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charliex wrote 01/14/2015 at 23:15 point

theres is a nice script i use for my tm220 with eagle, might be useful http://dangerousprototypes.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=68&t=5214

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