
Cirqoid – printed circuit board prototyping machine - lelf
http://cirqoid.com/
======
Animats
Now that is very nice. It does board milling, pick-and-place, and solder
paste. It's the latter two operations that matter. ("In this world, you do not
make your own PC boards." \- The Art of Electronics. Board houses do it better
using photo-etching, are cheaper, give you plated through holes, and have fast
turnaround.)

Here's a nice hobbyist pick-and-place machine:
[http://briandorey.com/post/DIY-Pick-and-Place-V2-Project-
Com...](http://briandorey.com/post/DIY-Pick-and-Place-V2-Project-
Complete.aspx) This one has a vision system to get precision alignment. In the
era of the $10 cell phone camera module, there's no reason to have one without
a vision system. You design some fiducial marks on the board, and the vision
system goes looking for them to get precision alignment. This makes up for
small errors in the board position. When putting down a part, the vision
system matches up the expected pattern of pads with what it sees and fine-
tunes the position. This is easier than trying to hold everything so rigid
that blind placement works. A vision system also lets you check that you
picked up a part properly from the feeder, and that it's in place properly
after placement.

Your little assembly line is then a pick and place machine, a solder-paste
dispensing machine, and a reflow oven, which can be a toaster oven with
precision temperature controls. There are many small shops in Shenzhen like
that.

~~~
hga
Or Joplin, Missouri, USA in the early '80s when my family was making C band
LNBs for the home satellite reception market prior to today's K band Direct TV
and Dish Network.

It's really not that difficult; I'm not sure they even had a pick and place
machine when they got started, the LNBs didn't have all that many components.

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
Pretty different paradigm though. In the early 80's P&P machines cost a few
arms and a firstborn and probably were automated with paper tape! Your family
was almost certainly not using surface mount. Or at least, only for a handful
of RF components.

The outfit I worked for after leaving college in the late 80's shipped
hundreds of boards a month doing everything manually. By the time they folded,
the only change was sending them out for wave soldering.

These days I can outperform them with a solder paste stencil and a toaster
oven. Blows my mind.

~~~
hga
Nah, I went to a Route 128 expo on this sort of technology in that period and
pick and place machines were _way_ beyond paper tape.

And I did a lot of thru hole soldering when I was growing up in the '70s; the
LNBs were surface mount (one of the reasons they asked me to go that expo).
_Maybe_ there were some thru hold components I'm not remembering, but there
was a definitely a lot of surface mounting (my intro to the concept, I think),
and I e.g. remember seeing their reflow oven when I got a tour of the place.

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dmritard96
This is a popular space right now:

Voltera: [http://volterainc.com/](http://volterainc.com/) Voxel8 Tempo
Automation: [http://tempoautomation.com/](http://tempoautomation.com/)

People are realizing that iterating on electronics is painful hence trying to
fix it. The interesting part is the market size, unit costs etc. Also ability
to do very small pitch ICs.

We got so desperate with pick and place that we literally 3D printed a 3D
printer adapter combined with our vacuum pump and Pronterface.
[https://twitter.com/flairvents](https://twitter.com/flairvents)

~~~
newhouseb
Woah, nice work with the UM2 pick and place! Do you have any write-ups,
resources or even just a BOM?

~~~
dmritard96
Sure, I put the design up on thingiverse:

[http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:528114](http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:528114)

[http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003GWGUR6/ref=oh_aui_detai...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003GWGUR6/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1)

Pronterface:

[https://github.com/kliment/Printrun](https://github.com/kliment/Printrun)

It should be noted that we only used this for the tiny pitch QFNs and other
small components that we couldn't do by hand, the easier components we did
with tweezers. Once we validated the design with a couple boards, we just had
a bunch more assembled over in Freemont CA.

~~~
durkie
thanks for this! that amazon link is for a 50 pack -- is there any reason
someone would need more than one? i've just been using tweezers up till now.

any chance you have a video of it in action?

~~~
dmritard96
not sure whats up with the 50 pack, but I see that on image as well. I'm
pretty sure its just one. Didn't take a video - wish i had.

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CamperBob2
Very cool. Add a camera to do pick-and-place alignment automatically, and I'll
take one. P&P is pointless with that much manual intervention.

Another obvious improvement: offer a hot air nozzle tool, with a preheater in
the base. It would be really neat to go from bare copper to an assembled PCB
without moving the board.

Oh, and an automatic tool changer. :)

------
jimmyswimmy
Not to be negative, but I am simply not impressed. I thought milling PCBs was
over about 15 years ago when pcbexpress and the like of plot and go quick turn
services came to the market. There is just no reason to mill your own boards
anymore (and -ugh- manually fill your own vias) with services around like
dirtypcb.

If you truly need a quick turnaround, pcbexpress can get you a slightly higher
quality board tomorrow for less than $200. That's around 1/15th the cost of
this device, and a better product (i.e. less likely to cause a problem which
will waste a ton of your time)

The pick-n-place aspect is somewhat interesting, but HaD had a project for a
$300 pnp machine; I expect to see something like it on kickstartr soon.

~~~
snarfy
But I only need two boards. My next project needs one board. And the one after
that one board. I could get some etchant and start cooking, or I can use a
mill for my one-off projects.

~~~
bravo22
What about vias? If your board is that simple then just use a breadboard.

Also you can get one off simple 2 layer boards for $25.

~~~
snarfy
> Also you can get one off simple 2 layer boards for $25.

Where? I haven't really looked into outsourcing it. I assume like most things
it's a hefty cost for the first one due to setup and tooling, and the rest are
dirt cheap. I'm a hobbyist so a mill like that is interesting, but as a
hobbyist I'm not really aware of all the options. It seems much better than
messing with etchant. The designs that use SMD components aren't going to work
with breadboard. No vias as they are single layer.

~~~
bravo22
Cheap 2-4 layer PCBs in US: [http://www.pentalogix.com/us-prototype-
pcbs-4-pack-p-602.htm...](http://www.pentalogix.com/us-prototype-
pcbs-4-pack-p-602.html)

There are Chinese ones as well that ship to you within a week.

------
krschultz
Rapid prototyping circuit boards is still relatively expensive and limited
compared to the options for purely physical objects. I don't believe we will
unlock the value of 3D printers until banging out circuit boards is as quick
and easy.

~~~
doctoboggan
I just launched a company and our first product is exactly what you described:

[http://www.voxel8.co](http://www.voxel8.co)

We don't have the resolution to get what most board houses can do, but we can
reliably hit pitches (pin to pin spacing) of 800 microns. This allows us to
build fully embedded fully 3d circuits using many of the surface mount chips
on the market today.

As we make our machine more accurate we will eventually be able to hit 500
micron pitch and then we will be able to integrate BGA packages. We'll be
there soon!

~~~
coryrc
Your website has SSL errors

~~~
doctoboggan
Whoops, I did not mean to link to the HTTPS version. We had that set up
previously but when we switched to Squarespace we could no longer use SSL.
However my browser still autofills in the HTTPS version. I've updated the
link.

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noonespecial
One thing I've learned from using standard CNC mills to do this sort of thing
over the years is that the V bit has to be _brutally_ sharp to avoid tearing
up the fine traces as it cuts. A high quality cutting bit makes the
difference.

Also be careful of the dust. Especially from the fiberglass substrates. Its
nasty stuff.

~~~
CamperBob2
Yeah, a vacuum attachment seems like a good optional add-on for this system.

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pkaye
Can it do 4 layer PCBs? Probably the most important thing missing.

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Involute
They conveniently omit how they do the plated-through holes.

~~~
unwind
Sure, if by "omit" you mean "cover in their FAQ" which says:

 _The most common and by far the least expensive is soldering a thin wire (or
some TTH component 's lead) between layers. Depending on the number of vias on
your board it can be as entertaining as watching grass grow, but quite often
it's the fastest way to get them done.

Another possibility is to press copper rivets (sometimes called eyelets).
Rivets can be pressed sufficiently flat, thus allowing to put them under ICs
(which is impossible with soldering approach). Though they need more space
(i.e. outside diameter of the via needs to be larger) and tend to be less
reliable.

There are other possibilities, including the actual electroplating process,
but these tend to be fairly sophisticated and expensive._

The FAQ is at [http://cirqoid.com/pages/faq](http://cirqoid.com/pages/faq),
and of course linked in the tabs across the top of the page. Not very well
hidden.

