Not sure if the name "pic n' place" actually applies. It's more a souped-up air placement tool, but they call them manual pic n' place around the web.
Basically you're looking at a spring, some 1/4" plastic tubing, a piece of aluminium tube, powered by a computer power supply and this vaccuum pump from sparkfun. The roller bed beneath is a board with unidirectional ball casters and a swivel plate (those hardware links are just examples. our actual hardware came from salvage and other).
Probably still need to add a switch (right now just covering port with finger to release) and a tip and likely a camera. When we originally built this, we could never find an affordable pump solution. We tried sealing and reversing a aquarium pump but it never had enough force. The sparkfun pump was the key.
Once we prove this one out we'll make a parts list and put the whole thing on Inscrutables for others.
Btw, we do realize that this might seem silly compared to just placing with tweezers, and I'm not sure that it isn't, but we specifically wanted to place the tiny PIC chips with a lot of connectors and that can be a challenge with tweezers for some. We'll test out it's usefulness during the 2015 badge build.
No comments:
Post a Comment