Working with surface mount components allows you to save a huge amount of space on your projects. You may also save money and assembly time, but what doesn’t help is when you end up loosing tiny components. Even if they’re not truly ‘lost’, having to poke around to find the right items before tweezing them into place repeatedly dramatically adds to the assembly time.
As a solution to the problem (that doesn’t involve simply paying someone else to do it) Ahmsville Labs has come up with the Pick-N-Place wheel. Vaguely resembling an oversized seashell, or perhaps an alien spacecraft; this device features two trays of parts that rotate back and forth to present the needed part to your tweezers. The board-in-process is also presented on a rotating platform for optimum positioning.
While that would be neat in and of itself, it gets even more interesting. This wheel isn’t just a mechanical assembly, but features magnets on each rotating parts wheel, and a SAMD21-enabled encoder board that picks up on this rotation. This interfaces with a custom program on your computer that uses the board’s generated pick-and-place file to show what drawer of components to use, and where to place them.
Notably, the listing is for the board only, and you’ll need to do a fair amount of 3D printing to get a usable wheel. Still, if you do this type of task with any frequency, I’d say it’s well worth the price (and time) needed to get one.
