Common Parts Library Partner Spotlight: FirePick Delta

This is a guest blog by Neil Jansen, the creator of  FirePick Delta, a launch partner of Common Parts Library.

DIY and electronics have gone together like bread and butter since the very beginning, before the consumer electronics industry even existed.  Around the mid to late 1970’s, pioneers like Steve Woz were hand-soldering microcomputer boards in garages, and other hardware hackers of the time were building Heathkit VTVM’s, ham radios, and Altair 8800s.  The jargon was simpler back then, everything was through-hole or point-to-point, and easy to see with without a high-powered stereo microscope.  While the barrier to creating and designing useful electronic things wasn’t exactly low back in those days, it was certainly a lot easier to manufacture those things.  All that was needed was a well-lit garage and a handheld soldering iron, and a pair of side cutters.  This was a great time to be alive.  Awesome facial hair, cool cars, and great music on vinyl.

 This held true into some time in the 1990’s, when a new generation of engineers started shrinking electronics down to unfathomable levels, using black magic and sorcery, with the help from evil men in dark suits, and an army of robotic machines.  It was the dawn of an era where electronics were made in large soulless factories in foreign countries that costed millions of dollars; everything was done to a cost.  These large companies didn’t like competition either, so your choices for a phone or a radio or a personal computer were scarce (like the jeans, they only came in one fit or style).  The cool facial hair had disappeared; the ‘67 sting rays were traded in for ‘92 Oldsmobile Silhouettes.  I was very young during these years, but I hear it was a very, very dark time.

 Fast forward to present day.  Crowdfunding and personal manufacturing is exploding, and it’s actually become somewhat hip to be a maker or hacker.  Also the facial hair and cool cars are back. It’s like a renaissance for electronics and fashion and music.  Thanks to companies like Sparkfun and Adafruit, the DIY spirit is as strong as ever.  They’ve learned to keep a few of these evil robotic machines as pets and use them for good.  These two multi-million dollar American companies are manufacturing locally, using robotic SMT assembly machines, to make breakout boards and products, that would hard for the average person to solder together themselves.  These are still breakout boards at the end of the day, though.  If you truly need a single prototype of something truly original, or if you need 100 or so of them made, you’re still out of luck, unless you’ve got access to a comparable robotic SMT assembly line, or you’ve got decent eyes, a nice stereo microscope, steady hands, and a lot of patience.

 This is about when our project,  FirePick Delta comes into the scene.

We’re trying to shrink the robotic SMT assembly line down into a compact package that will sit on a desktop, and allow people to manufacture their own custom electronic assemblies without going to a factory.  We’ve leveraged RepRap 3D printing open-source technology, but we’ve applied our EE prowess and experience of running SMT lines to the project in ways the RepRap project never dreamed of.  It 3D prints as well, and we’re able to 3D print the SMT component feeders on the machine, using conductive ESD-safe filament, which I think is pretty clever and useful, when you consider how much a single component feeder costs in a commercial machine ($500+).

We’ll spare you with all the gritty details, though.  We’ll instead link to all the specifications for our machine, and the philosophy behind it, over at our Hackaday.io page, and over on our website.

I started this project out of my own frustration of trying to make DIY boards myself, and along the way have teamed up with others that have had the same issue.  We have deep DIY roots, so we took a very unique approach with this machine. I would say that almost all DIY pick and place machines were created by someone that had to manually place lots of SMT components onto circuit boards, all by hand, probably with tweezers and a microscope if they were lucky.  Most people find the process of doing it by hand very tedious.  Many of them, myself included, have decided to engineer their way out of the problem by building some sort of homebrew machine to make the process faster and less error-prone.  I've seen countless DIY pick and place machines, both manual and automatic, on the internet over the years.  They all shared a common idea and problem, and most of them shared a similar fate.  The DIY machines were never completed, because the people that built them were smart and busy with whatever project they needed the placement machine for.  The problem was that the their DIY machine was just an means to an end, it was never an end goal for them. That's where our machine differs.  FirePick Delta is our only project, that we plan on working on for many years to come.  We plan on refining it, and adding new SMT component feeders and other modular tools.  And eventually, if everything works out, we'll probably make the world's first open-source SMT assembly line, with reflow ovens, conveyor belts, and stencil printers, all released under open source HW and SW licenses.

Our grass-roots idea has sort of caught on, and now we’ve got almost 20 prototypes out in the wild, in various states, and it’s finally built up some momentum to where I’m trying to figure out how build enough circuit boards for 100 motion controllers and other pieces needed in the machine.  I’ve got people knocking my doors down to get a preorder machine.

This is where Octopart comes in.  Their search and BOM tool have helped me come up with and manage a set of BOMs for this project, and it’s been such a pleasure to use, that I don’t think that I could live without it.  When I got the email that they were rolling out their Common Parts Library program, I knew that it would be the perfect fit for FirePick and OpenPnP.  This was another missing piece of the puzzle for prototype SMT assembly.  You need some sort of database of part info that the pick and place machine can access, in order to understand the parts being fed into it, and how to correctly place them on the board.  OctoPart has graciously accepted FirePick as an official CPL partner, and we have committed to supporting 100% of the CPL parts in our machine without any need for the end user to program them in during PnP setup.  Our own boards, shown above, make heavy use of the Common Parts Library, which will make my job a lot easier, when it comes time to run the SMT job(s).

In conclusion, we’re trying to lower the barrier and bring back that hacker spirit, like when Steve Woz assembled Apple I’s in Job’s garage.  I think the future of DIY tech is going to be pretty awesome.  Finding parts is becoming effortless.  Using those parts in a design is getting easier, no matter the size or shape.  Tutorials are abound on the internet from Adafruit and others.  Being able to take an idea and turn it into a finished product, complete with a 3D printed enclosure and robotically assembled boards in the comfort of your own home, and being able to follow that up with a small production run of identical pieces is going to pave the way for a new generation of DIY hackers to come up with some truly amazing things.

Oh, and FirePick Delta is 100% open source and have all of our software and mechanical files in our Github repo, and we’re always looking for bright people to come and lend a hand, especially with software and solving some of the real engineering problems that we’re facing.  You can stop by our Google Dev mailing list if you’d like to offer to help.  We’ll be on Kickstarter et. al. at some point, but first we need to get the software 100% before we promise anything.