Home Automation Hangout 2020-04-26: DIY pick and place machine

well hello there got here just in time well I've actually been messing around trying to get things working for a while first check is is audio okay audio is going to be a bit of an issue today because I need to be walking around the room and I am connected by a cable to the computer right now ah fantastic thanks Larry so sounds like it's working alright that's good alrighty so one other thing there are so many ways this is going to go wrong today which will make it more interesting firstly I need to be able to show you different things around the room because I want to show you the pick-and-place machine so you can see over my shoulder there is a tripod that's actually got my mobile phone on it so which is training as an IP camera so if I switch to that we can stream from there and then I can carry it around the room and hopefully show you different things not just show you the fixed perspective coming out of the the built-in camera in the computer but so that could go wrong there's also a little bit of lag on that which is annoying so if I'm facing that camera and talking to you my lips will probably be out of sync ooh unexpected maker says he's picking placing tiny Pecos awesome see on so he's got his machine going his is a proper CNC machine mine is a homebrew Frankensteinian monster as you'll see in a minute and that may well go wrong as well in fact one of the reasons I was a little bit late starting today is that I've been trying to get the motion controller working on it properly because there was a problem where if I needed to do either a pic or a place what you need to do is move the head to the correct location and then lower it what would happen is it would trigger those two events at the same time so the head would be lowering as it was moving and it would crash into things so I just got that working right before coming online so Oh see on yeah so that from the IP camera that is my phone what is it a to polka phone f1 so it's just using an IP camera streaming program running on the phone but the thing is that I'm gonna have to move a bit so as it actually let's do this as a test I want to take this microphone and on the other thing is you might hear a bit of a high-pitched squeal I'm just going to be quiet for a second and see if you can hear this that is the stepper motors on the pick-and-place machine they just sit desk wheeling which is kind of annoying oh good you couldn't hear it the frequency is probably too high so if I leave the microphone on the bench there that's alright I can walk around the room and Scott Miller says my picking place is a uts-15 so there was also one other thing uh mike says yes the buzz is there well hopefully it's not too bad I'll keep the microphone away from the machine while I can so one other thing that I was going to do before starting the livestream and I didn't was to paste up a board so the this is going to be quite boring I didn't get it done first so I'm gonna begin that I might as well get that underway get as much of it done as I can before everybody gets bored so part of the problem is that the board we're going to be pasting up today is it's one which has a lot of placement on it we're not going to be placing everything on the machine today this has 103 1k resistors on it so we'll place those it has some 4 k 7 resistors that one of the interesting things about this board is that it's extremely repetitive it's basically just lots and lots of the same thing repeated over and over again which when you're doing hand placement actually isn't too bad because it means you can get into a flow you don't need to think about what parts you're putting down you can just keep using the same thing but for more complicated boards that have a lot of different parts that's actually where pick and place can be really useful because you don't have to engage your brain once you've got it set up and it's putting the right place it parts in the right places it'll get it right every time so that can be a real help but now I have to place this board up and I don't have a stencil for it which is really annoying so what I'm going to do is put it all on with a syringe now if this was actually in production what we would have is a stencil that you lay over this and then use a squeegee and put solder paste onto it lift the stencil off that means you can do a whole board like this in a few seconds instead it's probably going to take me five minutes sitting there under the microscope with the with this which is a little syringe full of solder paste but hopefully the lifestream will work from the hunters you can make your own stencils yes I can and that's what I'll do so once I get beyond just doing like one of these I just want to check that the design works so what I'm going to do is switch over to this view and I'm going to take the microphone and drag it across as far as I can towards the microscope and you should be able to see side view from the camera and the microscope just gets it's all going out of the way yeah it's know what I'm gonna do while I'm doing this I need to tell you a story or something can't think of any stories right now they so what should I do problem is that the focus on the camera is not quite the same as the focus through the eyepiece and working through the eyepieces is much much better because you get proper stereo view so one of the things that you'll see when if you're looking at microscopes maybe that's something I should talk about okay so if you're looking at microscopes for doing this sort of thing you've got a couple of options the cheap option are the simple USB microscopes they've got a camera on a tripod and a tripod on a little boom stand and a screen on them typically they will have a screen it'll be like a nine inch or five inch or whatever screen physically attached and they usually have usb on them as well so you can connect it to a computer and basically use it like a webcam and then when you are working under it you don't have any direct optical path to what you're working on what you're looking at is purely the view from the camera not from there and so there are a couple of issues one is that in those systems the camera is a single camera so you have monovision not stereo vision and the result is that you have no depth perception now what you are looking at now on this livestream is the view from the camera oops is the view from the camera that is looking down in parallel to the two eyepieces so this is it is what's called a trinocular microscope it has three sets of optics internally there is one dedicated what our path with lenses for the camera and then there are two dedicated paths for the two eyepieces and if you look up from underneath the microscope you can see that there are actually three lenses under there and they can be independently focused to some degree so what happens is that when you're looking through the eyepieces you get full stereo vision with depth perception which is incredible it makes such a difference compared to just looking at either a mono view under a microscope or looking at it on a screen so you're seeing a very flat view here so if I move this nozzle up and down you can see the focus changes but you can't really tell how high it is above the pad but looking through the eyepieces I've got perfect depth perception so it makes a whole lot easier the other issue with the camera based microscopes is that there is often a bit of lag in the camera because what's happening is that the camera is processing the image and passing it through to the little computer which is then driving the screen and the delay may not be much it might be you know in the order of 100 milliseconds maybe a couple of hundred milliseconds but that is enough that it gives you a really weird feeling when you're working under it you move something or you move the your tool whatever you're working with and there is a very slight delay on what you see so the result is that it takes a bit of getting used to it's almost like a motion sickness effect and it varies depending on the type of microscope some microscopes have almost no lag some of them have really bad lag and yeah so it's important to get one that doesn't have lag if you're working through the camera so with what I'm doing right now I could be sitting here like you can see me from the side view up here I've got a screen on my bench which there's a which is connected to the HDMI output what I've got here is the camera from the microscope goes into a game capture system which has USB to my computer which is how I'm streaming this but it also passes HDMI out to the monitor which is up above my desk so I can see on the monitor what the microscope is saying so I could be doing this sitting back here looking up at the the monitor so what I'm saying now looking at this monitor is exactly the same as what you are seeing through the live stream but this is really clumsy this system has very little lag it's the latency is actually really good but the lack of depth perception is really off-putting I've got into a bit of a flow now but I'm kind of feeling my way through it I'm not using my eyes to to do it the way I should so working directly under the microscope like this or I can see what I'm doing is so much easier so USB microscopes or camera microscopes tend to be cheaper a lot cheaper and for only occasional use that is it's definitely worth getting one if if it's the choice between no microscope and a camera only microscope and go for the camera microscope because once you can see in detail what's going on it changes everything it makes such a difference it's like having a superpower being able to look at parts like this and see in detail down on the board what's going on it's fantastic one of the things that I really like to do is solder under the microscope because there's this weird thing where if you touch a solder joint with a an iron and you're just looking at it with your naked eye it basically looks like the joint all melts at once but if you're looking at it under the microscope you can see the heat from travel through the solder and you can see it like a you can see which part of the solder is still solid and which is molten it's kind of weird actually but very cool alright so back to this microscope and I'm still filling in time babbling incoherently here while I just do this mindless job of putting paste on the board so that is camera microscopes versus optical microscopes if you can get an optical microscope it is preferable definitely stereo now one thing to keep in mind this is something that that traps a lot of people is there is a big difference between a stereo oh I don't ascribe it's okay try not feeling like a scope trinocular is binocular plus the third fourth for the camera and what a lot of microscopes do is they say there or trinocular microscope but what they do is they use a little mirror internally so that the camera parts from the light paths from the camera goes down through the left eyepieces lens and you can't use the left eyepiece at the same time as the camera and there's a little thing on the side that you can switch between camera or okay so while you've got the camera running you only have one eye which is really annoying so the trick for that is if you're looking for a microscope we're in the ad it says sigh mph over and that means it'll simultaneously focus both eye pieces plus the camera and then you'll be fine Oh My mr. a couple of spots here put down that one and that one did I miss any others I don't know there's lots more I could say about microscopes but what any no I think I've got it all okay now that I've pasted that up I'm gonna have a quick look at the chat and see if you've been able to hear what I've been or hand-done we're talking about Legion X said hey John our ways develop Elm Mike not Wireless I'll click this back on to this and where are we feel like we are icing a cake yeah I have a wireless microphone which I use with my normal camera and I tried to connect it this morning but I didn't have the right connection to put the receiver into the computer I'll try and get that fixed for a future thing so I can walk around with the microscope I was the microphone um [Music] okay ah station into 40s head what's all the pace is that my never flied that well good question which one is this CT I'd kim tools this is a it's from chem tools Australia and I don't know which particular type it is this one is a leaded paste it's not unloaded that might make a bit of a difference and up until right before the live stream this was sitting in the fridge I've got a little bar fridge in the bathroom through there through that door and that's where I keep solder paste and I've got tubs and stuff in there as well for when I use stencils um [Music] okay mr. Fixit said I was doddering last night with my old Weller soldering gun that caught fire I was running through the house with a flaming soldering gun hitting for the back door that's not so good okay so in terms of which microscope I mean I've got so much more I could say about microscopes but maybe we'll come back to that let's get the machine running but before I do that I'm gonna put in a link so that link has that page that I just put in has links to things including the specific microscope that I have and there is a link to the version that you can buy with the camera and the same thing without the camera so you can decide whether you want it or not and it's on the more expensive side out of all the options because I've gone for the swing arm hang on you can't even see it I'll go back to the side view okay so this is mounted on an arm that lets me swing it around anywhere I want to and getting it like that is is really useful you can also get them on just a fixed base so you have to move the object around under it and you can also get it on a version that's got like two bars and the whole thing can slide in and out but the really nice thing about this is that you can move it anywhere in space you can basically move it up down left to right and just let go and it stays exactly where you put it and it's one of those things where if you you can spend a hundred dollars on a microscope you can spend a thousand dollars on a microscope or you know outside of those ranges and for the amount of time that I end up using it I figure that it's worth getting something that was basically as good as I could afford and I haven't regretted that at all all right so let's switch around to the other camera and have a look at this pick and place machine let's see okay so we're now on the Android phone Oh Aaron asked does the camera come with it you can get it either with or without the camera I got mine from a seller called fie scope and you've probably heard and if you've watched Lois rosemond's videos he's always talking about AM scope which is a which is a pretty well-known microscope brand so from what I can tell em scope here's an american-based front for a Chinese microscope supplier and that's weird talking and looking at the back of my head and the actual place they source their parts is from some of the same factories as fie scope so fie scope is buying directly from China AM scope is buying through the u.s. distributor now they do something slightly differently like they bundle some different things with it they've got different camera options but I got mine from fie scope and what they have is an incredible range of dozens of different heads different camera types different eyepieces different lens systems Barlow lenses different mounts so what you can do is by every piece individually and construct your own custom microscope or you can just go for one of those bundle one of their bundles that has all the things you need and they've got many different bundles so the page that I put up there earlier has links to two bundles one of the bundles is the same as the one I got and the other one is the bundle - the camera so hopefully tattoo time maybes got alright so I'm going to put this put this microphone down here on the bench grab the other camera [Music] let's see if I can find a position that's going to make sense for being able to see what's going on here all right what I'm gonna do yes I hope you can all still hear me okay I'll speak up all right before I write I'm just gonna show the major parts of it and that way you'll know what I'm talking about in a moment and then we can come back and talk about details later this is the head which moves in x and y pretty much like a 3d printer and then these nozzles move in the z-axis and they move up and down and they can also rotate and this is a camera so this is a vacuum pickup nozzle that's the downward looking camera we've got vacuum hoses coming through here there's a stepper motor here with a hollow shaft so the vacuum can go through it I've got fixed place feeders here just cut tapes there's a spot here where the target board goes in fact I'll put that on now this is the PCB that I just put all the solder paste onto and I've got these at all magnetic board mounts so once I got its out for a particular board I can just drop the board in it sits in place these are just little 3d printed mounts with we've maintenance fluid in the bottom so I can snap them in place wherever I want this is a met this is all steel this base plate these are the auto feeders will probably look at these in detail in a little bit reels of parts down here down this side there's the motion controller as a tiny-g motion controller down there there are also a couple of aquarium pump Stoke fish tank pumps and one of those is providing vacuum and the other one is providing positive pressure down there are four vacuum solenoids which are used to provide either positive or negative pressure so they pick up heads what else bring this around the other side down underneath it that is a PC motherboard it's running Ubuntu that's an i7 which is kind of overkill for this but I had it spare so I used it there's an Arduino down here connected by USB and that is running a G code interpreter and there's another Arduino down here can we see this yeah so this is the one that controls the auto feeders that's also running a cheat code interpreter so the open PNP software which is running on this one - machine talks G code to the three controllers the motion controller for the main machine the head controller which controls the vacuum solenoids and the servos and the one down here which controls the auto feeders alright so is everybody hearing me okay Oh Legion X you made me look said there's a lawnmower stuck in the hole in fact if I bring this over here you can see way off in the distance just there that's the auto mower sitting in its docking station and the hole that keeps getting stuck in is right about there you can't see it though because of the angle is a bit of a patch of dirt right there and that's where my dog keeps going to dig a hole over and over and over again all right so I'm gonna try to get an angle here where I can get up to the Machine and you can still see what I'm doing all right so I can drive the machine from open PNP I might have enough length here I can put the microphone back on all right so hopefully you can see this screen you won't see the detail but you can get the general idea this camera here is the view through the downward looking camera there is also an upward looking camera so if I go to the bottom camera that's now looking straight up at the ceiling and you can see the lights there on the ceiling so I'll go back to the top camera and there is a graticule on it that shows the position and the rotation of the head now I can go to the job controls of home the machine and what I've done is put little optical limit sensors on the x and y axes so it's just done the x axis homing and now it'll do the y axis homing coming up to find the sensor so at the moment the position on this is all open-loop it doesn't have real-time and feedback on its position so much like a pic and play much like a 3d printer it relies on homing and then it does everything relative to the home so now I can use the job controls and I could I can move the head around to wherever I want to somewhere in the order of a few hundredths of a millimeter accuracy and unfortunately you won't be able to see the detail on the software here but if I come into open recent job and I'll pull up the the job for this particular board it's got a list of all of the parks that need to be placed which feeders need them and I need to clear the placements so where is this job reset all placed ok and this is the point where I've got to go through a bit of a mental checklist and figure out what is setup first I need to activate the auto feeders so I'll turn those on and they are now live I also need to have vacuum and this is where it's going to get a bit noisy so the two vacuum pumps are now running and I'm always hesitant at this point because things can go badly wrong I've got to make sure I've got oh yeah ok so first thing is we'll check the position on the board so if I go to the deposition of the board that's the bottom left origin and then it's got some fiducials on it so I can pick a fiducial and then move to it and the board is not quite right at the moment after doing the major rebuild on the machine I don't have the I don't have the open CV pipeline working properly and you'll see what's going on with that in a minute so I just moved the board to make it aligned with the width where the camera is expecting it to be okay and then if I go back to the first video shot that should still be on yep close enough so I think it's just about time to hit go yeah any other comments cooked it up good nope all right I'm amazing how nervous I feel about this having it run live let's see if the head crashes into the feeder or the feeder doesn't work or whatever all right so this this job is gonna take quite a long time to run it's probably gonna be about 11 minutes so while it's running I will assuming it doesn't freak out I'll move the camera around and point out some other things so time to hit go oh no it's crashing I told you it would be a disaster that's what the machine was doing just before I went live on the livestream and I thought it had stopped doing it so hang on I'm gonna first thing is turn the actuators off for the auto-feed I'm going to re-home the machine because it just crashed it's it's lost its position and I'm going to do a little test while it's clear of all objects so I'm going to jog it down here and what I'm going to do now is run a discard function and what this should do is move the nozzle over that little tray at the back and then lower the head if it screws up it'll lower the head while it's moving so I'd see what happens no so that worked fine so the discard worked but then when I ran the job it didn't so I'm going to move move the head over here I'll do the discard job again yeah so you can see there that's the sequence of what it should be doing so I'm gonna I got to put this microphone down so I can move closer to the machine and let's see if we can make it crash again I told you this would be a disaster so I suppose that's one thing about having these holders just stuck on with magnets it doesn't really do too much damage if everything goes wrong it just knocks stuff out of the way and then you get to stick it back again so as a bit of background to explain why I have this specific problem it's largely because of the motion controller for the chassis and it's been driving me bonkers it's a tiny-g motion controller and [Music] wonder if we're ready to try again Oh dodgy ask is this hold up a stool okay yes it is this is I think it's a thermally stable solder paste which means that you can leave it exposed for a little while and you wouldn't leave it out for days but I've pasted up a board and then taken a couple of hours to get around to placing the parts and it still works just fine all right so let's have another go at this and I'm gonna start by just to avoid any possible damage to the feeder what I'm going to do is move it to the position of the first feeder that it's going to need which is the 1k so what will happen is that because it's already in position it doesn't matter if it starts to lower while it's moving because it's already there and then if it crashes it'll be crashing into the board and not into the feeder and the board is more movable than the feeder that's for sure so oh and one thing I forgot to do is I didn't check the position of the board let's have a look I'll go down to first fiducial I just stuck it approximately in place I've got to go through this process now moving it because the opencv is not working properly okay first fiducial aligned second fiducial is closed and I should probably explain what if additional is it's a positioning marker on the board what happens is that the machine needs to know the exact position of the PCB and because the the mechanical routing around or cutting around the edge of the PCB is not necessarily very accurate the position of the parts on the board can't be trusted relative to the edge of the piece a B so you can't just make a bracket that holds the PCB in the correct place based on its edges so what you have to do is use features on the PCB to figure out where things are and a fiducial marker is like a little pad on the board that is used purely for optical alignment and they can take different forms but in this case they're just little circles so what I'll do now is move the feeder back to the 1k I'll leave the head back to the 1k feeder and do the mental checklist again so we've got no need to activate the the feeders and let's see what happens this is where it could all go wrong again there's no particular reason it's gonna work now when it didn't work before but yeah if this fails oh well I'll um I'll mess around with it off-camera I'll just talk to you instead so let's go play let's pick up oh that's better see it's moving now before it lowers the head so now that it's underway it shouldn't screw up and I'll see if we can move the camera a little bit closer and still have it focus ok once again I got to put the microphone down [Music] [Music] [Music] all right so back to that motion controller problem what is happening is that the tiny-g motion controller doesn't necessarily report its position as its as it's going what happens is that open PNP relies on the motion control telling it when it's done so it sends a command like go to these coordinates and then it watches the values coming back from the motion controllers that say what its current coordinates are and then when it has reached its destination and the problem is that the tiny-g doesn't report consistently and sometimes what happens is that it immediately returns so it will accept a g code and begin moving to a certain position and just immediately say yes I've got it undone even though it hasn't actually finished moving yet and then open P and P thinks hey we've already arrived I'm at the place I need to pick up the part or put it down and so it then sends the command to lower the head but we haven't got there yet so the head ends up being lowered while the whole country is in motion and it crashes into things I've got a smoothie board somewhere as well and I've been thinking about maybe switching over to using that but and I think this movie has enough stepper drivers I'm not sure I can't remember too well since I was looking at that so this process is going to take as I said about 11 minutes to run through the about a hundred and twelve placements that it needs to do now there are a few ways that this can be optimized one is that the auto feeders can advance before they are required what you can see here in the sequence is that the nozzle puts down a part and then it pauses because the controller is telling the auto feeder to advance and bring the next part up ready to pick up if then moves the head to the feeder and picks it up but it's wasted time because it hasn't been moving while a fetal is bringing this part up it's a tiny change in the open PNP config to tell it to pre advance the feeder so there is always a part ready and then the gantry just about never stops that overall makes it maybe 10 or 15 percent faster at the moment it's running at a rate of about 600 components per hour and you can also see at the moment that this is in what's called an open loop system so it's not using the vision at all right now what it can do is use the down camera to find the pickup position of the feeder and it can also use the up camera to correct for any imperfections in the alignment of the part when it's on the nozzle because the parts can move in the tape when the nozzle picks it up it might be a little bit skewed or off to one side and by going over the camera it can use OpenCV to process it and then apply Corrections right now with these particular parts it's not doing it it's just running open loop where it's not looking at what's going on it just sends a sequence of commands in a little while it's going to get to placing capacitors and then it's going to go into a closed loop system and you will see that it will use the camera to firstly locate the part using the down camera and then it will carry the part over the bottom camera the bottom camera is the little round hole that you can see directly between the two banks of beaters under there is a webcam just looking straight up and it's had its lens modified so that it's like a macro and it can focus very close it'll move the parts over that hole and be stationary for a moment while it takes a photo and then uses OpenCV to process that image and then apply Corrections now that's something else that is being weird at the moment on this machine since the major rebuild will a while ago the Corrections that are being applied by open CV I think of backwards so if the part is skewed in one direction instead of correcting the skew it makes this new twice as bad and I think that's just because of the there's some configuration I were to do in the open CV pipeline and so maybe once this machine but once this job is finished I'll explain a few other changes I made to this machine fairly recently which was part of the big rebuild that I did which is also partly what's led me to having all these teething problems the machine was working reasonably well before and then after I totally pulled the pieces and rebuilt it in a different way I've now got these sorts of configuration and teething problems and also I switched from the open PNP one code base to open PNP two and had to regret the whole config from scratch which means I reintroduced problems that I had already ironed out in the previous setup [Music] see the screen wall sure yeah move this so now you can see the view of open PNP and you can see the camera view that's coming up and it's working down the list of parts and marking them off there is a little checkbox there's a little checkbox next to each other parts that says whether they are placed or not and if you look very carefully just down here you may not be able to see it on this screen this checkbox that one just got populated so that one is now done and now it'll populate this one yeah so it's going down the list some of these parts are set to do not place and it's only doing the ones that are configured at the moment so it's getting down towards the end of the 1k resistors so it's done it'll have done 101 of the 1k resistors and then it has a few other things to do so fairly soon it should move on to the the capacitors which is where things can go wrong as well because it's using the OpenCV system for checking the position of the capacitors and i've have lighting issues as well at the moment right now as you can see I'm running this in full daylight and that is very far from ideal no it's just going over and you can see there's a delay that's because it was using the camera to find the part and then took it over the up camera you can see it's finding the part moves to the pickup position grabs it brings it to the up camera and then put it down on the board [Music] now one of the limitations I have right now is that I've only got one working nozzle on the machine as well and I don't have a nozzle challenger set up so I can't change sizes of nozzle during a job unless I stop the machine and manually change it and it's about to try picking up a large diode and it may not be able to do it using this nozzle let's see what happens oh it's done it cool I pick up the diode and it sparked itself so the job is now done yeah capacitors are wonky as hell yes that's what I was talking about Scott with the opencv correction it'll be sticking them in totally the wrong orientation so now we get to put all of this under the microscope and see what happened I'm going to move up closer to the machine you hear that these chattering later themselves and we're only two Auto feet is used on this job just 1k resistors and 4k sevens and some fixed position parts so no I'm going to turn off all my stuff that's making noise I'll turn off the air and disable the feeders where are we actuators what I feed is disabled so they'll shut up and I'm actually just going to turn the Machine off now so I'll exit out it ya know so disconnect from the machine so open P and P should now be disconnected from the motion controller and take the board stick it under the microscope let's see what damage we've done all righty back to microscope you know before I get into that let's have a quick look at the chat see if there's nothing else I have there are some comments about the lag on the video yeah that is lag from the IP camera I'm seeing it locally as well it's not just YouTube what happens is the the camera is streaming I acting as an IP camera over Wi-Fi and then I'm using that as a feed into OBS and then OBS is merging it with everything else and sending it up stream but I also see the lag it's a local problem that's cuz it always put the board over yeah that wouldn't have been fun I think I've needed three said I got blamed for minor damage to two robots in the lab in uni the first was my fault negative offset into the positive trying to dive the robot hum into the tabletop yeah that's not fun alright so let's see what else I missed so ah okay this is a good question doji asked how come we don't see the park being placed and this was talking about the view when I had the camera looking at the screen for open PMP the reason for that is the camera is not aligned with the head so what happens is there are two different is an offset let's switch this back to yeah so there there are lots of offsets involved in this machine or in any pick and place machine it's using a like a Cartesian coordinate system with zero is the bottom left in this case and then everything else is relative to that and there are some things that are fixed positions like in theaters and the position of the board and there are other things that are moving positions like the position of the nozzle and the camera so the camera and the nozzle are side-by-side with a known offset relative to each other and then when it's doing a job where for example it picks up apart from the board or if you are looking at the board through the camera and you know can P and P you can have it exactly positioned over a component and you then want to move the nozzle to that location it moves the head so you can lose your camera view so you can either have the camera view or the nozzle in the correct position you can't have both it at the same time so while the job is running what you are seeing through the camera is basically the offset and it's just going to be showing you around a bit of the board decide whatever it is that you are doing [Music] okay so oh and Aaron said my host ID is kicking in with resistor labels being different way around yeah let's see how that goes now it'll be interesting because I've never actually looked in the tape to see if they're all the same way around yeah I think they are all the same way around in the tape but yeah okay time for a visual inspection and we're gonna see how badly those capacitors were aligned all right now there are a couple of interesting observations here first is that you can see that this first resistor that we're looking at it seems like it's way out of place and in fact it is offset a bit you can see that these are consistently offset down from the pads that's excuse me that's probably because I didn't have to ball it in the exact correct position and I kind of get a bit lazy about that because you don't need to be as precise as you think you do for a lot of this stuff and you'll see in a moment when we reflow this what goes on so I probably just had the board offset now you can also see that there is some variation between them in the position so this one is slightly left and then a little bit left and then you know they're not all perfectly offset by the same amount which is what you would expect now that it up here you can see quite a big difference if you look at the difference between these two parts which should both be aligned to their pads that will be because of two parts moving in the tape and the tape and think I've ever bit of tape and show you what it looks like all right so this is a bit of paper tape with hundred nano farad capacitors in it and what you can see is that I reduced the the lighting on this we should get less glare then you'll see more detail you can see that there is this which is cardboard or paper screw just call the paper tape and then there is a clear plastic cover over it which holds the parts in place and if I turn the tape over so it's on the other side you can see that there is a similar sort of thing on the fact this is it's like a gauzy tape that covers the back of it so on the top of the tape you can see the holes that have the parts in them you can also see that those parts are smaller than the hole and they can move around so if I do that you can see that they can flop down to one side they can rotate and they can offset by a significant amount with either the tape it can move that way or move that way and it can be rotated let's try that you can see this one here is rotated and it's offset so even if you have the pickup location perfectly centered and the nozzle comes down and grabs the part right there it will end up upset and it can be different from one part to the next depending on how the theater vibrated as it was advancing the tape and that is really why the division system is useful with the bottom camera if there's what it can do is look at that edit the view of the part once it's been picked up and then see if it's not where it expects it to be and apply a correction but for all of these guan k resistors we were running in open-loop with no vision correction and that's why you see that variation turns brightness back up so we can see it and you can see the parts just sitting in the solder now oh yeah you can see here this one is way way off this is rotated it was rotated almost 90 degrees so I just shot that back into place and this is what I was talking about with the vision correction is currently going in the wrong direction so into vision correction it's vision make it worse now with these parts hopefully don't care about that alignment this is fine what we will see is that when this reflows this solder paste I'm gonna zoom in on the solder paste just in case you haven't seen it before because it's kind of cool let's move weh-weh in and see if we can see detail in the post see if I get some focus that even more kind of dim at that focus level but what you can probably see is that the solder paste has all these little dots in it where's my pointer I'm at a scale where the tip of the tweezers is like a tree trunk so you can see all the little sparkles in it those sparkles are balls of solder so the solder paste is a suspension which is the the carrier and balls of regular solid solder inside it and it comes out kind of like a toothpaste consistency and you squirt it out or squeegee it out onto the board and that aqueous carrier allows it to I don't know the tech wins sometimes it is and that carrier fluid allows it to sit in position and the balls which are like it's basically like dust like solder dust then kept within it by the surface tension of that liquid and when it reflows the carrier oils away the solder melts and it makes us all to join so I'm gonna zoom this way back out so we can see what's going on so what happens and this is why I was saying earlier that I don't care about that orientation so much if we look at these parts what you can see is the the part is sitting and touching the two plugs of solder paste when this reflows the and the carrier starts to boil off it becomes very liquid and the surface tension will pull the part into alignment because this is close enough there's no need to correct that that's fine and that will end up perfectly aligned once it's actually soldered onto the board so what we're looking for here are a couple of things we're looking for parts that are so far out of position that they are not touching the solder on one end like this this kind of borderline that'll probably flow okay anyway but if it's only touching on one end then it can end up tombstoning and parts like this where the machine has totally screwed up and just put it down in the wrong place and what's going on here oh yeah so this is the same thing so these two resistors which is the 4k 7 receiver I squared C pull ups where these ones head I shot off the resistor these ones had vision turned on on the theta I'm getting deep in my tweezers yeah and that's what's totally screwed it up so at the moment the Machine actually runs better with vision turned off right so check those are aligned close enough this one could be a problem so I'll just adjust it make sure everything else is on yeah there's the diode that it put on managed to pick that up okay even with the small muzzle should have been using a bigger nozzle for that oh there's the first part that's because the Machine crashed you can see that there is one missing there what's that yellow stuff that's probably a result of it crashing as well so what I'll do is Chuck a 1k resistor on there so when it crashed I didn't reset the counter that that showed which have been put down so then when I ran the job again you thought it was already there you can see the markings are different it's all upside down but this one says zero one B and this one says one zero two that's a these are all 1k resistors they're just different from a different accuracy I think this might be like a 5k on a five percent resistor and this is a one percent resistor different markings game anything else that looks obviously wrong nothing that's going to be a big problem I'm going to chuck a couple of capacitors on it no I don't actually have the correct capacitors for this so and they're just like box breathing caps anyway I'm gonna put on some that are dramatically too small but it will still work check one on there what I really need is someone sitting in the room with me watching the chat and telling me about any questions or anything that are coming up because I can't do this and watch the chat at the same time who's wrong what else trainees do I've got to put on some chips now because I was stupid and didn't think ahead I I didn't have enough of these MCP 23:07 teens and right before the live stream I actually floated these off another board so I just used the hot air and remove them and now I'll put them onto this board a little bit sticky from the flux so I put tech flux on on the pins while I was removing them from the other board just to make it all flow a bit better maybe what I need is a screen with the YouTube chat that's visible up here somewhere as well or I could put it on a tablet maybe so I could carry it around and have it with me wherever I am in the room what is that get off there is some strand of something attached to the stuck in the flux on the chip last one I get off alright so now I have the board ready to put in the oven so time to switch cameras and let's have a look at the reflow oven so that this is my reflow oven - ten nine six to see I think it is I can't remember I built this enclosure over it to reduce the amount of fumes coming out of it it's kind of large as domestic like that's smaller than to go to the large ones of the Eastern factories and more like a pizza oven with a conveyor belt through them this one with the drawers are many all up and that you just use for small runs and things so turn that on put that inside I've decided on a couple of spare PCBs today and that don't know why I did that and it actually it's because the bottom of this tends to pop all a little bit as the temperature changes and it's just pops it up above it so there are a number of different reflow profiles see if we can get a view one here the menu system on this is horrible and so we're going to three to select a profile this is the this time across the x-axis and temperature across the y-axis and that's the profile that it will follow on a wave to source like that and for some reason every time you exit out of this it goes back into the Chinese menu mode so then I'll switch it back to English menu and hit start so now well start so now it's running this wave and the temperature will this is the target what do you see here on the chart and then it's going to try to follow it you won't get it spot on but you'll see the actual temperature on there as well now I'm going to move this back a bit and see if I can improve that microphone situation and I'm back at the computer so while the while the camera is sitting there pointing at an oven which is not the most exciting thing I'm going to go and cut off no I'm going to go back and catch up on chat Aaron way back in the chat Aaron asked is this full speed so that's in relation to the speed the machine was running in well it's kind of full speed for now that there are a few things I could do to improve it I can change the way the feeders preload their parts I deliberately don't do that at the moment because when the job is done you then end up with all your feeders with one part exposed and if you're doing a whole lot of boards then that's fine but I just do odds and ends here and there so I prefer to take the slight speed penalty and have the feeders only advance the parts when they're required and I can also do things like speed up the motion of the gantry this gantry is fairly heavy it's actually designed for making a CNC machine so it's way more mass on the moving head than is necessary for a pick-and-place machine you'll see that pick-and-place machine is designed for speed try to minimize the mass on the moving head and this one is large so it's got the steppers of running moderately high current and it's working quite hard to move two head around that quickly oh yeah see on said why you're not using a resistor arrays potentially four times let's pick up in placements yeah that's true that would be a good idea I just don't happen to have any resistor arrays and I had lots of 1k resistors so that's what I put on I also am kind of lazy about things like small pitch pads and k-16 arrays a pretty easy to place as as surface mount parts go they're not too small but when I'm using a syringe for things it's a bit of a pain yeah what else reflow is rather forgiving yes oh here's a really good question Peter cake I said I noticed the board flexes a lot when the nozzle hits it is it too far down that is an excellent observation now that is one of the little quirks about my pick-and-place machine and with most peaking place machines why you find is that they have a fairly well tuned z-axis and when I was first building this machine which was but seven years ago or something I didn't want to have to calibrate the z-axis and so I kind of cheated I'm gonna move the camera back around and explain a little bit more about the machine in fact I'm going to close the blinds because that's going to help the lighting and you'll be able to see a lot better what's going on all right hopefully that will reduce glare and you'll be able to see this area a little bit better what we've got hmm excuse me feeling quite cranky today instead of driving the z-axis directly this is just sitting on a little track and you can see that it's being lifted up there's a bit of string this is so crude up here is a servo so this is just a regular hobby servo and it's a bit of string that goes down to the carriage and the carriage moves on this rail so the syllabary can lift it or lower it and what pulls it excuse me what pulls it down is just gravity there is nothing physically pushing the z-axis down so it just gets lifted by the servo and then lower it down so when it wants to do a placement the servo moves down and this is lowered and you can see that the nozzle is also spring-loaded I can push it up that is to allow for tolerance on machines that directly drive to the z-axis so that if you try to drive it too far by you know a millimeter or so the spring compresses and you won't destroy your machine or the board or the part that you're putting down but what I'm doing is basically being lazy and just letting gravity push this down and I've got to calibrate it so that when it's lowered it goes a bit lower than the position of whatever it needs to be so at the top of the PCB and the position of the pickup the pickup location here on the foetus is all about 13 millimeters above the deck and so what I do is drive this so that it goes down to maybe 11 or 12 millimeters below the deck below that point so Wow sorry 11 or 12 millimeters above the deck so one two millimeters below the target and then it relies on the weight of this to just push down on whatever part I'm pushing down so that is it's kind of a nasty little hack and it works surprisingly well now on most boards so just as an example here's another PCB this is the more typical set of size stuff that you would do flex isn't a problem like you can't really bend that board easily it's only because we're using that ridiculously large piece of B that is not just large but it's also really long and that can flex so what I should do ideally is have another support somewhere in the middle here when this board is in position in that area you can make it flex like it's not taking all that much for sitting in flex it very significantly with most PCBs though that doesn't happen it's quite well supported okay other things to point out while we're waiting for the reflow oven to run well actually just coming over here you can see it a little chart on the reflow oven and you can see that the actual temperature is tracking fairly close to the type of temperature now there is a certain point here where it can't cool down quickly enough in fact just a what I'm going to do I'm going to temporarily mute my microphone so I don't set off all of your voice assistance okay and I just used she-who-shall-not-be-named to turn on an exhaust fan and then the exhaust fan is connected to that blue hose it goes down onto the bench runs around the room and then events outside in that blue hose goes back to a tee piece and it's picking up from both the laser cutter and from this view good so what it's doing is sucking here through here around the reflow oven it goes through out the back down through that tip piece and then down through the politicos and outside but what happens is that as the reflow oven is at the end of its cycle you can't quite pull down fast enough so what you'll see here is that the actual temperature will start to deviate from the target temperature you can see now that it's not cooling as quickly as it should be so what I do to help prevent that is I just pull the drawer open a little bit no there's a little bit more air flow to go through it and then the temperature can track more accurately and also any moment now that it's going to start to beat the ennis to say that it's done that's very loud it's wheel almost there sufficient Soviet stop button here we go and it just keeps doing that what I tell them to stop and you know it is it's finished its replay but it's still hot like if I pick that board up I'm going to burn myself the board is sitting there will he wreath load but I'm gonna walk away and leave it for a few minutes before I go on trying to pick it up sometimes but I'm feeling really impatient I go over and I pick the board up using a pair of tweezers or bounce it around between my hands like a hot potato you get it onto the bench but I'm gonna be patient this time alright so other things about this machine the feeders are quite interesting these these feeders were designed by a guy in Germany or Michael it's really only known by his handle of MGR L and here you can see one with its cover off and the tape comes in through the bottom here and this is a little spring-loaded thing that stops the tape from bouncing you can see that theater here there's a servo that pulls this back and it pushes it forward and that little point which is also spring-loaded down hooks into the holes in the tape and it ratchets it forward the tape then comes out through here and back out through the bottom the cupboard gets pulled off it comes up around here up over this which is spring-loaded down to this micro switch and then it goes down through this motor with a couple of gears on it and the micro switch controls power to the motor so what happens is that the tape advances the tension goes off to the cover the switch comes up the motor turns on it then winds forward it pulls the tape tight again to switch off and then the motor stops so that tape remover automatically keeps taking up the slack as the tape is advanced forward the tape is peeled back so if we look at the faders on here you can see the reel of parts coming up from underneath goes through and then it goes down through the hole in the in the plate it comes back out underneath and the carpet tape is peeled off it comes back over here down through the motor and then it just gets left hanging under the machine here so the if we back up from the machine a little bit you can see the tape for the 1k resistors which is the parts that we've just been using the discarded tape is just coming out at the bottom here and then areata clear I've gotta cut those off and chuck them in the bin all right I'm gonna kill audio for a second and is okay all right the exhaust fan is off again so hopefully it's back to being a reasonably quiet lab and now let's have a look at this microscope and see how badly we've screwed it up all righty so looking at the this row of resistors you can see that these are the ones that were offset like they were all upset but these were sitting down off the pads of fairway down to one side this one has pulled itself back into position this one hasn't really quiet it's not aligned properly it's a bit odd but you can see here that most of them have pulled themselves into alignment with the pads even though they were not properly aligned when they went into the other and the capacitor is pretty well aligned going down this row you can see that these ones are pretty well aligned we don't have any tombstones or anything yet everything seems to look okay so what I'm looking for here are a couple of things firstly I'm looking for the really obvious thing which is parts not in their correct position and that could be either offset in some way like not making contact with one pad or it can be tombstoned which is where the where is the point up there which is where one end has not made contact and the surface tension on the other end has pulled it so the whole thing pops up and the resisters ends up standing up vertically so that's called tombstoning and another thing of obviously you solder bridges that's something else to look for and there don't seem to be any problems here all of these resistors are where they should be capacitors are aligned yeah everything is where it should be now the other thing to look for is on these days ICS is bridging between the parts between the pads you know I'm going to try to adjust the brightness here the view through the microscope camera is not quite as good as eyepiece so it's a bit hard to see but you can see here that there is no breach between when I touch that you can see the you can see the flux flaking away you can see there are no breaches here each of the pads is almost separately because I had taken these these ICS off another board just before the livestream they still had bits of solder on the pads they weren't perfectly clean like you would expect so that makes a little bit harder for them to be sitting down properly now the other thing to look for on a part like this where there are multiple pins is if it hasn't been sitting perfectly flat sometimes apart looking from above will look like it's connected but it's actually floating above the pad a little bit I haven't seen any evidence of that here but that's something that's particularly a problem if you're reusing parts like I just have and these undersized capacitors seem alright obviously there should be a much bigger capacitor but this one still bridges across the pads so that's fine overall this is looking the right so that I would write as a successful reflow there's more to do to assemble that board and make sure it's it's ready to go obviously that's just the the the basic parts alright where are we let's switch back to here and have a look at the chat again see if I can catch up all righty hmm oh yeah so and then just reminded me of Scott miller's comment about and swaps the drive motor wires during the rebuild yeah so what that's in relation to is the correction of the offset on the rotation when it picks up the part and then uses vision to figure out how it should be correcting it that is a good theory but it's not what's happening in this case because what's happening is even when we're running in open-loop so we're not using open well we're not using open CV so we're not using vision correction it still has to rotate parts and it's rotating the parts in the correct direction so if I tell it to rotate 90 degrees clockwise and I'll watch the machine it does rotate 90 degrees clockwise so the mechanical control of the machine is okay on the output side that's fine what I think is going on is that there is an algorithm or there is a an open CV pipeline and what it does is take a photo of the apart looking up through the board and then it applies a mask there is a an image essentially which has like a blanked out area so it removes air parts of the background that it doesn't want to look at it then does edge detection so it finds if for example you are putting down a resistor it's going to be a rectangle so it does edge detection and finds the boundaries of the rectangle and then it compares that rectangle to what it's expecting to see which could be a bit rotated it could be a bit offset or whatever it'll be not quite right and then whatever the difference is so if it was expecting the if it was expecting the part to be like that and it takes the notes like that if he goes out I need to check I need to turn it by you know 12 to degrees anti-clockwise or whatever to do the correction and then it applies that to rotate the head before it puts the part down so that in theory when the parties put down that that error will have been corrected I think what's happening is that in the opencv pipeline where it gets the offset and then sends it back into open P and P to do the correction it's giving it the wrong orientation right now the camera is looking up and there the perspective of the machine is looking down and I think that's the problem so it'll be just in the way I've got the configuration set up I need to fix the camera orientation or something for the bottom camera so anyway lots of stuff to play around with mm Richard said have I have you talked to your live stream setup I'm assuming you have multiple camera streams going and you're toggling between them I haven't actually talked about that I've talked about a little bit on the discord but not on the live stream itself I'm using OBS as the software that brings all those video streams in at the moment what you see back there is my mobile phone running an IP camera app which is streaming the camera over Wi-Fi and then OBS is pulling in that it's pulling in my desktop it's pulling in the a window from the Game Capture system it's basically got a whole lot of sources coming in to it and then I've got a little menu and I can select between different views so I can select if I want the front camera I've got the side camera oops side camera switch to the desktop view and at the moment I've got a fusion 360 running on there so I can pull my desktop up live and move it around and the microscope view and the view from the Android phone so OBS is really cool lets me do lots of stuff but it's it's a bit of a pain having to manage OBS and switch between views and keep track of the track the chat and be trying to do stuff in the room at the same time so I really need a producer sitting here with me to to keep track of that sort of thing yeah Mk me lab said of course you have motorized blinds - yes my whole house has motorized blinds all the way through it and a few years ago I did contracting work for a company that makes those blinds and so I actually designed the controller that's in them and those controllers ended up being installed in houses all over Victoria some in New South Wales I think so Seabreeze said what is happening in the laser with the side off that's because I was replacing the controller the that laser has been rewired so I've just added a um a Raspberry Pi running laser web and that if you know about octo print for a 3d printer where you can open a browser connect to your 3d printer you've got you got a view to be able to load jobs and there's a live camera and all of that sort of thing Laser web is kind of like that but for a laser cutter and I've got a Raspberry Pi sitting up on there at the moment running laser web and I've just been connecting it up to the controller so I can control the laser cutter over the network instead of having to go up and do it directly on your windshield Scott it looks like a bird crapped on your windshield do you mean the window yeah that needs that needs cleaning ah when a runner said what is the tomato sauce used for that is a bottle of water that I squeezed onto the sponges for solved for the solder ah that is a really good question da Jie said why would it be called a reflow oven when it hasn't been floated a first time true it should just be called a flow oven ah and Govinda said where did you post the link for the microscope I'll just put this in there is a gear page I put this in earlier in the chat but just to make it convenient that page has links on it to the microscope and a few other things and most of those links are our affiliate links so I get a some fraction of a percentage of any value that comes on them comes from stuff bought through those links so I just tell you that as a there's a full disclosure thing Oh Darien said saw a solder ball next to the ceramic cap yeah that's actually something else to look out for I'm going to switch back to the microscope and we'll look for that solder ball thanks Darien normally while I'm working on boards like this I will also check for those and pop them off but in this case I was kind of rushing through it so the ceramic cap not that one that one yes okay so where you can see right here that spot there that is a ball of solder and the way that happens is if I put too much solder paste on the pad as the part gets down by surface tension sometimes there isn't room on the in the joint between the pad and the the actual contact on the part for all of the solder and so what happens is some of us older gets squeezed out and it forms a little ball which gets stuck in the flux so at this point while it's reflowing the flux and the carrier will still be liquid and sort of boiling away there so what happens is you end up with this little ball of solder that gets embedded on attached to the side and it's not there typically not electrically connected to the whatever the joint was they usually just like glued they're in the flux and you can pop them off so what I'll do is I'll zoom in so you get a better view of this bringing us right in get some more focus turn up the brightness here we go that's a better view so you can see there this little ball of solder which is on the side now normally I would just flick this off with the oh there it is with the tweezers and you can see that it really is like a ball because surface tension has pulled it up into a ball shape like a little solder ball bearing and that was stuck in this flux that has solidified around the joint so that's something else to look for what I normally do is go around the board and if I find any of those I just popped them off with the tip of the tweezers another one there yep so there's a tiny little one just there and there's a tiny little one just there it's quite deceptive to scale that we're working out here like it looks like these tweezers are quite large and blunt these are very sharp tweezers these are like that's like a needle you can stab yourself at this very easily so things look like they're blunt and there's one just there see that there's a little ball that popped out on the side now if generally they don't cause a problem the worry is they can cause a short circuit or something but the reality is that that doesn't really happen unless you've got way too much as a pop and least bang it like that to get them free unless you've got way too much solder on there and it ends up bridging then you won't get a short-circuit it's just I prefer to remove them partly so that if later on something happens like the board gets knocked or subjected to vibration and the little bits of soul to come loose you don't want them floating around in side whatever the device is that it's been attached to now if I was using a stencil the quantity of solder would have been correct and then that probably wouldn't have happened that happened because I was putting it down manually with the syringe and being kind of slack slapdash about it all right so oh there was a question here I just just lost it there was a thing about automatic gain control on OBS that is an excellent point hopefully that won't be a problem after this week if I if I get an adapter I can connect the radio microphone to it and me walking around the lab like this is a bit of an unusual thing it's because of obviously what we're showing so most of the time the microphone will be right here with me and it won't be a big problem all right [Music] mr. Eckland said tomato sauces for the hotdogs he cooks in the oven with the boards yeah I could do lunch at the same time so hotdogs with a side of lead and flux doesn't sound too appetizing all right okay so espera cali said have you explored the possibilities of marketing your air quality measurement tool for consumers users or patients with lung issues i'm going to be making more stuff available in relation to that or the first few videos the idea was to explain exactly what's needed if you want to go and build one yourself but obviously there are many people that could benefit from it who either don't have the capability of making their own like there they're not able to solder or they don't want to do the software side of it or whatever I mean most people in the world aren't like us they don't solder things together and load custom firmware onto it so the what's going to end up being the fifth video in the series is going to be the pro version of what I'm calling a pro version of the air quality sensor project which uses a PMS 7.03 sensor which is the newest plant our sensor it's also got an SP 32 on it instead of an esp8266 it's got a big display on the front and it's much more of an integrated ready to go unit it's on a custom PCB just one of your five one here I don't think I do and what I'm going to do is sell those and for people that are just wanting something that's ready to go then that's an option but of course there are many other places you can get them too I'm not the only one doing air quality sensors there are plenty of them around most of the reason for me wanting to do one is to be able to have more control over how it works rather than just buying a device that's like an appliance and plugging it in and getting numbers out of it I really wanted to understand how it worked and to be able to customize it to suit myself so that will be well it's still going to be some weeks away before I get to part five of that series oh it is - Scott just said my car is visible on one of my screens yes so I've got CCTV around the house and outside the house and there's a screen up the top here which was showing actually my wife's car right now I don't have a car my car was taken by the liquidator my best friends the liquidators a sleepy 105 say it I've noticed you sign off so light doesn't the clicking sound at the relays buggy I'm currently trying to make a board with a single-pole double-throw solid state relay to avoid that yeah that's a good point the clicking of the relays does annoy people for me most of the time it doesn't really matter I've got a if you've seen in some of our switchboard I've done videos about that before I've got heaps of relays in there and you can't really hear that if you're if you're up in one of the two bedrooms that is adjacent to that wall and it's really quiet and you listen at the wall when a light is being turned on or off you can just very faintly hear a relay clicking inside the switchboard but you've really got to listen for it that's not really a big problem but following on from that one of the advantages of using things like a solid state relay or using and using a triac for example is if you do zero if you do zero crossing detection and things you can apply Deming so one of the big differences between a relay based controller and something that uses a triac is typically that you can do doing on a triac but that's a whole other topic so Benjamin said did I miss we said what board is it is you're making that's a good point I didn't actually explain it I kind of assumed it because it's a board that I've been talking about recently on discord and also on previous live streams I've shown it but if you missed that then you would not know so just as a little aside let's go to the desktop this is ultimately the device that I'm working towards with this particular board and if I spin this around you can see this long green board here this is the one that we've just been refloating and what it's got is a whole lot of mCP 23a Seventeen's which are I squared C IO drivers connected to these rj45 sockets so the device overall looks a lot like an Ethernet switch but it's not each of these connections goes out to a light switch in my house Ethernet comes in here and then there is a pass through there's a connection there if you can follow my cursor so the idea is you use a little patch cable that you plug in there the patch cable comes around and plugs into the Raspberry Pi and the town on here there is a six way connector and then there is a an IDC cable same as the ICSP cable that you would use on an Arduino you plug one into there and then the other one into this down here and then one into here and then one onto this hat on the Raspberry Pi so this hat take power over ethernet and regulates it down to five volts and also exposes it out on these connections this board in the middle has a little keypad on it and it's also got a display so the idea is these are menu buttons and then there is a display on here so the summary is that this is a rack mount light switch controller for home automation and you plug it into Ethernet you plug it into all your light switches and either a Raspberry Pi or an Arduino can be located in here and it can read when your light switches are pressed and then publish to MQTT or do whatever else it is that you like if you use a Raspberry Pi in here it means that you have the computing capacity to be able to do things like run node read or openhab or home assistant directly on this which means the light switch controller becomes the main control device for your house if you don't have a system running somewhere else or if you do have a system running somewhere else like you have an existing Raspberry Pi or a VM on a very nice server which I know some people on the discord have then you and you have open house or whatever running in that then what you can do is just put an Arduino in here it doesn't need to be a Raspberry Pi so they can cut the cost down a little bit that's the end result so that's the reason that this board is such a long skinny shape it's just because it's got all these connectors on it you'll also see that we have used the pick-and-place machine to put on these resistors and I manually placed these ICS because because I had taken them off another board so I didn't have them conveniently in a tape or anything to feed but there are through-hole parts like there are these big connectors and to go on there are these little rj45 sockets here there is a LED here the model here isn't quite right for the LED what wanted was for the LED to come up and then the legs to be bent 90 degrees and then have it come through this hole in the case so from the front what you'll have is a power LED which is visible here but the 3d model that I used on the PCB is just for a normal LED mounted down flush and that's why it looks like that that's not actually how it will be installed and then I need to hand solder the power socket so there'll be an option for either powering it using power over ethernet if you're a target device supports that or just power by plugging in a DC jack right there okay let's see going back oh hey it's God said while watching this the paste application I was impressed counting the solder balls not so much yeah I was I was not doing a very careful job the way my brain works is I tend to be very focused on one thing I don't multitask and I don't even try to multitask the way I put it is multitasking is a lie it's just doing two things half as well it's not doing two things as well as you normally would so when I'm trying to do this and talk at the same time and explain what I'm doing I'm kind of thinking about what I'm saying and not paying attention to what I'm doing putting down the solder paste so yeah that was a bit of a rough job so I owe dodgy said during this time of discontent with the virus that shall not be named have you considered making some of the stuff we might normally buy for example I need a hand controller for my sense I would rather buy locally yes so that is an interesting question my wife and I were just talking about this a couple of days ago one of the excuse me a second because business has changed well my business has changed dramatically over the last few weeks there is there is a question of if it's worth trying to provide some kind of a local assembly service and maybe so the big difficulty right now is lack of logistics and I've got to admit this is not something that I predicted early on when when this whole thing hit my idea was my observation was okay we can't go to local stores so much anymore people are staying home using online shopping one of the very first things that failed here in Australia was online shopping the week that we went into into voluntary isolation or whatever you want to call it the major retailers here the the supermarket's stopped their online delivery service so you couldn't just pull up the Kohl's online website order your groceries and and have them delivered a day or two later because so many people switched to using online services that they just couldn't keep up with it and also they had issues with people not being able to pack the orders and so they switched it so that their online shopping service was only available to certain people I think yet to have something like a senior's card or you know prove that you're in an at-risk group so for a couple of weeks we were told we're not supposed to go to the shops unless we absolutely have to but by the way online groceries you can't do that either and that was probably the first sign that things in the logistics world were really falling in a big heap where I'm getting to with this is the issue that I thought that what would happen is that we would be able to go into isolation you know houses place orders for things deliveries would still happen but there is but the reality is if I want parts from China or wherever getting stuff is really really hard and I can't ship out now it seems like it should be the golden time or the golden age for online retailers now during the week this week both see on so unexpected maker who is in the chat here and myself made me made the the painful decision to turn off International shipping for our online stores and that the problem is lack of flights there just isn't enough cargo space because so many passenger flights now have been grounded there isn't room to take packages so both Elin and I have been told by Australia Post that there are there's a big list of countries now that we simply can't ship to I've been told that I can't ship internationally using economy at all anymore like if I go to the post office with an economy part parcel don't just say no sorry we can't take it I can ship using premium services like International Express post but that costs a whole lot more and also they're really delayed one of the notices I got from Australia Post I think it was yesterday or the day before now must've been Friday was that they have suspended their guarantee on Express post shipping there used to be guaranteed that if you shipped something Express post by a certain time of day then it would arrive at its destination the next day so they're no longer guaranteeing delivery times on Express post they are not shipping internationally by economy at all shipping buy premium services international can have weeks of delay added to it something that would normally get overseas in you know three to five days using an Express service might take a few weeks to get there so the result of all of this is that we've had huge problems with being able to sell overseas Scott just said premium shipping is done with dedicated flights and they only fly when they have a full load yeah so it's really hit and miss at the moment I've noticed with these PC reasons like this the PCB that we just did this reflow on came from China and that was that was shipped and when I got the shipping notification DHL told me that it was going to be I think it was 16 days was the estimated transit time from China to me on a service that normally takes two to three days and then when they did actually deliver it it took about five days I think it was or six days so it seems to be really changeable the carrier's themselves can't predict what's going on so all shipping time estimates are out the window if your shipment happens to align with the time when there is a flight going and there is room and it can get on there it can end up getting there really quickly if there is no flight at that particular time then you could be waiting weeks anyway what this all comes down to is that a number of people that are doing online that run online stores have now had to turn off International shipping and so that's painful coming all the way back to where they started was that means there may possibly be a demand for more local manufacturing and it's possible that there are people in Melbourne for example that one assembly done and normally they would farm it out now I'm not exactly a factory and you've seen what I've got set up here it's a little lab with a DIY pick-and-place machine see on has a much better pick and place machine than I do and he's been asked in the past as well about whether he would do contract assembly work and he said no way doing contract assembly work opens up all sorts of difficulties but maybe that's the sort of thing that is more of a future opportunity is doing things really local okay well I because of all of the screw-ups at the start I've already been going for two hours I'm gonna stop in a moment but I'm just going to quickly scan down for comments legionnaires ex asked when will these be listed on the product page when I tested them so we have a board now and what I can do maybe later today I'm not sure sometime in the next few days is I'm gonna put the IJ 45 sockets on it I've also got to build the new version of the control panel board which has got the display in the buttons on it I've got PCBs for that but I haven't assembled any of them hang on a second I shouldn't be coughing in your ear like that I need a more convenient mute button and so once I've simple boards tested I'm gonna do videos about them and make them available a que c'est station 240 said have you seen that through-hole soldering machine that Adafruit use it's like a solder fountain I haven't seen a de fruits specifically but I've seen those machines many times I've seen them in factories in China as well I've I've seen a couple of them in use at seed studio I've been to the factory that seed the little seed studio factory where they do their assembly in Shenzhen and I've seen there's running in the factory so what-what station 240 is talking about there is a soldering machine that's used for through-hole parts and there are two different ways you can do it from the bottom of a board you can either use a wave reflow machine sorry not reflow it's a wave soldering machine or you can use a selective soldering machine so with wave reflow the the board is placed over a bath of molten solder which brushes across the bottom of the board and it solders all the joints that are exposed the other way which is what station 240 is talking about it's like a solder fountain the easiest way to imagine it is a chocolate fountain so you've probably seen things where there is a tube up the middle and there is molten chocolate being pumped up and it comes out the top and it streams down and then you can stick marshmallows and fruit and things in it and coat with chocolate well imagine a chocolate fountain but much smaller and it has molten solder running through it and a chocolate and it's on a positioning gantry so the PCB comes in over the top with the through-hole parts and the little pins sticking through them and then the reflow either the soldering machine comes underneath and it comes up and touches the joint and the solder flows over it and then the machine comes back down and moves to the next position so it basically comes around and selectively solders different joints under the board so Peter said which pol modules use on the bolt head or that particular one is just a super cheap 5 volt regulator module this one here I'm going to do a couple of different versions of that I'll spin it around and bring it up here this particular version is for like a DIY POA where you put anything from six bolts to 24 volts into it and it will regulate it down to 5 volts and feed it to the 2 pi now this black thing you see here that is just cheap 3m 5 volt regulator module that takes the unregulated power coming in from the the correct pairs on the Ethernet connection regulates it and then feeds it back into the PI but it is not a proper 802 3 AF 80 POS system it doesn't do any signal and your anything it just expects you to be putting voltage on to the correct pairs of the wire and so what I'll probably do is another version of this that has a proper p OE regulator module i normally use the Silpat L modules like the AG something an Ag of course for silver I can't even remember the part numbers like 6 1 1 2 is a 12 volt output module there's an eight one one two I think so I'll probably do another version of this which has support for proper commercial POA for people that want that we share which is 48 volts on the wire [Music] okay oh station 2:40 said DHL ten days to ship from our CEOs to Australia okay that's an interesting observation as well that's the sort of thing that normally would take two to three days and now it's ten days so I mean stuff is getting through but slowly and [Music] unpredictably I and unexpected maker said I've been thinking about doing that offer I can't pick and place service but it's such a tough thing to do yeah it really is there is there are so many considerations when you're doing a job for someone else and not just for yourself when you do it yourself there are so many things that you can make allowances for that that you can't get away with when you're assembling someone else's boards there are things you can do in terms of testing and stuff that you can sort of fight your way through do it manually but if you're assembling someone else's boards then you need tests procedures and all sorts of things so I am dodgy said coming out of the other side of the shipping issues people are still going to want to buy locally even during good times stuff from China doesn't turn doesn't turn up after months of waiting yeah that's true sometimes oh and the other thing is that the cost of shipping out of China looks like it's going to be going up and that was starting to happen right before the current crisis hit and it began I think as a result of the us-china trade war that was going on and I could go off into a long tangent about shipping out of China but I'll resist that urge but it looks like the days of free shipping on $1.00 items coming out of China might be over we might end up having to actually pay for shipping Aaron said what about contract design well yeah that's a possibility and I already do that I have a number of clients that I do design work for those are typically commercial projects and they are their designs for a client that wants to own the right so I don't talk about it in the context of super house but that's actually how I make money normally is doing designs for people espera Carly said do you have to have insurance to it to do assembly work for people yes and I have I pay a lot of money for insurance actually there is insurance just for selling products as well there is professional indemnity insurance which is righted to giving advice like if I tell a client to do something and then they do it and something goes wrong I have liability for that so I have professional indemnity insurance and there is third-party insurance for damage if I make something and then it blows up someone's gear so yeah insurance I already pay lots of insurance so guerilla a you said will we see more capacity for production being brought back onshore that is the open question I don't know that's really interesting there are very few places in Australia now where you can get contract assembly done there are actually quite a few places that do it but they only do it for themselves it's like this little secret industry that happens behind the scenes a lot of big companies that are in the tech space like that deal with hardware have their own pick-and-place machines they have their own little assembly facilities but they don't do work for anyone outside of themselves they just provide they just do work on their own product and so nobody hears about it there are places like Blackmagic Design in Melbourne who are fairly well known for doing all of their own assembly so if you there they make camera equipment and mixing desks and that sort of thing like video mixing desks and they run their own factory in Melbourne but there are a lot of other places as well that do their own picking place for small runs they might do a few hundred or something or a couple of thousand or something they need and they do it locally but no one ever hears about it so in terms of a place that you can go and say here is my design please assemble this for me I don't know that that might start to happen a little bit more hmm oh yes I'm gonna get off somehow to try to answer a couple more of these s bro I said are you introducing your kids to the things you know and teaching them I give them the opportunity but I don't push them and the way I look at this is my kids have the opportunity to do whatever they want in terms of electronics work but if they're not interested in that there's no point pushing them so just recently actually I've had my son doing some some soldering work he's been doing some SMT real work there are some there's a batch of boards that I got manufactured recently in China and they put the LEDs on backwards there are nine LEDs on every board and every single LED was fitted backwards and they assembled 200 boards for me the problem was that shipping them back to China and then getting them reworked and everything wasn't really worth it and I figured I would just give Tommy the opportunity to do some paid work and I set him up on the microscope and he uses two soldering iron so don't know if you can see let's see switch to the side view there is this soldering iron here you can't quite see it but just over the other side there is it there is the cord for a second soldering iron so what he does is he works under the microscope with it once all during iron in each hand and put one on each end of the led and lifts it off the board and then he puts new LEDs on putting them on the correct way around so yeah I'm paying him to do that so my kids have the opportunity to mess around with this sort of stuff and they have certainly done things like school projects that involve things that we've built my daughter who is now studying fashion design at uni when I'm gonna switch back to the front he did a project where she put optic fiber through she designed a couple of dresses and then put optic fibre and LEDs and things all through them and the way we did that was I designed a custom controller with me SP 32 you might be familiar with the the Adafruit flora range which is used for wearable electronics I designed a version of a controller board that has an SP 32 on it and we also wired up so she did a whole lot of work under the microscope with putting Oh 603 resistors on two ribbon cable by scraping off the side of the the insulation on the cable I've got a pair of cable and we actually used gray IDC cable which is a one point two seven millimeter pitch and we peeled it so that we had two conductors and then she used a scalpel and sliced the insulation off it and then under the microscope she put host accessory resistors across the ribbon cable between the two conductors and then we put all of that through the dresses that she designed so that they would glow at night so to answer the question kind of anything that they want to do I will help them with but I'm not saying you must do tech stuff because their interests necessarily there I an Scot said Tommy is at least as smart as his dad yes he is so then wish asked what are you using for the 240 volt switching side of your home automation I will answer this question very briefly and then I'll cut it off because it's now heading towards two and a half hours so two different things I have sawn offs for things like power plugs things like control of my soldering iron and the the exhaust fan in here which I control through G Who Shall Not Be Named are done using some off s 55s so that's the little plug that you put into a power point and then you plug something into it and you can turn it on and off I really like those because they are portable and you can retrofit them to anything so if you've got like a bedside lamp and you want to make it controllable you just plug it in you know thirty seconds later you're ready to go the other part of it is my entire house has been rewired from scratch so I have centralized switching of my of all the loads in my house now what I'm going to do is drop a URL for a video that I did specifically about this that will help explain a bit more there is the oh wow how far back do I have to go is this the one yes okay so what I have is central switching of all the loads in the house and this particular episode explained how I did it and what I have is switchboards full of relays that turn things on and off so loads around the house like lights are not controlled by the switch on the wall they're controlled by the relay in the switchboard which then has the wire that runs all the way to the light cool all righty now I am going to cut it off there and I'm gonna try not to feel bad about it I want to keep talking about this stuff but know that I'm doing this regularly it's every every Sunday I'm doing a live stream that means I can cut it off at two hours and not feel bad because we'll be back we can answer more questions and talk about more things next time but what I'm going to do is drop a URL in here and if anyone wants to chat about stuff come and join discord and there are a whole bunch of people in there that are very happy to talk about these things and help you with your home automation projects or whatever it else is that you want to build one thing I will point out because this is true that's caught many people there is a permission thing in the discord where if you sign up for it you can't see all of the content until you go into the rules channel there is a post there with the rules and you have to give it a little thumbs up so click the thumbs up that other people have already done and the bots will then give you access to everything in the discord so when you first join it you might think it's empty there's nothing here and you can only say two channels once you accept the rules you'll see there are dozens and dozens of channels on all sorts of topics so come along and say hi so thank you very much for coming along to the live stream again and it is very cool to to have so many people here and answer questions and talk about stuff what I really want to do is get someone else maybe helping me in fact maybe next week I'll get Tom or Amelia to act as my producer and they can read our questions and change screens while I'm doing stuff so that is all for me sorry thank you very much see ya

Channel: SuperHouseTV

Views: 9,068

Rating: 4.817143 out of 5

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Id: yujuBAkYORw

Length: 141min 49sec (8509 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 25 2020