Neoden YY1 - Pick & Place Machine

The YY1 landed in my work space almost a month now. It has greatly helped, having previously hand-placed 1000s of boards each having 100+ components. Did a lot of research and was very familiar with a few machines before choosing this one. I'm happy w/ this one given there are no perfect desktop PnPs off-the-shelf. I wanted to get up-and-running quickly w/ easier interface, without customizing or 3-d printing parts or open source coding. Quality and construction is surprising. A survival kit including tools and spares is provided to help fine tune three rascal peelers - not bad since I'm currently using 25 of them. The Edit Fiducial parameter setting gave very unpredictable results. My workaround was to just delete the fiducial and work from board origin 0,0. That way I can preview the placements in component settings - and if something is off I adjust the board origin in the parameters...so do this very carefully not to mess up any other global settings. Now I'm placing 0805 and 1206 with decent accuracy, predictable results, repeatability and very few mis-picks/placements, and speed at 80%. The camera, displays, and touch screen always keep me in touch w/ what is going on. Had the system hang a couple of times, but only because I had unexpected data in the CSV file - the assigned head number isn't supposed to be 90 degrees haha. Put in the effort and time to dial things in, learn which settings work best for you in your environment, and you'll have a rewarding and productive experience w/ this machine. Looking forward to the YY1 helping me w/ my runs during this time while I continue to grow my small business.

Starting with packaging, the YY1 comes well packaged surrounded by form fitting closed cell foam. While the outer carton had a sizable puncture the machine inside was undamaged. The hole placement was just right to hit the main screen but fortunately a rather sturdy plastic cover was zip-tied over the display and prevented any damage that might have occurred otherwise. Cut a few zip-ties, raise the shroud frame, and bolt on the peeler rails and the unit is ready to be loaded with components and set up for it's first run. After unboxing the YY1 and setting it up, I got right to work loading up the feeders and learning about the shortcoming that is the tape peeler mechanism. While functional, it can be quite fiddly to get the friction rings just right for each tape. While paper tapes tend to function with the default friction rings, I found that most 8mm plastic tapes needed the lower value friction rings and even then could use a "warm-up" where after replacing the friction ring with a lower value I would have to manually twist the pulley on the rail a few times to "break the seal" and get the tape to stop feeding while peeling the tape. Every time I leave the machine idle for more than two hours I find it best to repeat the process of manually twisting each pulley before starting another batch of boards. This is my one and only complaint about the machine. When you consider that the peeler mechanism is the biggest reason this machine can be offered at such a competitive price though, it is well worth the minor inconvenience. Once the feeders are dialed in and you've got a board programmed, this machine does wonders for a low volume board shop. Where I was spending roughly 15 minutes per board with the tweezers prior to picking up the YY1, the YY1 cranks out each board in just shy of three minutes at the default 70% speed. Just enough time for me to feed a board into the reflow oven, inspect the last board to come out of the oven, and paste the next board just in time for the YY1 to finish the board it's working on. Overall I am very satisfied with the performance of the YY1 and it is saving me between 10-20 hours of manual labor per week. The only thing I might recommend is for Neoden to offer a third value of friction ring for the peelers that provides about 75-80% of the friction of the current smallest ring. That might be just right for my problematic 8mm plastic tapes.