SMT550 details...

[John Plocher]

Matthew Odinotski,

Your corporate email has an incoming filter that is rejecting my direct messages - so I'm posting here...

TL;DR - the YX SMT550 (HGC design...) is a well designed and robust 3k-5k CPH hardware platform coupled with surprisingly functional - but not terribly inspired or easy to learn - software.  At about $US 10k, it is significantly better than anything in the $5k price range; the competition in that price range all have what appears to be the same high quality hardware and the same low quality software :-(  

How are the motors controlled/connected to the PC?

The PC (runs pirated chinese XP...) has I/O cards that connect to the hardware, cameras etc

The SW is in .Net, and can be decompiled (I haven't - not enough hours in the day to become a windows .Net decompiling expert, too...)

There is a HW interface .Net library in the app that controls the hardware, which can be reused; someone on eeevblog has done some work in that area.

Do the cameras (up looking / down looking) have good resolution?

The downlooking camera has sufficient resolution, depth and field of view, but not high resolution.   Sufficient to align, identify pads etc, but not enough to reliably read the markings on 0603, if that helps.  The uplooking cameras are very fast and sharp - both the small and large ones.

Do you have a tool changer on your machine?

no - not really practical.  It is easy to segment a job into phases and rerun a board after changing tips - but with 4x (or 6 or 8...) heads there is little reason to do so. 

  -John