Homebrew PCBs

I've grown lazy and outsource everything it seems these days.

I've found silvercircuits.com can make a doublesided board for $54 shipped
which is way cheaper than I can do it.  By the time I run everything and
clean it up it has taken at least two hours extra over just emailing the PCB
files over to silver circuits.  I figure my free time is worth at least
$25/hr.

I still haven't found a good solution to assembly however.  I was thinking
of trying to find some college student to assemble my fine SMT parts but
haven't had any luck.

So I thought it'd be useful to make my own pick and place machine.

I'm lucky and have several XYZ tables accurate to .001" or so that I picked
up off ebay for under $1000 and control it with Labview.  The last thing I
need a good repeatable way of vacuum gripping these chips and tiny
resistors.

Any suggestions?  Thanks.
Also, my life is so much better now that I moved to Labview FPGA and a
PCI-7833R board.  No more microcontrollers except premade boards like a
wireless one TI RF2500 (complete with battery pack).


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