Homebrew PCBs

you can use a medical needle with a small piece of silicon, or buy a 
manual SMT vacume pick tool for the tube and typicaly 3 different 
size suction cup. 
  the main thing is to make a Selenoid needle valve to run the 
vacuum on = "pick " and Vacume Off = "place"  operation. 

for very high desnity parts like BGA , send it to advance Assembly, 
they have a SMT Proto special.

BoonS


--- In Homebrew_PCBs@yahoogroups.com, Henry Liu <henryjliu@...> 
wrote:
>
> 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).
> 
> 
> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
>