hand assembly of Moteinos

[jbeale]

Just saw your Youtube video showing hand pick-and-place of some Moteinos, which was impressive. But if you have enough volume to do something like that even a few times, it may be worth considering something like seeedstudio.com for your assembly and fulfillment. (Or not- I haven't done anything like that myself.)

And on the other hand, I really enjoyed getting my new Moteinos in just a few days, vs. a longer wait for overseas shipping.

and perhaps the market is not large enough, otherwise some Shenzen-sourced copies would be on ebay already.

[Felix]

Yeah, the market is not that large. I still can fulfill it myself. I would prefer not to deal with seed or chinese manufacturing. These boards need love and a special touch

The manual PNP is quite effective as I mentioned before... It literally cost about $20 and 1 hour of assembly and I've assembled countless PCBs with it already.
I've seen a lot of CNC based pick and place attempts. Various people are trying to make their own PNPs, with various degrees of success, a lot of projects are in the [can do one thing ut not much else] phase...
But looking at their videos and demos of the machines, i'm surprised how slow they all seem to be. With my hand tool I can place components significantly faster. The only downside is that my time is needed.

For instance, look at this *commercial* kit PNP called Red Frog, it looks hopelessly slow to me: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVlad7l9HvI
You got to change the nozzle manually and build the thing yourself so infinite chances to screw up there, has some kind of vision but I don't think true vision, is HUGE, plus it's $3700 + shipping... and this is just an example.
Here's an overview on that: http://www.circuitsathome.com/production/neoden-tm240a-pick-and-place-machine-first-impressions

Oh and I don't even want to go into "manual" commercial machines ... completely hopeless.

The only thing I came to think could really be effective are the chinese TM220A/240A machines, which i've researched a bit and though they got no vision, they can do a decent job and the price is not bad, around $4k-5k delivered.