If you're choosing between a desktop pick-and-place and a used industrial unit, the marketing materials don't tell you what actually matters. This is the honest decision matrix, written from inside both worlds.
The first question every hardware founder asks before buying a desktop pick-and-place: will this thing actually handle my boards? This post lays out the real envelope, the edge cases, and the failure modes we see in the field.
If OpenPnP can't find your PCB fiducials, the entire job halts. After running PikkoBot machines through hundreds of boards, these are the five fixes that resolve nearly every "fiducial not found" error.
This is where we'll share field notes from running PikkoBot machines: real builds, calibration tricks, feeder firmware tweaks, and case studies from users.