3 posts tagged with "calibration"

The new bench is 30 mm lower and half a metre shorter than the old one, and I did not think that mattered. I carried the Vertex 4 across the room, set it down, homed it, put the same board back on the plate and started the job. Every part landed about 2 mm to the left of its pads, all the way across the panel, and nothing in OpenPnP raised anything I would call an error.

Two millimetres is four 0402 widths. On a 300 mm panel it is also 0.38° of rotation across the whole board, and that second number is the one that eventually told me where to look.

The bottom camera is arguably the most important vision system on your desktop pick-and-place. It's what verifies that the component is correctly oriented on the nozzle before placement. Get the exposure wrong, and you're either blind to misaligned parts or drowning in false detections.

Most OpenPnP guides tell you to "adjust exposure until it looks right." That's not helpful. Here's what's actually happening and how to calibrate it properly.

Fiducial detection is the backbone of accurate placement. When OpenPnP can't find your board's fiducials, the entire assembly process stops. Before you blame the software, work through these five fixes in order—they resolve the vast majority of detection failures.