4 posts tagged with "feeders"

Most of the tape on my bench never came on a reel. A hundred 0805 resistors arrive as a foot of tape in an antistatic bag; five thousand of the same part arrive in a sealed foil bag with a desiccant sachet and a card printed with three dots. The two are stored and loaded differently, and getting it wrong costs parts rather than time.

I keep three things next to the Vertex 4 for this: a flush cutter, a roll of splice tape, and a marker. Here is what each one is for.

Four OpenPnP feeder classes cover parts that never came on a reel: tray, tube, loose part and heap. I set all four up on the staging plate of our Vertex 4 to see what each one does with a JST housing, a buck module and the odd 0402 that ends up on the floor mid-run.

If you've been sourcing PCB assemblies in 2026, you've felt the squeeze. Lead times that used to be 4-6 weeks are now stretching to 16-26 weeks. Assembly house pricing has climbed 20-40% since last year, and minimum order quantities are creeping upward as shops prioritize larger clients.

The root cause is familiar: component shortages continue to ripple through the supply chain, and the assembly houses that survived the 2024-2025 crunch are now capacity-constrained. They're cherry-picking jobs, and small-batch prototyping runs are the first to get deprioritized.

For hardware startups and small teams, this creates a strategic question worth answering: is it time to bring SMT assembly in-house?

Photon feeders use UUIDs (Universally Unique Identifiers) to communicate with OpenPnP. This is generally reliable, but it creates a specific class of problems when feeders share IDs, get reassigned, or conflict with each other. If you've ever seen OpenPnP detect the wrong feeder or fail to recognize a feeder that's physically connected, UUID conflicts are the likely culprit.

Here's what's happening under the hood and how to fix it.