7 posts tagged with "guide"

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?

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.

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.

Your solenoid valve won't open. The nozzle has no vacuum. You can't pick up components. Before you spend an hour debugging, check this: the GPIO pin mapping in OpenPnP doesn't match your actual wiring.

That's the answer 80% of the time. Here's the 60-second diagnostic and the full troubleshooting flow.

Every hardware startup faces the same question: do you buy a desktop pick-and-place or invest in an industrial machine? The answer depends on where you are now and where you're heading. Here's an honest comparison with real numbers, not marketing copy.

One of the most common questions about desktop pick-and-place machines is: "What component sizes can it actually handle?" The answer depends on the machine, the nozzle, the vacuum system, and your patience. Here's a comprehensive breakdown with practical guidance.

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.