Towards Solderless PCB Prototyping

When we think of assembling a PCB, we’re almost always thinking about solder. Whether in paste form or on the spool, hand-iron or reflow, some molten metal is usually in the cards. [Stephen Hawes] …

OpenMV Promises “Flyby” Imaging Of Components For Pick And Place Project

[iforce2d] has an interesting video exploring whether the OpenMV H7 board is viable as a flyby camera for pick and place, able to quickly snap a shot of a moving part instead of requiring the part …

Brick-Laying Machine Builds Without Mortar

Move over, 3D printed houses. There’s a new game in town, and it is able to use standard concrete blocks to build the walls of a house in just one day. Australian company FBR’s Hadrian …

Hackaday Prize 2023: Circuit Scout Lends A Hand (Or Two) For Troubleshooting

Troubleshooting a circuit is easy, right? All you need is a couple of hands to hold the probes, another hand to twiddle the knobs, a pair of eyes to look at the schematic, another pair to look at t…

Pixel Pump, The Open Source Vacuum Pickup Tool Is Now Shipping

The Pixel Pump is an open source manual pick & place assist tool by [Robin Reiter], and after a long road to completion, it’s ready to ship. We first saw the Pixel Pump project as an entr…

Tour A PCB Assembly Line From Your Armchair

Those of us who build our own electronics should have some idea of the process used to assemble modern surface-mount printed circuit boards. Whether we hand-solder, apply paste with a syringe, use …

An RP2040 Powered Pick And Place

Pick and place machines are a wonder to behold, as they delicately and accurately place part after part. Unfortunately, they have to have a similarly wondrous price tag. Luckily, they aren’t …

A Vacuum Pick Up Tool For Not A Lot

When working with grain-of-dust surface-mount components, one of the tools which makes a huge difference is a vacuum pickup pen. Instead of trying to move the part with tweezers and succeeding only…

(Re)designing The LumenPnP Tape Feeder

Many of the hardware orientated hackers among us will likely have been following along with the story of [Stephen Hawes] and the Lumen pick-and-place project but kind of waiting a bit for the proje…

Hackaday Prize 2022: Salvaged Pumps And Hoses Make A Neat Vacuum Pickup Tool

Anyone who’s ever assembled a PCB full of tiny SMD parts will have found that tweezers are not always the best tool when it comes to accurate positioning. Thin, flat components like microcont…

Pick And Place Hack Chat Reveals Assembly Secrets

These days we’ve got powerful free tools to do CAD and circuit design, cheap desktop 3D printers that can knock out bespoke enclosures, and convenient services that will spin up a stack of yo…

Pick And Place Hack Chat

Join us on Wednesday, February 9 at noon Pacific for the Pick and Place Hack Chat with Chris Denney! We in the hacker trade are pretty used to miracles — we make them all the time. But even t…

Angel Investor Gives Open Source PnP A Massive Boost

We love it when an Open Source hardware project grows up and turns into a sustainable business, bootstrapped with nothing but hard work and great ideas, but it’s a really tough prospect to do…

Pixel Pump Pick & Place Positions Parts Precisely

You’ve finally decided to take the plunge and build a board with surface-mount parts. After carefully dispensing the solder paste with a syringe, it’s time to place the parts. You take …

The Man-Machine

This week we saw a couple DIY tools for small-run manufacturing at home that help make your life easier if you’re climbing out of the happy bucket and into the pit of despair — when you…

PnPAssist: A “Smart” Build Platform For Manual PCB Assembly

Open source pick and place machines have come a long way in the past years, but are not necessarily worth the setup time and machine cost if you are only building a few PCBs at a time. [Nuri Ergine…