Samsung, eh? The SM482 is really just a ripoff of Apple’s iSM, only with cheaper components. Look at the clumsy exposed screws on the dull beige sheet metal, compared to the iSM’s silky-smooth anodized titanium shroud.
I think it goes bing…
Everyone loves their pick and place machines. Sure beats doing it by hand.
481, 482, whatever it takes…
Getting a new pick and place machine would make anyone happy. I’m stuck with tweezers and a microscope.
It’s a component placer able to place nearly 30k components per hour. Snazzy!
Just look at it…
Oh, wait, wrong thread. Nvrmd
I was just imagining the text of this article with the pictures of the sex machines from earlier…
To translate from those of you who know to those of you who don’t, that machine automatically puts circuit bits onto circuit boards.
Whatever that is, it is clearly an excellent one of those.
ELI5: You stuff resistors and wires in the machine and then it makes some sort of circuit board like a raspberry pi?
What does such a machine cost?
The SM482 is better than the SM481. How much better? One more better.
Pretty much. The components are all on strips, which you can see as reels on the front of the machine.
As for how much it costs, five minutes of searching couldn’t tell me, so I suspect it a case of ‘if you have to ask…’
Pick-n-place electronic-bits vs poke-n-stroke naughty-bits – rule 34 dictates that there is likely an overlap somewhere…
I actually made a homebrew pnp machine back in the mid-90s. It was tailored to memory modules, and had a production rate of 12 modules per hour on a good day! Mostly cobbled together with scrap I had already, plus pneumatics filched from a Burroughs tape unit I got from a scrapper for $100. Ran off the parallel port of an old XT.
A more thorough description:
A circuit board starts out as a piece of fiberglass with two or more layers of copper, finely patterned into connecting lines and "pads, places to solder parts to it. The parts are little rectangles that need to be soldered to the pads in order to build a working circuit. This machine picks the parts from their factory-supplied carriers, which look just like movie film, and places them on the pads on the circuit boards.
Before this happens, the circuit board has solder applied to it in paste form using a stencil. After the placement step, the board is carried through an oven on a conveyer belt (like a fast-food-restaurant pizza oven) to melt the solder and connect the parts to the board.
The cost of this machine is easily six figures. Maybe seven, new.
Pick and place machines like this one costs $200,000 - more or less depending on options and accessories.
If you are on a tighter budget, options may exist: http://www.geek.com/chips/4000-pick-and-place-machine-makes-custom-circuit-boards-on-the-cheap-1536883/
That’s pretty awesome - if only because it shows that Adafruit is a viable business. (I guess) I’d be interested to see their books - how does their cashflow work? $200K for an outfit targeting hobbyists is impressive.
I hope the machine serves them well. The hobby industry can be a hard road, especially in technical fields (no matter how non technical you make it). I’m just going to leave this here. 
