...
If the industry has its act together enough to make that fully
automated, I'd be surprised and pleased. I think that small-quantity
prototype assembly doesn't even bother with all that and uses
manually-guided pick and place machines. Those would presumably zoom
to the coordinates provided in the xy file but then the operator
finishes the job with a joystick.
Very often they use a vision system that can detect the package boundary and sometimes the pins locations as well. As someone mentioned earlier, the placement origin is usually the part centroid. When the part is not symmetric (
e.g. D-PAK) then manual intervention is more likely.
Boards that we have had built lately (in runs of 4 to ~ 100) were done in a time frame that would have been impossible if the precess were not mostly automated.
Joe T
I will know early next year what it takes to actually go beyond the
quoting step.
...
--
Randall