Andy,
Thanks for the feedback!
The idea is that no components would be placed by the SMT machine besides the standard 50+ components found in the common library. Given this would be hugely limiting but I think it would provide enough basic building blocks for most hobbyists - my boards seem to have about 12 parts common to all of them and those parts cover about 95% of the parts used. The $1 (or whatever the price worked out to be) per part was for hand placement of those parts that the customer needs to send in. The 50+ common parts would have a library (Eagle and maybe KiCad) for the customer to use in their design, this would ensure common footprints. Evolved from the adafruit discussion - I’m wondering if accepting Eagle Board files and using a custom ULP to get the XY data for those parts might alleviate some of the placing errors (plugins for KiCad and others to be developed if it worked).
Solder paste could go stencil (we have a laser cutter and mylar is not too expensive) or paste dispensing (though I fear that isn’t accurate enough).
Placement errors certainly could be the death of a project like this - for it to work we’d have to be able to reasonably accurately calibrate and run the machine off a combo of XY data, vision, and fiducials (which would be at the corners of each panel). That is the big one, admittedly, whether we can write custom software and get an accurate enough machine to accomplish that.
I currently solder all my SMTs by hand, including 0402s and fine pitch, but it sure would speed up my development process if I didn’t have to hand solder all my prototypes, and that’s where this idea comes from.
Thanks again for the feedback, I certainly here that this would be quite a task to accomplish - I’m thinking I might use production of some of my boards to justify the PnP purchase and go from there trying to make something like this work.