G'day, welcome back to the factory. This week we are servicing Nadine, the pick and place machine. The manufacturer sent us an air hose upgrade kit to install as a bit of preventative maintenance, and I thought it would be a nice opportunity to take a look at what else goes on inside the gantry cover. Let's get started.

The part we're replacing is this y-shaped tubing that connects to the nozzle, and my best guess is that one end connects to a vacuum supply or a solenoid that switches the low pressure, and the other end connects to a solenoid that releases the vacuum. And then, of course, the common end goes down to the nozzle effector.

First up, remove the cover. The tubes are bundled with some control wires, so I'll need to separate those first. The wires control the stepper motors that handle nozzle rotation, and there's a fair bit going on here. At first glance, from top to bottom, it looks like there are some motor drivers and a bank of solenoids. Behind the tubes, I can see some tension springs as well as some timing pulleys. I expect the eight gray cylinders that come off the short section of tubing are inline filters for the vacuum release lines.

Pulling the tubes off these barbs takes a little bit of force. The servicing instructions don't provide a preferred method for removing these tubes, so I'll just have to trust that this is the intended way.

Next, I'm installing the new tubing. I found it easiest to isolate the tubing and preload the zip tie, then slide it down to the barb for final tightening. The spiral wrap goes on to complete the upgrade. All that remains is to check the nozzles operate correctly and recalibrate.

For now, let's take a closer look at what goes on inside the gantry. We're looking side on at nozzle...One, if I raise and lower the nozzle, you can see a timing belt in the back there, which is responsible for moving the nozzle up and down. So I thought this was quite interesting because that means that we have eight independently controllable, basically little mini gantries. These are all individual axes with timing belts to control them. And if I pull that down, you can just see the makings of a spring here to help it return.

If we follow the air tube down into this block, this must be the interface for the air to come to the nozzle. And so, I can see a sealed bearing up at the top here. And if I rotate the nozzle, perhaps you can see that shaft rotating at the top there. So there must be some kind of bearing air seal in here to allow a good seal for the air in this tube.

There are four wires here, just for this little stepper motor that handles the rotation. Getting extremely handheld now, we have our stepper motor wire and our air tube coming up together in this loom. And they hit a little tee where the wire comes off, tees off, and the air tube forks and goes to these two tubes. So one of these must be to draw a vacuum and one must be to release the vacuum.

You can see up here at the air block, we have a right angle going into one air solenoid and going into another air solenoid. And these are each individually controlled on this control board. Let's get a closer look at that. All our connections along the top here, so we have the stepper motors that handle the nozzle rotation. And then these are all the air solenoid control wires, and it looks like they're 24 volts. We're on a conformal coated board, and those are probably just Darlington driver ICs or something.Like that. We've got two keystone jacks, two ethernet jacks coming down one to each camera so we have these two going down to each camera. Quite interesting to see here we have some large electrolytic caps just sticking straight out of the board. That is, I mean this this thing handles quite a lot of vibration, quite a lot of very rapid movements back and forth so it's interesting to see those electrolytic caps just flapping in the breeze as Dave Jones might say.

Let's take a peek down into the guts. Hopefully you can see that with my with my phone light we have a rack of four stepper motors visible. That leftmost stepper motor on the top we can see there's one just beneath it and to the left so there must be a second row of four steppers just below to give us our eight nozzle control, eight independent nozzles back down at the gantry and this is the probe that extends to stop the panel in its tracks. You've probably seen this in other videos. I can feel that's a spring-loaded probe and there's the air control for that guy coming out the top to our extra air solenoid and interestingly I can see in the back here just tucked away behind that solenoid there's a little load cell so this must be how the probe can detect when a PCB has touched it.

So the probe goes down, the belts roll forward and the PCB hits the probe. That hit is registered by the load cell and that's how the machine knows when to stop the belts and the panel is in position. And there you have it a closer look at the inner workings of Nadine our pick and place machine.

In other factory news we've run our first production of PiicoDev pressure sensors so expect to see these up on the Core Electronics website later this week and as always if you have any questions or need assistance, feel free to reach out to us. If you have any questions or suggestions or just want to see something a little bit closer, head over to the Core Electronics forums and we'll see you there. Until next time, thanks for watching.