Hey folks, happy June! Check out all the stuff that's happened in the past month:
Lead Times
We're looking for more assembly techs to join the team! If you're in the Pittsburgh area and interested, please don't hesitate to apply! We've already brought some new folks on, and we expect our lead time will begin to drop in the coming weeks.
As always, the official lead time on each product's product page is the most accurate metric for when you'll see your hardware ship. There's a good chance we ship early; LumenPnPs are shipping quite a bit ahead of schedule, but we keep it where it is to ensure we're able to stick to our estimate.
Feeder Loading Station
It's here! The Feeder Loading Station is in the web store and ready to ship! 
We've gotten some great feedback from beta testers, and we're ready to get them out to y'all. And as always, the source is fully open.
We've had these around the office and they're incredibly handy to use. Quickly loading or unloading a feeder is so much easier when you don't need to use a slot on your LumenPnP to do it. We've also found it's super useful for prepping a new job while your machine is finishing up the last few boards of a previous design.
We have units in stock and ready to ship, so you can pick one up now!
16mm and 24mm Feeders
Production parts are in-house for 16mm and 24mm feeders, and we're gearing up for an imminent release.
Documentation has been written, firmware is being finalized, and full production has begun. Keep an eye out for an announcement soon!
Reel Holder
Production inventory of the Reel Holder is in house, and we're heading into production of units now. We're making some small adjustments to production jigs based on our PVT build to help make assembly go smoother, but otherwise we're off to the races on production.
This thing has made running the LumenPnP so much smoother. Reels having a dedicated location beneath the machine, and having their cassettes be individually removable, makes swapping reels so much easier.
Kitchen Sink PCB
Over the years, we've had many folks ask us all kinds of questions about how accurate, precise, and otherwise "good" the LumenPnP is at placing parts where they need to go. We can answer this with the resolution of the machine's stepper motion, or the smallest passive/pitch we can place successfully. While these answer most folks' questions, they also don't help us measure and compare vision and movement settings. And many folks don't use the LumenPnP to place electronic components, so they care about different metrics.
To solve this, we're playing around with some ideas to have a quantitative metric of placing success. Our first experiment is a "kitchen sink" board, which has a range of component placements, from high density BGA to 0201 passives. The placement success of these is quickly determined by a continuity check. But most interestingly, there's a custom footprint which is a circuit board implementation of Vernier Calipers.
With nothing more than some precise markings at varying pitches we can get 50 micron increments of measurement for placement accuracy, checked with the top camera of the machine itself.
We'd love some thoughts on some other ways of measuring and communicating machine performance! There's things like the IPC-9850A which is similar in trying to standardize and characterize pick and place performance, but we'd love to hear your thoughts on other ways this could be done.
Job Postings
Now that we're in our new space, we're spending a ton of time looking for folks to join our assembly team! If you're in the Pittsburgh area and want to help us build pick and place machines, please apply.
You can check out our careers page for all the details of the jobs we have available. If you or someone you know would be a good fit for any of these roles, please apply!
We're currently hiring for:
- Assembly Technician
- Helping us assemble LumenPnPs, feeders, and accessories in our Pittsburgh office.
- Customer Service Specialist
- Responding to customer inquiries, managing quotes, helping customers get up and running
- Responding to customer inquiries, managing quotes, helping customers get up and running
- Social Media Manager / Video Editor
- Maintaining a social media calendar, shooting, editing, and posting video for our Youtube and social media.
- Integration Engineer
- Full stack engineer comfortable with mechanical CAD, PCB design, software, and firmware. High agency, fast execution. Working on new projects.
Reach Out
If you have any feedback, questions, or comments about this update, please don't hesitate to reach out to us here.
Thanks, and we'll see you next month!
-Stephen