Hey folks, happy October! Here's what happened at Opulo last month:
Lead Times
Our production team has been hard at work, reducing our lead times for LumenPnPs and feeders down to 3 weeks. We're continuing to make progress on this, and should be able to bring it down to 2 weeks very soon.
The official lead time on each product's page is the most accurate metric for when your hardware will ship. While we are working hard to ship products early, we suggest relying on the information posted on our website to play it safe.
LumenPnP v4.2
Just a few days ago, we announced v4.2 of the LumenPnP!
There are a ton of wonderful improvements in this version. For existing LumenPnP customers who would like to take advantage of these updates, we have a LumenPnP 4.2 upgrade kit available on our website.
All previous versions of the LumenPnP required a wing nut to be tightened underneath one of the plates. With v4, we cleared out the bottom of the staging plate, which helped with this, but it wasn't enough.
The best solve to this issue is a steel staging plate with an array of tapped holes instead of through holes, meaning you can mount everything from the top. Every once in a while, we would get a quote for these plates, just to see what it would cost. If we made the change, we wanted to do it without raising the price of the machine. A few months ago, we got a really excellent quote, and the cost of our current plates increased sufficiently that it made a lot of sense to make the switch.
While we were updating the staging plate, we also incorporated another piece of feedback: the camera often feels like it's in the way. Often, customers have a board that technically fits in the machine's work area, but the camera being front and center prevents it from fitting.
The original thought behind the camera's placement was to reduce the amount of motion required to get from any feeder slot to the camera. While this might technically be true, it's a small time savings in comparison to just placing more frequently used parts closer to the camera. Also, folks using the LumenPnP care a lot more about even being able to populate their board, over a few seconds of time savings.
We also wanted to make calibration easier. In v4.1, we started supporting a new calibration process in OpenPnP that uses a paper hole punch. This technique results in a nice, automatic way to do nozzle offset calibration. But doing the hole punching has been finicky, and they're not as consistent as we'd like.
We decided to solve this using a method we love here: using a PCB in a weird way. If we could replicate a hole punch using a very thin PCB with a large fiducial, we should get much more consistent results. So we got it made!
When testing, we had some issues with failing to pick the token. This was because the token and datum board were so perfectly flat, there was no channel for air to rush between them when it was lifted up. This is a similar effect to breaking a ruler with just a piece of paper laying over half of it.
We solved this by adding a very slight waffle texture on the bottom of the token using the silkscreen and copper layers! This allows air to easily flow under the token while it's being lifted.
There's a ton of improvements to this version, and they're all based heavily on feedback from you all. Thank you, as always, for all the notes, and for helping us make the LumenPnP even better.
Paste Extruder
Our v2 Paste Extruder is coming along very well. Our summer intern, Jerome, did an exceptional job on this revamp. We've begun sourcing components and have a first pass of documentation complete. 
Curiosity got the best of us, and yes, it does work super well for decorating cookies as well.
We're gearing up for a launch on this very soon, so keep an eye out for more information!
Injection Molding
3D printing the majority of our parts on our print farm since we starting making hardware. This has worked exceptionally well for scaling up, as we've grown, and being able to make super rapid changes on the production line.
But with some parts, there isn't much else to tweak, and printing is not the most time effective way to make them.
We're currently in the process of assessing which parts take up the most time on our print farm, are unchanging, and would benefit the most from the injection molding process. We're hoping to have a T0 trial mold cut by the time we're in China in the next few months, so we can see the mold and test fit parts right there on the production line.
There's a ton to learn with designing parts for injection molding, especially coming from designing for 3D printing. We're really excited to dive into this process. And, of course, we'll maintain printable versions of all our parts for customers that want to build our hardware at home.
Job Postings
Opulo is growing quickly and we’re adding more people to our team.
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:
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Assembly Technician
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Helping us assemble LumenPnPs, feeders, and accessories in our Pittsburgh office.
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Customer Service Specialist
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Responding to customer inquiries, managing quotes, helping customers get up and running
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Mechatronics Engineer
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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 at support.opulo.io.
That’s all for now. We’ll be back next month with another update!