May 2025 Opulo Update
Hi everyone, and happy May! Here's your monthly Opulo update:
Lead Times
While we have managed to pull ahead a bit on our lead time internally, the past month's volume of orders has been overwhelming. It's been everything we can do to just keep it the same as what it was last month. Internally we're still shipping between a week to two weeks ahead of schedule, but we still keep the 4 week lead time listed as that's what we know we can guarantee.
Tariffs
As I'm sure many of you have been aware of over the past few weeks, the tariff situation in the United States has been extremely volatile. We've been doing everything we can to just keep production moving along as normal.
Many of you have been asking about if our pricing will change as a result of these tariffs. At the moment, we are not increasing the price of our flagship hardware. That being said, lots of the downstream effects of these policy changes have yet to fully hit us, so this might change. We're doing everything we can to keep the cost of our hardware as is and find other ways to absorb the fiscal burden of these new fees. We'll keep you updated as we start to feel the effects, but for now, we're able to keep our pricing the same.
We've also received lots of messages asking us to weigh in on how to handle these new challenges. We are actively navigating the situation as well, and will definitely be recording an OHM episode once things settle down a bit, but so far we've been focusing on buying lots of stock before tariffs come into effect and waiting for things to settle/be walked back. Many folks have been sharing their experience in the LumenPnP Discord server, so hop in there if you'd like to join the discussion.
Wide Feeders
We're really excited about the progress on the new wide feeder architecture! I published a video showing the new prototype on my channel, so you can check it out if you'd like more details!
Now that the general structure of the wide feeder is proven to be effective, I'm diving into lots of design cleanup and optimization. There's still some work to make the CAD be fully parametric for both 16mm and 24mm tapes, and the new controller PCBA needs more adjustments aside from just the layout change I gave it in the last spin-up. This is where the Ninety-Ninety Rule begins to take effect!
Docs Revamp is Live
Mitchel has published our new calibration docs overhaul, and we're incredibly excited at the result. The focus for this new pass is being explicit, and photos first.
Photos are always more useful than a text description. We've added dozens of new images, annotated OpenPnP screenshots, and GIFs showing all aspects of the calibration process.
Animation illustrating the purpose of nozzle tip calibration
GIF illustrating correct top camera pixels/mm calibration
As always, if you run into any confusion while following our docs page, please don't hesitate to reach out to us and we'll make whatever changes needed to clarify!
Workbench PCBA Factory
I've been spending some more time experimenting with using a fiber laser as a PCB fabrication machine, and have continued to have some pretty exciting results! Especially in the current tariff climate, getting fast and cheap prototype PCBs has been incredibly useful for us here at the office.
My most recent endeavor was doing a full production run of PCBAs using my fiber laser and the LumenPnP. From the time I was done with the design to having a dozen working PCBAs was 12 working hours (and I think it could be much lower with some process tuning!) And these boards have standard design requirements: each with a 0.5mm pitch TQFP microcontroller and all 0402 passives.
This Saturday I'll be posting a video showing how these tools used together can effectively turn your workshop into a micro factory for quick-turn prototyping.
This interactive panel was made in just a handful of hours, using only stock already in the Opulo office.
While recording this video I also filmed a whole job on the LumenPnP v4 with 0402 passives, which I know many folks have been asking for. This will be up on the Opulo YouTube channel shortly!
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