At 02:23 PM 2/13/2015, Isaac Marino Bavaresco wrote: >A friend of mine owns a TM240A, its smaller sibling is the TM220A. Those >machines were very common an AliExpress some months ago but now they >simply disappeared from there and can be found only at >. > >I have the same opinion as yours, to me simply there are not enough >feeders. The manufacturer could put feeders on at least three of the >four sides of the machine for very little cost. Actually, I think that you could put feeders on the sides only. The=20 pickup head just can't get good access to the back of the=20 machine. But: that would double the number of feeders, which would=20 most likely suit my needs. >The feeder arrangement is also totally inflexible, with just a fixed >number of 8mm, 12mm and 16mm feeders, without the possibility of >replacing some of them for a different width. Yep. That's part of the price paid for low cost. Think of it this=20 way: this whole machine cost maybe as much as 6 to 10 feeders for a=20 'real' machine. Proper feeders are *expensive*. >The maximum height for the parts is also around 4mm, which severely >restricts the range of components it can place. Yep. But it handles most of the components that *I* need. >The machine also cannot pick parts from a tray on top of the table, it >can only pick loose parts from some bins of fixed size in its front >side, you must keep filling the bin with parts by hand. Yep. Those trays are good for things like TQFP packages and=20 such. Note that the machine is smart enough to know that it needs to=20 advance to the next compartment every time it grabs a part. I don't=20 know how it behaves after it has taken the part out of the last=20 compartment - I haven't needed to find out. >All those limitations allow the machine to be used just for very simple >jobs, it should have support for at least 80 feeders of flexible widths >of up to 44mm (SD-Card slot). It all comes down to cost. I think that these guys were trying to do=20 the usual "please 90% of the people 90% of the time. In my opinion,=20 they hit the mark pretty close. If I was doing mostly digital designs, I'm pretty sure that I'd have=20 a lot of empty feeders on my machine. dwayne --=20 Dwayne Reid Trinity Electronics Systems Ltd Edmonton, AB, CANADA (780) 489-3199 voice (780) 487-6397 fax www.trinity-electronics.com Custom Electronics Design and Manufacturing --=20 http://www.piclist.com/techref/piclist PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist .