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PCBs made in America. Twice as fast as Shenzhen.
Today @CircuitHub is unveiling The Grid, our factory-scale robot in Massachusetts that builds circuit boards on demand.
No changeovers, no per-design setup. Prototypes and production batches, fully automated.
I saw there was a recent auction in GA but sold "as is where is"
Gonna have to keep an eye out for something in CA/AZ, those are pretty sweet prices. I'd probably use a couple for dumb stuff and harvest the rest.
They are pretty tidy but the spindle power is laughable (1/4 HP IIRC)
Very full featured for a desktop unit though. Now when I see mills without a tool setter and probe I get the ick 🤣
I like it! It's able to do PCB milling, and take some pretty decent cuts into aluminum if you have a good workholding setup. I use the SMW fixture plate and modular vise
xitter.cf/timbot/status/20256820…
I started cooking up something else - CNC setup, control, and monitoring with a human-friendly web UI and a headless agent-ready CLI/API. Initially targeting the Carvera Air (pictured, with SMW fixture plate and mod vise v3).
VelocityPnP: pick and place software for @OpuloInc machines that's actually fun to use. Designed for headless/agentic operation but it has a nice web UI as well.
Will be releasing on github (Apache 2.0 license) next week. HMU if you have a LumenPnP v3.1 or v4.0 and are interested in being a guinea pig.
It was rough going initially but turned out pretty nice!
I'll bring a robot up to AMR at some point over the next couple months and we'll see how it does on a shop 10x the size
I'll take a look!
From what I hear, @maticrobots / @mehul are next-level on this sort of thing. Custom software stack on (what looks like?) proper local NVidia compute and probably a nicely dialed in camera system.
My setup used a Pi4 + OAK-D lite + offline (DGX) compute. Not good enough for real-time!
This video is a "fly-around" inside a gaussian splat model of my shop.
It took a lot of tokens to dial in all the params and settings, but after two weeks and many tokens we've arrived at a usable/useful shop model. It takes ~8 hours to "train" this model on my Spark DGX.
The captures were taken on a Turtlebot4, which is based on the Roomba i3 series, but adds lidar and depth camera. Not bad for a vacuum cleaner.