I noticed on your latest video you talked briefly about your HK-4D2Y based soldering robot, but you didnt get into allot of details. I have acquired 2 of these robots and I am trying to fine tune their settings. Can you share with me your solder point parameters? Also, I noticed you are not using the shaker setting of moving forward to push into the through hole lead. Is there is reason for that? Finally, I also noticed you are not using the drag soldering method in what would seem almost an ideal setting. Was this due to bridging?
Any comments would be very much appreciated!
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Hi Thomas,
We’re wrapped with ours - they have produced hundreds of parts already. In our #TheFactory videos we don’t get into the nitty-gritty for production configurations as everything is job-specific. The learning curve has been steep and the best advice I can give is to observe, adjust, repeat. The only thing you can be sure of is it’s a repeatable process, and a failure is likely due to a misconfiguration (pin profile) or preparation (jig alignment, solder loading, etc).
Re drag soldering - we ruled it out for Pico’s as some pins are connected to ground planes (and require a lot more heat than others).
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Thanks! I very much appreciate the advice.
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I now have both machines up and running pretty well now. I really like the HK-4D2Y. It has a few bugs, but their manageable.
After watching your video again, something you might want to think about on your “running into pins” problem. There is a workfile setting at the top of the macro called “contact action set”. It is specifies the height, distance, and speed to complete a dot solder pin contact operation. For whatever reason they do not appear to document this setting in the HK-4D2Y manual. They use a default setting of 1mm distance, but for pins like you have, you probably want it more to 2mm or 3mm. This will prevent striking the pin, but also provide adequate pressure on the pin during the soldering operation. The spring on the head assembly is designed to provide the back pressure so that you dont sheer off the pin or damage the soldering head. Using this will prevent you from having to redesign solder pads, which for industrial EEs like myself, is not a realistic option because most of my designs are already existing.
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Thanks for letting us know @Thomas196334 - we haven’t come across this before but we’ll take a look! The video you’re referring to is already a bit dated and we’ve learned a bunch since then, but every little bit of understanding helps… Especially for the undocumented features!
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Your welcome! Let me know if I can help you. I have over 20 years in industrial pcb design and manufacturing experience, so I have a little advantage over you in previous experience with most of these robots. I’m very familiar with the Japanese soldering robots, but this was my first experience with the lower cost Chinese HK-4D2Y controllers. I had to reflow one of the controller boards and replace their irons, but otherwise both were fully functional. Their great little robots. Both are now running in production. No soldering pad changes required.
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