Comment by 15155 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 15155 | Hacker News Reader

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https://www.smallsmt.biz/products/

or any similar Shenzhen special. Buy bigger over smaller.

Buy, don't build. There will be a handful of recommendations for the Opulo Lumen/OpenPNP: avoid them. Avoid everything but ballscrew designs: you will spend an annoying amount of time trying to calibrate a belt-driven design and calibration will never stick.

Please, do not make the mistake I did: get something with CL feeders, make this investment. Drag feeders are not good - they are slow and the stylus will violently shake parts out of reels (or you'll spend time calibrating it to try and avoid this issue - don't waste the time.) Get something that can do 0201, even if you don't use it.

Ideally, get something that uses a separate, commodity host machine.

Thanks for that. Drag feeders are exactly the type of thing I would try first time around, because I'm not sure what I'd lneed.

I thought the entire plan of independence is building yourself and not buying at all.

Independence is having the knowledge, skills, equipment to do it yourself if you had to - not doing something just because.

I didn't build my vapor phase reflow oven, either.

I'm trying to solve my own problems, not craft a basic piece of equipment for bragging rights; I just don't have the kind of free time to have things not work perfectly.

That works, maybe, if you're a giant of indusrtry... Hyundai doesn't have to buy ram for its cars, it can build it.

But if you're small, you can't build most of what you need, and you should not build what you can buy that's better than whaf you can build, and you may as well buy things that you can build as good unless the cost to build is much less.

Sometimes it's fun to build things instead of buying them, and that'a ok. But if your goal is to do X, you're better off spending time on X than spending time building tools you could have bought. (Unless building the tools builds requisite knowledge)

There is no bright line on the DIY spectrum between that injection molder and making your own charcoal to refine iron.

I love building machines - enough so that I never build anything with them. Maybe someday I will, but by then 15155 will have built hundreds of things.

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