Looks absolutely amazing, just the pricetag of 500$ seems a bit steep. To be fair though, people buying this probably assemble/sell a ton of PCBs so they can recoup that cost fairly easily. As a hobbyist it's sadly too expensive.
You can make it yourself - all the parts and boards are on GitHub (so also a group buy for assembled boards is an option). I couldn't find a BOM cost estimate though and I guess it'd be $1-200 from scratch, plus things like custom buttons.
Probably a lot less. One can effectively use a small aquarium blowing pump by connecting the sucking tube to the air intake instead of the output, and they're cheap, like 10 bucks each. The electronics would be trivial, and the switch could either act on a solenoid valve (less than 10 quid) or be a small hole in the side of the tube so that closing it with a finger would let all air in through the end of the tube.
Heh, looks better built than our "pyramid of power" professional SMT vacuum pick! I forget what the new price is but it had to have been close. To make it worse, when you order replacement tips there's a minimum of $100 on the order!
The alternative is tweezers. There's a few really annoying problems:
It's very easy to squeeze a bit too hard or not quite get the grip right and the part will ping off and you'll never find it.
If the tweezers get a bit of solder paste on them the components start to stick so you can't let go of them.
It's really hard to get the components out of the tape - so you tend to have to tip them out and then they are upside down so you need to flip them over. Which is really hard with tiny components and again you often lose them.
For larger components (e.g. MCUs) its quite hard to pick them up in a way that is easy to place with tweezers.
To add a little to the existing replies. When you buy surface mount parts, they normally come on tapes - little plastic/cardboard strips with indents that the components sit in and a film over the top. These tapes are sold as reels if you need lots of units, but most hobbyists buy "cut tape" which the big distributors offer.
In a production setup, the pick and place machine accepts the reels and uses a vacuum tool to pick the parts up. It knows the orientation of the part in the tape (which is fixed) and where it needs to go on the board. Often components with irregular tops (usb connectors for example) will have small piece of kapton tape fixed to them to aid pickup. This is important: if you're doing this with tweezers, it's often annoying to pick the parts out of the tape and if you dump on the table you usually have to flip things the right way up, rotate them, etc. So a vacuum tool makes that a lot easier.
Small pens already exist and so do diy options like aquarium pumps, but this is a really polished looking project and great if it's open source too.
I once replaced a faulty SMD fuse on a laptop motherboard; I used tweezers and a microscope. Could I have done such a repair with a pick and place theoretically?
This is used for circuit assembly indeed. The vaccum is used to pick a small component from a tray and place it on the PCB at the right place. As the components are so small nowadays the small tip of the nozzle helps where human hand would be to big.
Nice. I have a manual tool for this, with a little squeeze bulb, but it's not reliable.[1] You'd think there would be some $5 tool that runs on an AAA battery, but apparently not.
There's fish tank pumps that can be easily adapted and work great. You use a luer fitting to attach the vacuum tips. From there you can add extras, like pass the tubing through a pen and epoxy the luer to the end of the pen. A foot pedal operated solenoid can be added that opens the line to ambient pressure to release vacuum and drop the part.
I can’t even tell if you’re being sarcastic, but exactly what you describe does exist [1]. They work OK, but they are a little heavy in the hand for fine placement. The vacuum is quite weak, nowhere near as powerful as a basic converted aquarium pump, and that really limits its utility for me. It would only work well if I had just the right tip, and just the right suction cup for larger components.
My aquarium pump setup only needs two tips, one for 0603 sized components, and a slightly larger tip with a small suction cup that handles everything from 0805 to 14x14mm large ICs (when picked on centre of gravity).
