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You know, some of the early syringe extruder designs should be capable of dispensing solder paste and holding onto SMD components
This sounds like it has the potential to be a little... kludgy. I'm very much in favour of separation of concerns... a magical multipurpose toolhead would be cool, but I just bet it would be 4 times harder than developing two independant toolheads.
Paste dispensing and part placing don't really need to be done in parallel, so requiring a head change isn't onerous.
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If we could figure out how to make the SMD holding head rotate 90 degrees, store and align SMD components, and mill copper clad then PCB production could be fully automated.
Easy as that!
But what do toolheads need to be able to do, *in general*? I'm thinking about the inputs and outputs they might need on a head-changing electrical connection. Power, 4x PWM, 2x digital in (ie DC motor direction), a couple of analogue returns (ie, temperature sensing), a couple of digital returns (quadrature encoding?), i2c bus, whatever else?
I'm guessing that most heads (such as pick'n'place tools) are going to be somewhat simpler than an extruder, but what sort of more complicated tools might be needed? (this is another reason not to use all singing, all dancing , bells'n'whistle heads)
