Stephen Hawes

March 2025 Opulo Update

Hey all!

As a way of keeping everyone in the loop on what's happening at Opulo, I decided to start doing monthly status updates. I'll include everything from status of WIP products, improvements to software/firmware, lead times, and anything else happening here at the office.

Given that this is the first, it will be much longer than ones in the future!

Lead Times

We are in a constant battle to bring down our lead time, especially with the huge increase in demand we saw after launching v4. Thankfully, lots of the DFM optimizations we made in this new version have made the machine much easier to build, so we're slowly but surely getting an edge on the lead time. We're vigilant about making sure the listed lead time on each product page is accurate, so don't hesitate to check there for the most accurate time!

v4 Upgrade Kits

Thank you to everyone who signed up for updates on the v4 upgrade kits, and for your patience! Lots of the past couple months have been focusing on just trying to keep up with demand and getting enough stock in-house amidst tariffs to fulfill existing orders, but we're getting out of the woods and working on getting upgrade kits ready to go!

Below is the results of the sign-up form on the product page. Far and away, folks are interested in a v3.1/v3.2 upgrade kit to v4, with a scratch build as a close second. These will be the first two that we'll focus on shipping.

We've also been spending some time thinking about the best way to write the docs for upgrading. Because we already keep our own internal work instructions (called OHAI) live and public and in an effort to maintain a single source of truth, we'll use this as a basis for our upgrade docs.

My current plan is to release a docs page that has you follow OHAI as the basis for assembly, but lists any differences you might encounter while following OHAI, but using OHAI as the basis for the instructions. This will be the quickest way to get these kits out to everyone, and I expect it'll work well for walking people through the process, but I'll be ready to shift to a full separate docs page if need be!

8mm and 12mm Feeders

We just cut a new release of the feeders with great improvements to feeding thick tape. This mainly comes from a reduction in how much curvature is present at the exit of the tape. We dropped the angle from 45 degrees down to 30, and the thickest tape included in the taping standard feeds with quite a bit less effort. If you'd like to print these frames for your feeders, STLs are attached to the release as always. A tremendous thank you to Discord user @jbussmann for his mod that led to this change!

We're also looking into changing the wheel geometry a little to help with this, although it's a much smaller effect than this frame geometry change. I have some sample wheels that just arrived that I'll be testing with.

I've also been working on cutting a new release to Photon, the firmware that runs on the feeders! This new version will be 1.0.4, and has some great new features in it:

  • Firmware Version Reporting - The feeder can now report back its exact firmware version through Gcode. There's a new button in the debug tool after scanning for your feeders where you can read the firmware version.
  • Status LED Control - We added in a feature where the status LED can be set through the protocol. This will be useful for future features, for example illuminating all the feeders that need a firmware update.
  • Thick Tape Detection - This is a new feature where the feeder can actually determine the thickness of the tape currently loaded, automatically. Upon first feed after loading tape, the feeder runs a quick test using the motor and encoder to determine the force required to move, then drives the tape more forcefully if it detects thicker tape. This test involves a quick delay and you might hear the motor increasing in power as it performs the check.

If you'd like to test out this new version, we have Release Candidate 3 built and available on Github. (Programming instructions here) Please let us know how it works out for you!

Wider Feeders

I haven't spoken much at all about wider feeders outside of our Discord server, but we've been working on them! They turned out to be much harder than we expected to get working with the current feeder architecture.

The 8mm and 12mm feeders have the film mechanism underneath the tape path, which requires the film to wrap around the frame to reach it.

This works great for smaller tapes, but is not consistent enough for wider tapes for two reasons:

  • The extra width of the film makes the wrapping messy and crumpled, regardless of how we structure the path to the peel gears.
  • Wider tape also typically has a strong adhesive holding the film to the tape, and this makes the film get caught up in the gears very easily.

One of our prototype 24mm feeders on our internal SMT line. We hang 300g weights on the end to handle peeling as an interim solution.

What we've been working on is a new approach to the feeder where the film peeling mechanism sits above the tape path, so the film can peel straight back. This solves both issues by keeping the film path smooth and simple, and we can adjust the peel gears to only grab the film in the middle where there's no adhesive, and avoid the sides.

A rough sketch of how 16mm and 24mm will look different

If you don't want to wait for this new architecture, many folks in the community have printed the 16mm and 24mm frames and replaced it onto an 8mm feeder with great results (like the gold feeder above). We recommend a weight for film peeling, but some people have actually been using the existing peel mechanism without issue. 

(16mm Frame Link) (24mm Frame Link)

OpenPnP

Many of you have been asking us about why we recommend the version of OpenPnP that we do. More than anything, it comes down to stability. We always want to recommend the most consistent and reliable solution for folks. We tested this version very thoroughly, and built our docs around how it works. There have been lots of nightly builds since then that were meant for testing, but they haven't cut an official stable release in a while.

However, as of a few weeks ago, OpenPnP started making official releases again! This is super exciting, and we've been testing their new builds and checking for any show-stoppers. There are a few bugs that I'm in the process of filing on their Github, but we're working on getting everything updated to a recent release! A huge thanks to Jan in the OpenPnP devs on pushing for a stable release cycle.

Documentation

Mitchel has been working on a full rewrite of our calibration documentation. So far, I've owned writing and updating most of our docs, but Mitchel pointed out to me that I'm probably making some assumptions about what people know about the system because I'm so used to it myself.

He has done a few full audits with folks that have never touch a pick and place machine before, recording every single hiccup or moment of hesitation, and addressing them one by one. We're really excited at this revamp, and we'll be pushing it out as soon as we can.

Set Up Guide

A few weeks ago, I heard from a customer that they wished we had a bit more information about all the other stuff that goes into setting up a mid-scale line with the LumenPnP. I went through all his questions, plus common questions we get from folks about this, and put some answers together into a Set Up Guide.

If there are things you wish you had known before getting going, or questions you still have after reading this, please let me know and we'll update the page with new information! You can reach out to us here. Thank you Braden for all the help with getting this together. 

Paste Extruder

A little side project has turned into quite an interesting use case for the machine, and we've been really excited to see all the things folks have been using it for! I spent a weekend building a little web tool that lets you import paste-layer Gerbers (or even capture arbitrary positions) and run pasting jobs. 

It's definitely still in beta, and is only a quick MVP, but we'd love to hear any feedback on it if you're inclined to give it a try.

Accessories

We've had a number of folks reach out to us about stocking more SMT accessories, so we've been working on getting some of those in house! 

The first of these is Film Extensions. These are super helpful for extending the film on a spool of components when loading a feeder, so you don't have to waste the first few parts in the tape. You can see how they're used on this docs page.

We've also had a ton of people ask about carrying a stencil jig. There are lots of options out there, but some have been a bit lackluster in our experience. We got in a few different samples, and found one that we're quite happy with! We're in the process of getting some stock in-house via air freight, and a longer batch via sea so we can have them available pretty soon.

Reflow ovens are quite a bit more difficult to stock for a number of reasons, but we're still working on getting a good reflow solution up on the web store. In the meantime, we still highly recommend the Controleo3.

Please let us know if there's anything else that's difficult for you to source when doing SMT, and we'll see what we can do to stock it as well!

Reach Out

If you have any feedback, questions, or comments about this update, please don't hesitate to reach out to us here.

-Stephen