Does anyone have experience with pick and place machines?

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I’ve been finding myself making a few orders for batches of assembled PCB’s lately and it’s always a bit of a hassle filling in quote forms/negotiating suppliers and they are not fast (probably 6 weeks or so). So I wondered - has anyone used a P&P machine before or know makerspaces using them anywhere in europe? I heard fizzpop in birmingham might have one.

I don’t have any experience using one so it would be great to hear the pitfalls etc/how big the learning curve is.

I saw a good sparkfun article about buying a cheap one recently, I’m not neccessarily going to buy one just considering options for the future. Ideally I’d find a space I could join and play about with one and get a feel for the learning curve etc.

Typical board I do is maybe 20 different passive components (mostly 0603’s and bigger) and 5 IC’s, with rarely anything smaller than 0.8mm pitch - in a typical batch of a hundred or less.

Cheers
Calum