A Benchtop Pick and Place with Stephen Hawes
Stephen Hawes, founder of Opulo, discusses the development and business of the Lumen Benchtop Pick and Place machine, an open-source device for low-to-medium volume PCB assembly. He explains how the company evolved from a garage prototype to a scaling operation, detailing the technical challenges of software integration with OpenPnP and the pragmatic decision to use Marlin firmware. Hawes also shares insights on manufacturing operations, the importance of dogfooding, and his experiments with making PCBs using fiber lasers.