Last year I saw a really cool home-build machine that was used for mounting SMT components to PCBs. A small manual pick and place machine was cool at the time but I had no real use for it. But now with recent projects forcing me to use these tiny components, I really needed a better way and this popped into my mind as a cheap and pretty straight forward solution.
It’s just in the planning phase at the moment as I’m really only doing this with the spare time that I don’t have much of, but the concept is coming along nicely.
Check out the blog of the man who invented this neat little contraption and made it open source for everyone to make their own versions of it.
Downing's Basement 