Patent ID: 8381395

Claim:
A method of determining a pick-up position of electrical components in a component placement device for populating substrates with the components, which are made ready in pockets in a belt, comprising the steps of: providing only one component in each of said pockets of the belt; inserting the belt into a feed module which delivers the components to a pick-up point in a defined pick-up position; determining a location of a pocket center by using an image processing evaluation unit belonging to the component placement device, wherein the determining of the location comprises: moving position-resolving scanning optics of the component placement head over an area of the pick-up point; aiming the scanning optics at the pockets; directly scanning structural features of the pocket; calculating, utilizing the image evaluation unit, a central position of the pockets from a position of the structural features; the method further comprising: removing the one component only from each of the respective pockets with a freely positionable component placement head utilizing the determined location of the pocket center.