cheap but without making it useless! basically you can buy pathetic hand tools for £2k that you just put your arm on and slide around from part pickup to placement but I see that as problematic as you need fine motor control and in the demo of how fast you can go parts are not dropped right and of course they neglect the time taken to hunt out the parts locations so they are just matching footprints for effect. If I can buy a good base with motors and drivers for under £300 then that's a really good start but a bit bigger than 300x160mm would be good as if I can put multiple boards on (they can easily be 200x100mm each) this further greatly speeds up the processing even as a man in the loop.