I have some 16 and 12mm feeders on the north side which I tried to use yesterday, it ended in desaster, losing a lot of expensive parts.

The feeders have problems in feeding relaibly. They need to get 2 pushes for every part, but often that does not push the tape far enough, ending up in a mess. The software then retries, pushing one part away, the next is then out of position, and so it goes on and on. I gave up yesterday after placing only 4 boards, with 40 planned for the day.
The 16 and 12mm feeders have the same 8mm-strip-pull-wheels as the normal 8mm feeders, which is not very good for pulling the wider covertapes reliably. At least you should put fitting wheels on the machines. Ok, but now I have those and we must see how to get it running.

The tapes are plastic tapes, and they really slip very easy in the feeder, I bent the springs up to have low resistance.
Neverthelesse the feeder arm does not push the tapes in all cases. Pins are aligned perfectly, pressure is ok. I tried out several cover tape settings, the cover tape is loosened enough before the pins push the tape forward, but somehow that does not work at any try.

E and W feeders are working normally, with a few flaws, but ok to me.

I read the books about feeders etc but could not find anything which I did not try already.

Any ideas on how to get the 12 and 16mm running?

I restarted yesterday and found the culprit: It was the setting for open/close length. I used the recommended values of 12 and 20 mm for the 12mm tape, which was way too much.
I now use 9 and 16mm, that works very good. The long close length pulled the tape a bit further after the pins pushed the tape, that led to the different push distances screwing up all placements.
You have to select the right distances for every tape type as it seems. Also, the spring tension needs to be adjusted very carefully. It took some time to get the 8 feeders there adjusted, a pile of parts is now laying around here, but I will reuse them later.

Also, on two tapes the pins did not hit the holes exactly, but it is very hard to see that, I tried with a high-speed cam to see if the pins hit the holes. Maybe we should get a way to lower the pins to the tape to inspect the correct distance and retract them afterwards.
My function request of a button to make only one feed step without cover tape movement would be very nice, I did that by setting the feeder steps to 1 and open/close to 0 just to advance the bigger tapes for one hole only. That allowed for placement of the tape in finer steps. But to have a button for that would be of great help.

Now I got all 12 and 16mm tapes working and could place my first 25 boards yesterday, switched from slow to medium to fast, and after a few tweaks in the part settings all went smooth.

There are a lot of switches to turn, and finding the correct combination of all is the key to success as it seems. It took me almost 3 weeks to get that done.
Now the suggested exportfunction to move the settings of a feeder to the part-database would be very handy, as I could then copy my finetuned feedersettings to other parts.