Challenge
Perform a number of quality inspections on a variety of circuit boards.
Solution
A custom conveyor and reject station, a light-beam trigger sensor, a vision station with a 12-megapixel GigE color camera, vision software, a control panel, a Windows PC, and an E-stop circuit.
Story
A circuit board manufacturer produces a number of different boards for the HVAC industry. Each board has several components that are placed by hand, and those components have been known to go missing somewhere in the manufacturing and shipping process. The customer wanted a way to inspect each board after all the components were placed and before the product shipped.
This is a complex application, but the vision engineers at EMP were up to the task. Each board is placed on a conveyor and sent through the vision inspection. A 12-megapixel GigE color camera, working with the vision software, performs a series of checks to identify each manually placed component: location, color, orientation, missing screws, diameter measurement, barcode inspection, and more.
Because of the variety of boards, the EMP team knew a custom program was needed that lets the operator select which board is running. The program runs on an HMI powered by a Windows PC, where the user selects the job to run and can program new jobs as they come up.
If a board does not pass, it is sent to the reject conveyor to be reworked. Every inspection, good or bad, is stored in the customer’s database and can be referenced whenever a complaint about a missing component comes in. The database has already saved the manufacturer costly fines by proving that a component was present during manufacturing.
Do you have a complex vision application to tackle? Reach out to the vision engineers at EMP today.
