2-D location pointing system for individual component on device under test by using LabVIEW

Time is an important factor to determine the market performance of a product, where accelerating the process of test development is one of the solutions. Probing is involved in most of the process. Hence, designing a system to assist engineers in component searching during probing process is critical. This paper discusses a designed system that consists of a National Instruments embedded board NI sbRIO-9632XT, a movable laser pointer, two stepper motors with limiting switches as sensors attached at origin, and a web-camera for image processing of the location of the Device under Test. A personal computer acts as a host to link the PCB design software - EAGLE and the National Instruments graphical programming environment - LabVIEW by using batch file, and to incorporate them into the hardware. The image processing part is done by LabVIEW Vision Acquisition Software. The designed system is able to detect any printed circuit board (PCB) within a maximum dimension of 182 × 302mm. The system has been tested with promising results. The system is able to locate any electronic component on the PCB which is requested by the user for testing purpose.