Design of an inspection system for electrical characteristics of a PC board

The authors present the design of an inspection system that measures electrical characteristics of a printed circuit board (PCB) in a manufacturing assembly environment. The design utilizes two robots, a microswitch table, a linear conveyor belt, a GPIB (general-purpose interface bus), and the CPU (central processing unit) of a personal computer. In general this project demonstrates a very flexible, economical, and efficient inspection system. The products can be inspected on-line, and operator labor for inspection can be eliminated. Moreover, it is also very easy to adapt this design to other manufacturing systems. The individual pieces of equipment in the proposed flexible inspection system can be divided into five sections: printed circuit board, data acquisition, interface bus, microswitch table and contact probe. The integration of these pieces of equipment is described, and a design configuration is shown