BI Technologies (Fullerton, CA, USA; www.bitechnologies.com) produces a number of surface-mount electronic components on reels containing up to 4000 components. Many of these are glass-covered, which presents special problems in quality-control testing. Says Stewart Beveridge, senior manufacturing engineer at a BI facility in the UK, "We had four highly trained people checking the components through microscopes. It took up to an hour to check each reel. The result was not easy to view and tired the inspectors. Faulty components had to be cut from the reel, and, if more than seven components were found, the entire reel had to be reprocessed."
BI called in Envisage Systems (Berkhamsted, UK; www.envisagesystems.co.uk), a company specializing in automated visual inspection systems for the electronic-components industry. Envisage, in turn, consulted with Multipix Imaging (Petersfield, UK; www.multipix.com), a supplier of vision components.
The system used at BI is based on a flexible mechanical design capable of accepting all formats of cameras, including linescan. It was designed to keep the mechanical elements as simple as possible and perform the more advanced features in the system control/image processing software. From a vibratory bowl feeder, the components are passed onto a belt transport mechanism, which moves the units into the inspection stations. The modular design of the system enables different camera configurations to be used. Originally the system was set up to house four cameras at two inspection stations, providing a top and side view of each component. The system has evolved with differing customer requirements to hold as many as 12 cameras.
