Automated Printed Circuit Board Assembly Verification and Validation System

Abstract

With the fast-paced evolution in the engineering field especially in electronics, the design of circuitry is becoming more and more complex. Hence, to make sure the Printed Circuit Board Assembly (PCBA) is designed correctly, the prototypes of the PCBA have to be tested and validated before moving on to manufacturing and production process. The InCircuit Test (ICT) and flying probes are too expensive to be applied for a prototype stage. Hence, the verification and validation (V&V) test for the prototype of PCBA is done manually by the V&V engineers. However, it is a complex and time-consuming process. Therefore, there is a requirement to improve the current PCBA prototype verification and validation. This project is proposed to assist V&V engineers to perform a V&V test for PCBA prototype. This project basically consists of a CNC machine, which has total five degrees of freedom with measuring probe at the end effector. Three stepper motors were used to move the x, y and z coordinate of the probe. The stepper motors were controlled by controller myRIO with stepper motor driver A4988. Besides that, another two smaller stepper motors were used for the probing mechanism. The probing mechanism was designed and simulated by using SolidWorks software. For software, the data extraction from the PCB file was done by the algorithm built using LabVIEW. In addition, a graphical user interface (GUI) was also designed and built using LabVIEW. The system was tested in terms of accuracy and consistency by using samples of PCB. The results from the evaluation showed about 70.83% of accuracy in average. Overall, the performance of the system is acceptable and the accuracy of the system can be improved by the implementation of closed-loop control into the system.