Is AOI any good

Andy, AOI is a worth-while tool for verifying part placement on those pesky little telecommunication boards that are too small for referance designators. It can also be a valuable verification step to reinforce quality control. Pros and Cons of the different vendors can be found in Archives. Just remember, If you decide to go with an AOI machine, choose one that's fits your operation and stays within your capabilities.

That's just my opinion, I could be wrong!!!

reply »

Andy,

I have been "evaluating" some AOI systems. However, some of these are actually SAOI (Semi Automatic Optical Inspection), which is not a problem if that is what fits your process and budget.

You can buy a high end system complete with many cameras that can be programmed to detect solder joint acceptance using the reflected light etc; I don't know exactly how much these are but you could enquire to companies such as Orbitech / Schuh maybe.

These are for high throughput, I believe.

The type that fit my application, (small batch, small volume) are the SAOI ones which are basically an electronic version of the old Comparascope. Get a known gold board and compare to the new batch one at a time.

These are basically like an upside down photocopier that scan in you board as an image and save to file. Then you scan in your new board and the two images are presented on screen "superimposed" at a user set frequency so you can easily see omissions or polarity problems etc;

You still need an operator to sit there and decide if it is a "real" fault or not, hence semi-automatic..........but these can be had for about �18K - �25K.

Some companies find that such a system will pay for itself immediately due to the fact that once they have scanned their golden boards, they can then sell the golden boards as product.

Hope this helps,

Regards,

Chris.

reply »

we actually make AOI systems so I'm biased, but it really depends on what problems you have (or think you have). Systems like Scanning systems tend to be lower cost and have some physical limits but will not do as much asan inline system with camera's. A decent InLine AOI system should inspect 99% of what you want and is cheaper and better than people (given reasonable thruput or compexity)

reply »