On Friday September, 19 2014 by the Euro Hotel Residence in Concorezzo, has been held the fourth edition of “ONEPASS DAY”, organized by E.S. s.r.l. Electronic Solution.
The main goal of the meeting has been that of introducing , along with technicians and engineers of important companies, the machines conceived to perform every kind of test on electronic boards. The birth of such machines is mainly due to the growing necessity in the companies of automating the test procedures. Such necessity is fulfilled by ONEPASS and EASY2FUN test systems, which have encountered great favor because of their reliability and overall qualities.
As the name suggests, ONEPASS is a sistem which is able , in only one machine cycle, to perform several tests, such as In-circuit (ICT), functional, visual and Boundary Scan, proceeded if needed by a microcontroller programming phase. The advantages obtained with this kind of approach are quite a lot , among them the fact of having a modest footprint on the shop floor , an effective reduction of handling times and, in most cases, a complete coverage of tested components.
EASY2FUN is a simpler and less expensive system which is able to perform simple In-circuit and functional tests. The very small footprint and the modular hardware structure with changeable probe plates allow easy interfacing with different kind of instruments and make it suitable for fast production swaps.
Such features place these two systems in a position of very high competitiveness on the market.
Their advantages are, in effect , appreciated by companies operating in many industry branches.
During the first showing, a test system built for a major firm operating in the automotive manufacturing branch has been introduced. The presentation has shown to the many participants how it has been implemented the test of the full operation of a board that controls the command interface inside a car. With a minimal space occupation for PC, instrument and test fixture, ES has implemented the programming of 12 boards in parallel and the test of all functionalities of the same boards. Then a fixture for thermal screening , able to stress boards in a climatic chamber from -40° C to +105° C has been also proposed to the audience.
Successively Mr. Paolo Ghidetti of CCS Adaxys, a leader company in PCB development and production based in Mendrisio, has shown evidence of the advantages obtained by his company after six years from the purchase of a ONEPASS tester. In face of an initial investment, the cost of the equipment has allowed the company to augment the overall product quality by a measured improvement of 76% due to the reduction of human intervention, test times reductions and test setup times reductions. A demo with a video connection with the factory has shown the audience the ease with which the operator has been able to switch fixtures according to the production needs and the speed of the test itself.
Customer ABB company , world leader in Automation and Power technology, has spoken about his experience and the advantages obtained after the introduction of EASY2FUN test systems (Changeable fixture test system) in testing switches and contactors for the medium voltage range.
The description of the real experiences of ES customers have been briefly interrupted by the intervention of I-tronik company, ES partner and distributor of important brands of assembling and soldering machines, 2D/3D Visual inspection systems, washing and cleaning systems. The description of their many services has been the subject of their speech. As it is widely known, board cleaning constitutes a very crucial phase in the producing process of reliable finished boards. In moist and dirty environments there is high chance for finished equipments to develop faults due to a board malfunction. Environment factors and continuous operation over time may generate, under the coating layer of the boards, spurious elements in the components’ solder joints called dendrites, that can cause a drastic variation in characteristic values of components as inductors or capacitors. Without appropriate washing procedures there is a high chance of incurring in such problems, besides the problems and false errors that are likely to be encountered during the ICT/FCT test of a board with flux and dirt residuals, with all the additional costs that this involves. Proper board cleaning therefore has a fundamental role also in board testing phase. Test nails have to be kept as far as possible from pollutants, because this can easily alter test results.
I-tronik is also italian distributor for TRI company, a Taiwan based firm producing In-circuit test systems like the Tiny TR5001T that can be included in ONEPASS systems. At the end of the morning has been made a practical demonstration of a functional test of a panel of gate opener remote control boards with on-board programming , leakage current check and harmonic content analysis of RF signals, thus giving an idea of how diversified the field of application of our testers can be.
After noon, the meeting has proceeded with the the description of the work ES has carried on for a major Italian household appliances company. The goal in this case was that of detecting the pressure exercised by pneumatic actuators on a touch screen panel.The use of an automated test fixture to check the touchscreen has allowed to obtain an high test repeatability, an always constant pressure applied by pneumatic “fingers” and a high test execution speed. After the screen test sequence , also wi-fi connection of the panel has been tested, which allows the household to be connected to a network to allow remote control from mobile devices.
Before proceeding to the test of assembled PCBs , it is a good practice to evaluate , before the test procedure , the quality of the assembly and of the solder quality of the many components on board. New market demands lead to having much smaller PCBs and with an increasing number of components on them , so their inspection is requiring more and more precision and efficiency.
Cognex, the company specialized on vision systems, has presented to the audience its new 3D analysis systems. A laser profiler detects the passage of the board and rebuilds through software a 3D model of the unit itself. This way, by examining the obtained model, manufacturing defects like missing or misaligned components can easily be detected.
Then Flextronics, in the person of Mr. Mauri, has spoken about the cooperation started in 2010 with E.S. in building personalized test fixture for the many demands of the biomedical field. The possibility of E.S. to of draw and design their own 3D structures has easily allowed the development of those test fixtures.
In conclusion, it could not be missing the German company GPS Prüftechnik demonstration . GPS is the long time Electronic Solution partner for mechanical , pneumatical and RF fixtures.
At the end of all technical presentations, all the participants have been able to observe and analyze , in close touch with Electronic Solution technicians and engineers, the operation of all test equipment on display.
In an atmosphere of wholehearted exchange of technical knowledge and points of view, a meeting day that has provided the participants with new stimuli and ideas for test applications that can hopefully allow to submit to the market better and more competitive products has gone to its conclusion.
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