Shane Kirkpatrick answered Brian Ottosen:

>We are using an Omron AOI machine for post wave inspection and find the
>system very effective - just be careful of these systems as they require
>full time support which you would need to factor in when justifying
>purchase.

At a former employer, we used an Omron "vision testing" machine about 7
years back. It was effective in some ways, but produced 80-90% false
negatives. I would agree that it requires almost a full time tech to
support it, the issues are often due to the exponential permutations of
alternate package variations (mold compound, branding, lead finish, etc.)
alternate sources of components, and other differences which cause the
machine to reject a part with a visible deviation from the program.

Some of this would depend on how many different products you produce, and
how many different suppliers of components are used.

In practice, our programs had dozens of inspection sites "turned off"
because the components had some variation which was actually OK, but had
not been programmed yet. The operators had difficulty with the programming,
and the techs could not give it the daily attention it needed.

At that time (and this was LONG ago by SMT assembly timescale) we used to
refer to the machine as a "Learjet in our driveway". Impressed the heck out
of your neighbors and visitors, but not too efficient at getting back and
forth to work.

If issues involving the ease of updating new inspection permutations have
been solved, and you can be confident that the programming support
necessary will be there, it was capable of finding missing/wrong/reversed
pretty effectively. We just thought that for a few hundred Kbucks, and
nearly a full time tech, we did not get the return we wanted.


good luck,


Jerry Cupples
Interphase Corporation
Dallas, TX USA
http://www.iphase.com

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