AOI By DIY
As anyone who has ever assembled a run of PCBs will tell you, quality inspection of solder joints can be a difficult process. Even under a microscope their appearances can be deceptive, and one silver blob can be perfect while …read more
Category Archives: optical inspection
Tools of the Trade – Inspection
In the last episode, we put our circuit boards through the reflow process. Unfortunately, it’s not 100% accurate, and there are often problems that can occur that need to be detected and fixed. That’s what the inspection step is for. One could insert an inspection step after paste, after placement, and after reflow, but the first two are icing on the cake — the phase where most mistakes can be caught is after reflow.
There are a number of problems typical with a surface mount reflow process:
- Tombstoning – This is when a component stands up vertically. This is bad
