PCB Assembly

This photo is a workcell that Clear Automation designed and built to attach a small (1/2 " square) PCB to a round ceramic substrate. The placement tolerances (relative to the substrate OD and to an orientation notch) are very tight. A vision system locates the PCB in a tray prior to pickup and refines the location on the robot tool after pickup. The vision system also locates the orientation notch and inspects the placement quality after assembly.

This video is a workcell that we designed and built to assemble part of a printed circuit board. The video was shot during the Factory Acceptance Test on our shop floor. This busy workcell features 3 cartesian robots, 2 machine vision cameras, one robot controller, grease dispensing and 2 automatic screwdrivers with screw process and torque control. One of the screwdrivers is inverted to drive screws from below. The system attaches a processor chip to a heatsink and then attaches the heatsink to the PCB. Although the PCB in the video is bare, the actual production PCB is fully populated before it enters this cell.