Automation of Circuit Board Testing

The testing of printed circuit boards (PCBs) is a common quality control process mandatory for any of the circuit board factories to guarantee the quality and functionality of the PCBs. The manual operation of the testing process by an operator will be too difficult for a large volume of PCBs. Therefore, the automation of PCB testing becomes necessary. The purpose of this project is to develop an automated unit for pressing a PCB down onto a test platform, which is a part of the automated PCB testing system. The unit consists of two linear actuators, two motor drivers, two micro switches, three buttons, and an Arduino UNO micro-controller board. The actuators driven by the motor drivers move the PCB and press it with force needed. The micro switches were placed at the start and stop positions of the movement. The buttons were used to control the actuators' movements separately for the sake of of calibrating the unit. The Arduino was programmed to control the unit. It took in the values from the buttons and switches and drove the actuators accordingly. A mechnical construction of the unit was created. It is shown to be stable and able to allow the actuators to transfer the force evenly onto the PCB. The electrical part of the unit was tested first in order to verify the programming of the Arduino and make sure everything work as it should. The final system was tested to see that the specifications are met. The results showed that the unit worked with the fulfilment of the specifications. Future work would be aimed towards improving the unit created and continuing work on the rest of the automation system