Neural Network powered Assembled PCB inspection tool (AOI)

[Calder]

I have been using it for a while. Long story short: Their latest releases (5.X?) have the features and capabilities I was looking for. When I started using the service with my own camera, the results were... meh. I would say the system was able to catch around 90% of the faults present on the PCBA. But a 10%ish was a lot. I know the photos I was taking were not as good as they should be, but did not want to invest in any AOI at that moment.
 Now, I am using the system after the pick&place process (saving time and money) AND after the reflow oven stage. Their system is detecting even discontinuities in the circuit traces and it is improving. But do as I did: ask them for a test account and use your own camera. The inspection results depend very much on the quality of the photo of your camera but you can get an inspection platform from them. I made my own.

[kristinapetrova]

Ah! Thanks for the heads up. I didn't realize they had a trial account option. That's pretty cool and definitely makes it easier to test the waters without fully committing right off the bat. I'll for sure give it a try and see how it fits with my workflow. Appreciate the info!

[johannaandersen]

Hey Kristina, did you ever take the plunge? How did it fare? Their website is all about big corporate success stories, but what's the reality for smaller companies? I'm eager to hear your 'real-world' experience.

[kristinapetrova]

Sorry for replying so late, too much food on the plate! Yes, we have tested the system. At first with our own camera, but the process was a bit slow. About 30 seconds/inspection as we had to upload the photo manually to the inspection software. So, we opted to buy the online version they offer. I would say, although I have not done the "study", the AOI system of this company detects 99% of the errors present in our PCBAs after reflow-oven and 100% after pick and place phase: displacements and absences. I was honestly surprised by its speed and how convenient it is because you don't have to program the AOI. It is just a photo.

[johannaandersen]

Can we honestly hope to attain the 99% in uncovering those faults, undetected errors, or are we simply chasing the impossible? If these numbers are truly accurate, they're more what we would need, I'd say. Mind you, our 5-year old Mirtec machine seems to miss a bit too often, and without diving into a deep sea of statistics, it appears to only pinpoint about 94-96% of errors?

[SilverSolder]

The thing with AI is that it keeps getting exponentially better.  You can expect the error rates to keep dropping!

[kristinapetrova]

I've definitely seen the inspection speed pick up, and the error marking is now much more accurate. It's way better at catching mistakes now. Fingers crossed we get to that 99% with the next update. Honestly, it feels like the future, the platform's starting to think more like us and less like some conventional AOI.

[johannaandersen]

Well, thinking about reaching rates of 99% is a bit scary, to be honest. At the end of the day humans are going to be less and less "intelligent." Do you think the system can do customizations, for example to check if a wire harness is properly connected?

[onsokumaru]

I've been doing some research on this AgnosPCB system for a while now, as a customer I worked with was interested in an affordable inspection platform, for a small prototyping line. I think we'll probably ask for a trial account once we manage to build a proper photography setup with uniform illumination. What's interesting though is that I see some users in this forum use the system for inspection after the PnP but before the oven. Do you think we can use the same system for inspecting both before and after the reflow process? I think we'll be very interested in that approach.

[onsokumaru]

Ok, finally we managed to have a proper setup for taking pictures on the assembly line (ok ok, some small white led panels to somehow cast diffuse uniform light  ) and asked for an agnosPCB trial.

They provided us a software we can use to upload the photos to be analyzed and some free inspections on their servers, as I presume the local running software is not doing any hard work on the images. The trial software looks like the full featured product, so I think the only limitation the trial has is the number of inspections you can perform and that in the hardware they sell the camera control is integrated.

It works better than I expected honestly, and at least the setup is quite easy. I'm not an expert on PCBA so maybe is just that everything looks new and shiny to me now . We are testing it to inspect after the PNP but before the oven, and also with finished boards. After some tweaking with camera parameters and lighting we managed to get decent results. I really don't know how high end visual inspection systems perform, so I can't compare, but this is definitely affordable.