In China, whether from the popularity of machine vision or technical capabilities, the connector manufacturing industry is at the forefront of the electronics industry. The huge development space of the connector industry and its growth potential in China have greatly attracted the attention of machine vision practitioners. How to better meet the product demand, get the survival and development space? Machine vision also has its own unique development trend in the connector industry.
It is an indisputable fact that China has long been the manufacturing center of the world. With its open policy, abundant resources, cheap labor, strong consumption power, and sustained economic development, China has become a paradise for investors around the world. As a pillar industry of the manufacturing industry, the electronic manufacturing industry is developing more rapidly in China. In just ten years, the scale of the electronics manufacturing industry has ranked third in the world; The entire electronic manufacturing industry has formed a set of huge industrial chain involving electronic material manufacturing, electronic component manufacturing, terminal electronic product manufacturing, and precision processing, equipment manufacturing, testing instruments and other related industries, forming a contemporary China's high-tech precision famous industrial chain group.
Industrial characteristics: distance and height are different
-- Manufacturing characteristics, requirements and testing status of different links of the electronic connector manufacturing industry
Throughout the entire electronic manufacturing industry chain, each industry has distinct characteristics, different processes, and different processes, but the pursuit of good quality is their common goal. Because of this "zero defect" quality goal has become the direction of every enterprise's efforts, "total quality management", "Six Sigma" and other quality management methods have been unusually widely used, and the concept of "quality first" has been deeply rooted in people's hearts. Therefore, the various testing technologies that can ensure product quality and provide product characteristic data for analysis and further improve the process capability are increasingly widely and deeply applied.
In view of the precision and mass production characteristics of electronic connector products, the use of testing technology is particularly important in its manufacturing process, including mechanical performance testing, environmental testing, electrical performance testing, structural size testing and other aspects.
As far as dimensional detection is concerned, different needs are displayed throughout the various stages of the connector manufacturing process. Connector manufacturing process is mainly divided into stamping, electroplating, injection molding, assembly of four main process flow. Stamping is the forming area of a metal terminal. The metal strip is cut through the metal die by the huge pressure of the stamping machine to form the shape of the designed metal terminal, and a continuous material strip with metal terminal is produced. The so-called Plating (Plating), that is, after stamping the metal terminal needs to be plated on the metal surface of tin, lead, gold and other different coatings. Injection molding (molding) is the process of polymer forming a connector insulation body of a certain structure through the injection mold under the high temperature and high pressure of the injection molding machine. Assembly is the last stop in connector production, where stamped and electroplated metal terminals and plastic molded by injection molding are assembled in the assembly shop to produce the finished product. The metal strip is cut, inserted, shaken, inspected and other processes to become a finished product, and then delivered directly to the customer through packaging.
In the above four manufacturing links, each link has very strict requirements for product size, so only strict measurement can ensure that the product meets the quality requirements. At present, the main detection means can be divided into contact detection and non-contact detection according to different contact methods, such as metal gauges, micrometers, etc. are contact measurement, and tool microscopes, X-ray detectors, projection detectors, three-dimensional non-contact measuring instruments are non-contact measurement. It can be divided into offline detection and online detection according to different detection locations.
The above testing instruments have different applications according to the accuracy, speed, and detection items, but because of the slow detection speed, complex operation, environmental requirements and other limitations, it is mainly used in offline testing, and the main reason why online testing is mainly used machine vision testing equipment, the main reason is that it must meet the production characteristics of high speed, high precision, high repeatability, etc. In this way, we can meet the higher requirements of online inspection of production lines. This is undoubtedly a rich soil for the early development and enlightenment of China's machine vision market. Application history: Rising to the sky
-- The application history of machine vision in China's electronic connector manufacturing industry
In the early 1990s, some connector manufacturers in Europe, the United States and Taiwan successively invested in factories in the mainland, and some manufacturing and testing equipment with machine vision was slowly introduced into the country in the following few years, and all came from the board card system in Europe and the United States, such as PPT. Since the concept and application of machine vision technology was not mature in China at that time, there were certain bottlenecks in both hardware and software and technology, and there were a series of problems such as low stability, low speed, high technical threshold, and high cost, so there were very few typical specific applications.
In the late 1990s, the manufacture of electronic products in China developed rapidly. The emergence and development of mobile phones, PDAs and other products, and the increasing popularity of personal computers, make the application field of connector products gradually expand, the output continues to improve, the products are increasingly sophisticated, and the pins are more and more dense. At this time, some foreign-funded and Taiwan-funded enterprises began to realize the importance of machine vision in production and introduced more visual inspection equipment from abroad. At the same time, with the development of computers, electronics, semiconductors and other related industries, machine vision has made breakthrough progress, the detection speed continues to improve, the software algorithm continues to mature, and the price is no longer prohibitive.
At that time, machine vision systems were still mainly from foreign countries and Taiwan, and the mainland could hardly find machine vision system integrators. However, the development of machine vision in China has never stopped. With the passage of time, the concept of "machine vision" has gradually entered the line of sight of the electronics manufacturing industry, and more and more people have begun to have a strong interest in it, and huge business opportunities are also attracting people's attention. DVT, OMRON, COGNEX, NAIS and other companies have introduced smart cameras, which have greatly reduced the system