Brief Analysis Of Connector Assembly Factors

The final stage of electronic connector production is finished product assembly. There are two ways to connect the electroplated pins with the injection box seat: individual mating or combined mating. Individual mating means inserting one pin at a time; combined mating means inserting multiple pins together with the box seat at a time. No matter which connection method is adopted, the manufacturer requires all pins to be tested for defects and correct positioning during the assembling stage; another type of routine inspection mission is related to the measurement of the distance on the connector cooperation surface.

Like the stamping stage, the assembly of connectors also poses a challenge to the automatic inspection system in terms of inspection speed. Although most assembly lines have a beat of one to two pieces per second, the vision system usually needs to complete a number of different inspection items for each connector passing through the camera. Therefore, the detection speed has once again become an important system performance index.

After the assembling is completed, the size of the connector is much larger than the size promised by a single pin in the order of magnitude. This also brings another problem to the visual inspection system. For example: some connector box seats have hundreds of pins with dimensions exceeding one foot, and the detection accuracy of each pin position must be within a scale of a few thousandths of an inch. Obviously, the inspection of a one-foot-long connector cannot be completed on one image, and the visual inspection system can only detect a limited number of pin quality in a small field of view at a time. In order to complete the inspection of the entire connector, there are two methods: using multiple cameras (increasing system consumption); or when the connector is in front of a lens through the period of triggering the cameras one after another, the vision system will "stitch" the single-frame images captured one after another. , In order to judge whether the quality of the entire connector is qualified. The latter method is the inspection method usually selected by the PPT visual inspection system after the connector is assembled.

"Practical orientation" testing is another requirement of the connector assembly on the testing system. This "practical position" refers to the interval from the top of each pin to a specified planning baseline. The visual inspection system must make this imaginary baseline on the inspection image to measure the "practical orientation" of each pin apex and determine whether it has reached the quality standard. However, the datum point used to delineate this datum line is often invisible on practical connectors, or sometimes appears on another plane and cannot be seen at the same time in the same lens. Even in some cases, the plastic on the connector box has to be ground off to confirm the orientation of this reference line.