Showcase: Wire Color Detection Machine

Objective:

1. Invented an inexpensive method to accurately check and judge (Pass/NG) wire colors insertion sequence of the Lead Wire Assembly in our production.

2. To reduce standard time of the wire color checking process.

Condition:

Currently we have 4 assembly lines for manually inserting wire-terminal to housing, and our checking process is basically based on one by one contact check following a specified color sequence.

Problem:

The accuracy is very much depend on operator to strictly follow sequnce of colors, and the speed is up to the skill of operators.

Target:

1. The invention must increse accuracy of checking process, to filter out wrong color defects from Lead Wire Assembly job.

2. The invention must judge Pass/NG faster than the current checking process.

2. The invention must not be expensive.

3. The invention must be easy to operate and maintain.

Solution:

We have thought about to use a camara to capture image of wire colors and be processed by some kind of program in a computer. The first computer platform in our mind is a PC-based together with Web-Cam, because it is quite easy to write a code. But after some consideration, we think the cost will be too high. So we have kept on looking for the alternative.

Until recently, we have found an Embedded Microtroller Board called BCore which its hardware, software are quite vesatile enough to support the digital image processing for this project. We have written some codes to command this board to grab image from the CMOS camera, convert RGB color to HSV values, and run pass through a digital filter. Finally calculate positon of each color and compare them to a set of known color sequnce to yield PASS/NG result.

We have run this Color Checking Machine for quite a while now, please see the detail from our YouTube video

 

 

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