Graphics file generation for a computer-aided manual work place in the electronics manufacturing environment

Presents some general thoughts concerning the acquisition of operation, machine and quality data for manufacturing and discusses the application of a PCB production preparation system as a part of the manufacturing design system. The necessity of the automation of production preparation is based on having a continuous flow of information in manufacturing environment, in general, to reduce the through-put/cycle time, to reduce the set-up time and to have a better product quality and flexibility with low batch sizes. The paper presents a method of generating low-cost graphics for the handling operations of the computer-aided manual workstations. The method presented uses the CCD camera with pattern recognition, based on pixel/vector conversion, to generate automatically 2-D or 3-D graphics of the prototype of the product. The graphics generated can then, if necessary, be transmitted to a CAD workstation to add comments to the drawings for the handling of the operations. After that, the pictures can be down-loaded to the computer-aided manual work place on the factory floor