Customer Solutions

Smart Card Manufacturing Using Motion and Vision

Author(s):

Jeffery A.. Long, Automation Works

Industry:

ATE/Instrumentation

Product:

LabVIEW, Motion Control, Serial, Vision

The Challenge:

Designing and building a high-speed, fully automated manufacturing workcell for programming and quality assurance (QA) testing of plastic smart cards.

The Solution:

Using LabVIEW connectivity and powerful multitasking to deliver a machine controlling four servo axes, four RS-232 serial devices, integrated machine vision, and a host of pneumatic actuators and sensors.

Introduction
A major manufacturer of radio frequency (RF) smart cards needed an automated workcell to program smart cards as its final manufacturing process step. Programming consists of downloading electronic content to a smart card, which gives each one a unique personality per customer specification. In addition, the system must test each card for readability at its maximum specified range and print a code on its surface to visually identify it.

Our design constraints:

• Programming various products with the same cell
• Performing programming, testing, and printing with dedicated RS-232 devices
• Basing card personalities on sales order data located on a network file server
• Requiring a visual print inspectionNeeding a line rate requirement of 1000 per hour
• Finishing the initial implementation cycle within eight weeks

Only one product - National Instruments LabVIEW - could handle the challenge of quickly integrating digital I/O and servo motion control for material handling; machine vision and OCR for print inspection; RS-232 communications for device control; network database access for data management; full graphical user interface (GUI) interaction for manual process monitoring and control; and software accessibility for rapid process and product changes.

Our Design
The inherent ability of LabVIEW to manage several, independent tasks reliably was the key to our success. At any instant, dozens of tasks share Pentium 133 MHz processor time with one another to provide closely coupled servo motion control, digital I/O control of pneumatic actuators and sensors, and RS-232 communication and GUI monitoring. Figure 2 shows the top-level machine control program (VI) block diagram - each major machine component has its own top-level VI running in parallel with those of the other components.

The high product throughput rate, space sharing among several mechanisms, routing of cards to different bins based on QA test pass/fail status, and the need to precisely position printed graphics on the cards dictated the need for servo motion control. We chose ValueMotion for its high performance and seamless integration with LabVIEW via ValueMotion VIs with motor tuning capabilities. NuDrive cable connectivity kept this project on time and on budget by providing black box motor amps with the industrial standard motor connections to minimize engineering design and assembly time of our four-axis motion control subsystem. Even with many machine operations tasking in parallel, ValueMotion was still capable of high-speed decision-making to prevent axis collisions in shared work envelopes.

LabVIEW and the PCI DIO 96 board gave programmable logic controller (PLC)-like I/O speed, precision, and coordination to this workcell. A pair of 19-in. rack-mounted SC 2054 interface boards offered ribbon cable connectivity between PCI DIO 96 and industry-standard Opto-22 24-point optical isolator boards for machine level voltage and current interoperability. We saved a great deal of time and expense on this project because we integrated these components through software, without any custom engineering or fabrication requirements.

Experience with ink-jet printing methods solidified the resolve to perform 100 percent inspection of printed characters for correctness and quality. We employed advanced IMAQ Vision VIs with the OCR Toolkit and the PCI IMAQ 1408 to acquire and verify high-quality strobed images of card graphics on-the-fly as cards were transported through the machine without stopping.

The need to control an ink-jet printer, a card programming module, a card reading module, and a card data server, all via RS-232, meant we required more serial ports than a standard PC could provide. An AT-232I/4 quickly gave us reliable connectivity to all our serial devices with extra ports for future expansion.
Using SQL Toolkit VIs, users download sales order information from a MINX ODBC-compliant networked database and machine configuration data from a Microsoft Access database at the beginning of each batch process. During the batch run, vital process data is collected (Figure 3), logged, and displayed to the machine user. At batch process termination, the SQL Toolkit VIs upload running data to a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet for analysis by manufacturing management.

Conclusion
Industrial machinery requires robust, flexible, and easy-to-use software and components. LabVIEW excelled in this manufacturing application by providing fast, reliable software with easy connectivity to subsystem components, resulting in a high-throughput, smart card production workcell in an eight-week project time frame.

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