Without a doubt, the electronic devices we see in the market today are shrinking in size. Be it an MP4 player, a DVD recorder or a laptop computer, small and slim is the way to go. As such, the printed circuit boards (PCBs) that go into these electronic gadgets have inevitably downsized in terms of overall design and form factors.
At Beyonics Technology they faced the following two challenges:
Smaller PCBs mean less real estate for the barcode labels.
The increasing demand of product traceability requires more manufacturing related information to be labelled onto every PCB. Information like lot code, vendor ID, product number, serial number, etc. all need to be encoded onto this smaller label size.
Beyonics and its customers resolved these issues by migrating to a 2-Dimensional Data Matrix ID code.
Migration of Reading 1D Linear and Stacked Codes to 2D Data Matrix Codes
Even though Beyonics had identified the right approach, the real challenge was with the actual implementation. Within the plant itself, Beyonics has many in-circuit and functional testers with different reader configurations. Their existing readers were in poor condition and could not read 2D codes. Many of the systems require custom cabling to handle various triggering inputs from the PCs and I/O modules and some were configured to communicate with different protocols for non-standard outputs. It became obvious that they needed to find a new reader that could handle these demands and that the migration effort needed to be kept to a minimum.
Cognex’s DataMan Fixed Mount Barcode Readers Provide Versatile Communication
Through a few sessions of on-site troubleshooting and testing, the Cognex’s sales and engineering team was able to perform a direct replacement of Beyonics’ current fixed-mount readers without altering any existing software programming or hardware wiring configurations. Beyonics’ process engineers spent little time on this migration and so they could continue concentrating on their primary tasks of keeping the production lines up and running.
“I did not wish to perform any re-cabling or re-programming on my current setup. Writing a set of new documentation would have been a nightmare. Hence, the new readers had to be plug-and-play, and the DataMan fixed mount barcode readers from Cognex did exactly that, to my delight,” said Parthiban Periayah, Engineering Specialist at Beyonics.
Shanker Kaneson, Engineering Specialist at Beyonics added, “Prior to installing the DataMan readers, we were experiencing unacceptable read rates with the current readers. Our operators often had to reload the PCBs when a no-read situation happened. This caused the SMT machines to come to a halt until manual intervention took place. With the DataMan fixed mount readers installed, we witnessed a production throughput increase of about 10%.”
Deployment into Other Operations
Beyond the deployment within the SMT Machines, Beyonics also replaced their existing handheld ID readers with the DataMan handheld series.
Shanker added, “The DataMan handheld readers uses the same Setup Tool software as the DataMan fixed mount unit, making our deployment so much easier since we don’t have to go through another new product orientation or training. Moreover, compared with our existing handheld readers, the DataMan handheld reader is an electrostatic discharge safe device that conforms to the specifications published in the IEC 61340 standard. In the past, we had to wrap the handheld scanners with an ESD-safe jacket which was awkward and non-IEC compliant.”
