It is hard to open an Industry newsletter or visit an equipment manufacturer’s website without coming across a mention of the Internet of Things (IoT) or Industry 4.0, Smart Manufacturing and ‘big data’.
My particular interest is the use of these technologies to allow the systems Solderstar produces for the electronics manufacturing industry to provide information our customers can use to better the information they have to make decisions that will improve their process quality, efficiency and save them hard dollars. IoT techniques and technologies are not new, in-fact that is what is so powerful, the network infrastructure, software protocols and formats are well established with excellent development and diagnostic tools to quickly connect and scale systems across the manufacturing shop floor, interchange of information is simple using these format to allow wider system to share in data collected.
From a purist’s point of view, all sensors will be intelligent and can collaborate to make a massively intelligent network of devices to help manufactures build ultra-smart manufacturing lines etc. etc.
That may come one day, but my experience is the industry is currently looking at the ‘big data’ phase of this digital revolution. Engineer are not sure what data is actually useful to them, what can be analysed successfully to improve machine down time etc. The development phase of capturing manufacturing needs to first occur, before that can be employed in the full production environment to save that company money. Many are looking at the ‘low hanging fruit’, one of these areas is clearly the reflow ovens and the soldering process, the technology employed in this area typically uses immense expertise in thermal dynamics and control systems to provide ovens that can successfully solder assemblies of all shapes and sizes.
Some higher end ovens already have some data collection capabilities and people are using bespoke systems to capture chronological process information, the data available is usually from the control system feedback sensors which give a good indication of process performance.
Improvements made in the oven data we capture
Real-time oven monitoring systems have been with us for decades, the original Solderstar system – The SolderStar APS (Automatic profiling System) was introduced back in 2005, that system had a single rigid probe fitted along the fixed conveyor and measured process temperatures close to product level. The probe technology has evolved over time, where we now use a fast response flexible probe fitted to both left and right sides of the process to detect process problems quicker and more comprehensively; this system can be used on both single and dual lane conveyor systems.
The data captured by these probes is much more informative; it gives a true reflection of how the process is responding to oven loading or extraction system change for example. The other big advantage of these 3rd measurement systems is the ability to not only monitor machine parameters such as temperature and speed, but collaborate this information with real component profile data to predict what the current process data would be in terms of peak temperature, time above and other process or component parameters.
Why may this be useful? other than the confidence that every assembly produces was done so within define limits, it is useful for predicting trends in the process that are likely to result in a reduction in quality or a Stop condition ultimately occurring on the machine. Using SPC and intelligently tracking the performance data available from these measurement systems allows trends to be easily predicted, combined with improved maintenance scheduling can result in improvements in up-time and higher yield from the same equipment.
The ultimate goal in the Industry 4.0 / Smart Factory scenario are these predictions will happen automatically by intelligent systems which have this data available to them. The possibilities go much further than this, but I am only focusing on what we can improve at the oven itself.
The Next Step – Machine Monitoring to Smart Manufacturing
Traditionally the main user of real-time reflow oven performance monitoring systems were medical, safety critical and military applications. The technology has also however been widely accepted as the ‘way to manufacture’ in other industries such as other high value sectors such as automotive, or where high production volumes are the norm and things can go wrong a very large scale. In fact I have not met anybody who would not like to have the capability on their oven.
The drive for smarter, leaner and systems that collaborate has driven SolderStar’s path to take its Machine Monitoring Platforms to the next level.
Only by doing this can we meet the needs of this exciting new development within Industry. At Productronica 2015, we unveiled our newest evolution of real-time monitoring solutions, the SolderStar SMARTLine.
The SMARTline is essentially a suite of hardware and software products which allow electronic manufactures to gain a real insight into how the thermal process is performing.
It can be scaled across multiple manufacturing lines or factories. It provides the networking, data collection and collaboration modules to allow ovens to be as smart as any other pieces of equipment on the line. Using this well established networking protocols and infrastructures just makes sense, existing skills in IT and network configuration make deployment much more simple and end users are comfortable with management long term.
Using data exchange format such as XML also makes things much simpler from both a development and integration point of view. Any format can be ultimately used, but the web based techniques championed for IoT are well established and work well. There is XML processing libraries in all major development languages, many are free and make the reading and writing of these formats trivial for a software engineer.
What can we do today?
We are already pushing forward hard with development; our measurement technology was already developed so the transition has been relatively quick.
We have focussed on the development of connectivity solutions that allows our measurement units to be networked, gather and share their data to any system that is interested.
That work is done, we can provide data for every assembly that passes through the line, including zone temperatures, speed, barcode, time/date, and profile data and soldering process parameters.
In addition to this we can provide live information which shows what is happening at the line now, the system is also ‘two way’, not only can we stream measurement data from the oven but we can also make requests to the Smartline system to perform an action on the line, for example driving a light tower or forcing a SMEMA signal to stop the feed of product into the oven.
This system came together very quickly, as in essence we had 50% of the required system well established and good experience in the team of web based development. We had a system that produced ‘big data’ from an oven, and its data outputs can be easily imported to factory management software, job done.
Not exactly, we quickly realised that the move to full factory management integration was not something realistic for many, especially if the current phase of involvement is ‘let’s measure and see what is useful to us’.
We also need to show the power this data can bring, so we have also developed our own focussed software tools named ‘SMARTLine – Central’.
SMARTLine – Central is a web based software system that receives data from the networked nodes fitted to the ovens; it is intelligent and needs little or no configuration for a new site. All items are intelligently created as data begins to flow into the system; data is stored using SQL and NOSQL techniques to provide a robust and scalable data gathering solution. It can be run on anything from a Raspberry Pi to a virtualised server, depending on how much data is flying around.
The initial motivation ultimately was to show potential customers that they can improve their process quality right now and the investment in improved oven monitoring is a keystone in their move to increasing production data intelligence and smarter methods.
With the tools we have today , they can immediately to see through ‘dashboards’ and web based reporting how their thermal process are currently performing both live and historically.
We are also working on reports that provide information from the data about line to line performance, so what differences can be highlighted and questioned.
Where are we going from here?
My belief is groups of intelligent sensors collaborating to produce the specialised needs of the individual elements of the process are best suited, many decision need to be taken in real time and require embedded intelligence with local decision making capabilities at the production line, rather than a central system making all decisions from lower intelligence units. Using the correct technologies means that powerful systems can be quickly created and the ‘big data’ they generate made available top whatever can make use of it.
Once example is the desire to reduce energy and nitrogen consumption, with the obvious savings that would be made. By analysing oven throughput information over time, plus integration of data from other systems such as Oxygen sensors and real-time power consumption measurement , will allow all the data to be correlated to best achieve the savings that are there to be made.
Future development in oven technology will provide machines that can be controlled more intelligently and remotely to provide the lowest cost model for manufacturing flow.
Alternatively, if end users already have this capability then our integration portals will allows the raw process data to be received and analysed by 3rd party system that make use of the data to make their own informed decision.
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