Usefulness of pcb through hole automation

Oulu university if northern part of Finland has a printed ciruit board manufacturing facilities. The purpose of the facilities is to provide prototype pcb's to university staff and students. This supports electronics development and teaching at the university.

One of the machines on the pcb manufacturing is a throughole plating machine. This machine is used for two to four layer pcb manufacturing. On this process connection is made between different layers on pcb's. See explanation of the process from here.

Like in all machines made for this type of small scale prototype manufacturing line, ours is fully manual one. The user needs to monitor and move the board in process from one path to an another by hand. This ties the user to the process for about an hour. The process itself is quite simple and straight forward one. This makes it a good canditate for automation. Automation will reliese the user for other duties.

Even this project is mainly focused to automate our own pcb through hole plating machine, it is interesting idea to develop the automation so that it could be licensed original equipment manufacturer. As most of the small scale pcb though hole plating machines are manufactured by only couple of manufactures and their machines are almost identical this work could benefit all the users alike. Later on OEM wil be contacted for co-operation interests.