Porting a weather station app from the Arduino® GIGA™ R1 to the Arduino® UNO™ R4 boards
There is a vast gulf between making a one-off prototype and mass-production at scale. Within that gulf, there are innumerable small teams and businesses churning out PCBs in relatively low quantities – say dozens or hundreds a month. Inspection needs in that market are under-served, but Mukesh Sankhla designed a solution: a very affordable automated PCB inspection system .
This is a small, desktop-friendly setup intended for vision-based PCB inspection. It has a turntable with six stations and can automatically rotate through those, analyzing the PCB in each slot. It can identify specific components and check for anything missing, as well as defects. It does so with a camera view and YOLO vision models, deployed using Edge Impulse.
That is especially impressive because the system is easy and affordable to build. All it requires is an Arduino ® UNO ™ Q board , a LED, a webcam, and a servo motor. The servo rotates the platform underneath the webcam, which resides in an overhead mount. The STM32 on the UNO Q is able to control the servo movement, while the Linux side can run the vision models.
The entire structure is 3D-printable and can be adapted to the user’s needs. The turntable, for example, is customizable to cradle the PCBs being inspected. It would also be simple to alter the size of the turntable and decrease or increase the number of stations. For instance, four stations would allow for a workflow that inspects both sides of unpopulated boards and both sides of populated boards.
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