Factory Automation Integration Newton Labs Fuse Box Inspection System

Newton Labs (newtonlabs.com) supplies Riffle Machine Works, Inc. with an automated Fuse Box Inspection System.

Riffle, a major supplier to the Class 8 Heavy Truck industry, had a need to save inspection costs and to have perfect inspection of the fuse box assemblies they supply to truck manufacturers. Newton had designed and manufactured such automated fuse box inspection systems for more than 15 years.
The Fuse Box Inspection System that Newton Labs provided to Riffle interrogates the customer electronic work instructions for full bill of materials and subsequently inspects the completed fuse box to ensure installation of the fuse and relays exactly match the bill of materials and work instructions. The Newton system uses full machine vision optical character recognition to ensure all fuses and relays are properly installed rather than simple color recognition systems sometimes employed for fuse box inspection. Since the printing on the fuses and relays does not vary as can the shades of the colors of fuses and relays, optical character reading ensures absolute correct inspection.

Joe Harvey, Quality Engineering Manager at Riffle, stated, "The Newton system is a state of the art system offering real value to us.” He went on to say, “In almost a year of use, we have not had a single inspection error that allowed a defective fuse box to pass through to our customer with the Newton Labs system. "Not only did the Newton system allow us to reassign the inspectors on the task but it has also improved cycle time and created an increased degree of product quality, reliability, and credibility with our customers.”

The custom user interface supplied with the Newton Labs system shows high resolution imagery of the fuse box and exactly which fuse or relay is correct or incorrectly selected, as well as exact installation position.  The user interface was developed and supplied to Riffles specifications.  With the high resolution imagery provided in the Newton Labs Fuse Box Inspection System, a wider range of manufacturing defects in the fuse boxes, while not the direct responsibility of Riffle, are now detected and provide a valuable additional service to the customers of Riffle.

For further information about the Newton Labs Automated Fuse Box Inspection System and many other types of factory automation solutions provided by Newton Labs, please contact Newton at sales@newtonlabs.com