Improved Flying Probe-Inspired In-Circuit Tester for Practical Laboratory Activities

This paper presents an innovative, improved, and sensorless Flying Probe-Inspired In-Circuit Tester (FPICT) for verifying the interconnects of Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs). The proposed tester, due to its portability, can be easily deployed in laboratory environments for practical purposes. Thus, our research aims to demonstrate the effectiveness of the FPICT in increasing the learning rate of young scholars in Test Engineering Education (TEE). A total number of 16 high school students from "Caius Iacob" Technological High School of Electronics and Automation of Arad, Romania, were selected as the target group for the test platform studies. Before the practical laboratory activities, we performed a series of tests to evaluate the reliability of the improved FPICT. The experimental results show that the proposed FPICT is suitable for smaller and medium-sized PCBs and proves efficient regarding the probe’s positioning accuracy (99.06% for measurement testing), navigation time (an average of 8.20 seconds for single point testing), power consumption (an overall of 14.67W for all considered test cases), and cost (around 30 dollars). The obtained results indicate that the FPICT prototype passed the initial tests and can now be utilized in a learning environment for the final product validation stage.