Affordable Flying Probe-Inspired In-Circuit-Tester for Printed Circuit Boards Evaluation with Application in Test Engineering Education

This paper presents a hybrid sensorless In-Circuit Tester (ICT) design by combining the features of Flying Probe Testing (FPT) and the capabilities of a Coordinate Measuring Machine (CMM). The experimental results show that the proposed Flying Probe-inspired ICT (FPICT) is suitable for smaller sized Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs) and proves efficient regarding precision (overall precision of 95.70% for the measurements testing), test time (an average of 10.35s for a single-point test cycle), power consumption (an overall of 3.92 Watts for all considered test cases) and cost (around 25 dollars) points of view, being much more affordable and user-friendly when compared to traditional and expensive FPTs found in the industry.