A compact and low cost solution to control your SMEMA based SMT electronic assembly equipment.
SMEMA (commonly shortened to) is a simple machine-to-machine communications interface commonly found within the Electronics Assembly industry. It has been superseded by IPC-HERMES-9852 ‘The Hermes Standard’ but is still present on a large number of electronics manufacturing equipment.
It operates on the opening and closing of dedicated circuits that are associated with Signals. Compulsory signals are 'Machine Ready' and 'Board Available'. An optional Signal of ‘Bad Board Available’ can be used, which makes the 'Board Available' signal a 'Good Board Available'. Once all circuits are closed, denoting Machine Ready and Board Available, a Printed Circuit Board (PCB) will move between equipment on conveyors.
The adaptor allows IT Professionals to either interact with the raw SMEMA signals found on legacy equipment using a simple API or using the MultiPlug Edge Computing Platform allows them to create a solution using building blocks of MultiPlug software extensions.
Such solutions may be to use SMEMA as an interlock to pause and check if a product should proceed down the production line to the next manufacturing equipment. To achieve this the Adaptor acts as a SMEMA middleman, not turning on either the Machine Ready SMEMA signal, or the Good/Bad Board SMEMA signal until the software check is made.
Common uses of the Adaptor would be remote SMEMA state monitoring for a SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) systems and SMEMA Interlocking which may also be connected to barcode reading or a MES (Manufacturing Execution System).
Navigate to the lower half of this page to discover more details of uses for the Adaptor.
AKA the SMEMA Ethernet Adaptor
The Digital Economy has grown over the last 30 years and the people that work within it use the Web Browser has their native user interface. To employ their skills into the Manufacturing industry we must use the same technologies to talk the same language. While the Adaptor is a Headless device in normal operation, Setup and Monitoring is conducted by a Browser based user interface.
As a device with a defined purpose, the Adaptor will fulfill that purpose, but we now work within the Industry 4.0 era where shop floor technicals should be able to customise their solutions based on their changing needs. If that means the injection or extraction of data at given points, then a true Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) based product should give the option for change.
The Adaptor runs the MultiPlug Edge Computing Platform that allows additional functionality to be loaded by Software Extensions. MultiPlug.Ext.SMEMA is one such Open Source Extension but other proprietary Extensions can be loaded. New Extensions can be created using the .Net programming language.
The MultiPlug uses the Publish–Subscribe design pattern where events are mapped to subscriptions using a visual web browser editor making it fully flexible for changing needs.
The Adaptor features USB ports and a RS232 serial port which a barcode scanner can be connected to. Solutions can be created using MultiPlug of a chain of Events starting with a scanned Barcode, followed by a lookup of that barcode with a Manufacturing Execution System (MES), Database or IPC-CPX connection using another MultiPlug Extension dedicated to that task. After this the SMEMA Machine Available signal can be made. Also see SMEMA Interlocking below.
It may be useful to pause a production line due to an unrelated situation and rather than stop the equipment locally, a remote stop triggered by a remote user action or third party system. This is possible using the REST API which can control all SMEMA I/O as well as using the Web Browser based user interface.
You may want to simply pass the state of the SMEMA signals onto a SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) system to simply monitor the movement of a production line. In this situation the SMEMA signals will be relayed instantly from upline to downline equipment and events created in MultiPlug that can be pushed to higher systems using Network Sockets, REST Http, Serial or a bespoke MES interface. This solution would be seen as Read Only.
The SMEMA interface can easily be repurposed for general Input and Output. A single lane SMEMA interface consists of 3 switch circuits (1A 30 VDC max) and 3 circuit detectors (open or closed). So could be easily used to trigger visible indicators such as beacons (Outputs) and connected to switched circuits (Inputs).
The state of these I/O can then be mapped within MultiPlug to trigger off other events such as a HTTP Post request to a third party system, Or use the MultiPlug REST API to toggle the state of the output I/O.
