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36 SMT007 MAGAZINE I AUGUST 2023 Sensor and chemical analysis are part of the "Automation & the Journey to the Smart Fac- tory", a nine-hour webinar course offered for free by the UK Institute of Circuit Technology (ICT) organization. Industrial Sensors and Transducers for Electronics ere are many industrial sensors present in PCB fabrication and component assembly on PCBs. Table 1 is only a partial list I have col- lected. ese sensors can be found online but may not be suitable for all factory installations. ey can be quite expensive, so I have looked for sensors and transducers that can be used in PCB processes and compiled a list in my book, Automation and Advanced Procedures in PCB Fabrication. 3 Some- times, the best sensors come from fabricating them yourselves. DIY Training Sensors have been around since the Industrial Revolution and were the crucial tool that allowed us to make use of the steam engine. Now, there are so many electrical sensors. Later, in graduate school, I took a course titled "Instrumental Methods of Chemical Analysis." 2 is was a DIY course that required us to build 22 analytical devices and their elec- tronics from a LEGO brick-like set of opti- cal and mechanical components that snapped together. is course covered a wide variety of topics, including spectroscopy, chromatogra- phy, radiation absorption, and polarimetry, to name a few. I learned that sensor systems can lend themselves to DIY approaches. Industrial Training Aer college, I was recruited by Hewlett- Packard in Palo Alto, California, where I worked first in RF device substrate manufac- turing and later in automation. As one of the world's largest instrument and test equipment manufacturers, HP had very large data acqui- sition devices: industrial DAQ and control units. ese provided additional sensor train- ing through practical industrial applications. Some resources I found helpful that are still available today are: • Tektronix and Keysight publications (Figure 1) • Tutorials from IPC and Institute of Circuit Technology • Distance Learning: Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) like Kahn Academy or Purdue Global Figure 1: Vendor-supplied sensor and DAQ publications. Table 1: Common sensors used in manufacturing today