This project provides an overview of the development of a custom machine built for daily use at ATX Hardware GmbH. Lomecs is an acronym for laser-guided optomechanical control system.
Overview
Lomecs was a development project I worked on at ATX Hardware GmbH. Its purpose was to build a machine capable of automatically testing arbitrary customer-provided circuit boards and capturing relevant image and measurement data for downstream processing.
The generated data was intended to support additional internal software used for risk assessment and for preparing test adapters. In practice, customer board files often lacked important information such as accurate component dimensions or height data, both of which are important when designing safe and reliable adapter setups. Lomecs was created to help close that information gap.
The machine combines several hardware components: a camera system with both a standard and a microscopic camera, each equipped with orthographic lenses; a laser with a 180° range of motion; and a disc-shaped studio light. The platform can move in three dimensions across a working area of up to approximately 0.8 × 0.6 × 0.3 m and can additionally adjust the ground plate over two angular axes.
Software
The control software was developed in VB.NET and consisted of a user interface and a backend engine for machine control and workflow execution. The software itself is proprietary to ATX Hardware GmbH and is therefore not publicly available.
One of the main challenges was building wrappers around vendor-provided controller libraries for the machine axes. These libraries were primarily designed for industrial scenarios with highly repetitive motion sequences, whereas our use case required a more flexible and interactive control model.
Another challenge was the synchronization of the machine subsystems, particularly the interaction between axes, laser, and camera hardware. Because the machine needed to support varying boards and adapter geometries, a considerable amount of work went into avoiding collisions and ensuring safe operation for both the equipment and the people using it.
Axis control was implemented over a serial COM interface and updated multiple times per second. Achieving stable communication without timeouts required extensive testing and tuning, but the final motion control proved reliable in daily use. The camera and laser subsystems were easier to integrate, largely because both their documentation and software interfaces were substantially better.
The software remained in productive use after the initial development phase and continued to receive smaller updates for evolving operational requirements.
Adapter Tests
The machine’s ground plate was designed to compensate for tilted boards or adapter setups. In practice, the most important adjustment was the Z-angle. At the start of a test, the software used the laser system to determine the angle of the mounted object automatically and then adjusted the lower axes accordingly.
Once aligned, the system performed a sequence of height and size measurements and captured an orthographic image of the circuit board. Because the field of view of a single image was limited, the board was captured in several steps and the resulting images were stitched together at the end of the process.
The software used a custom input format generated individually for each board. After a brief calibration step, the entire process could run automatically. In practice, however, the most frequently used function was high-quality image capture, as these orthographic board images were almost always required for further processing.
Lessons Learned
During the later stages of development, it became clear that the installed axes did not provide the level of precision required for highly accurate measurement. While errors on the order of 0.1 mm would have been acceptable, the observed mean error was closer to 0.5 mm. Even with filtering and correction methods in place, this was not sufficient for the intended measurement use case.
As a result, the project was ultimately reduced to its optomechanical imaging component. The measurement-oriented part was discontinued, while the orthographic image capture workflow remained highly successful. The captured results proved useful in practice, and a follow-up system focused exclusively on image acquisition was planned.
I can provide sample captured images, although many production board images contain sensitive or protected information.
Conclusion
This project provided extensive practical experience in machine control, hardware-software integration, industrial imaging, and the design of larger technical systems. Although the original measurement goals could not be fully realized because of hardware limitations, the project still resulted in a productive and useful imaging system.
For me, the project was particularly valuable as an introduction to hardware-oriented development, circuit-board handling, image-based workflows, and the engineering trade-offs involved in turning a complex prototype into a system suitable for day-to-day use.
