100% Quality Assurance for Card Personalisation Processes

Inline magnetic stripe card analysis at full production speeds ensures encoded cards remain within pre-set or customer-defined limits during the card personalisation process.

Advances in digital electronics, component miniaturization and superior magnetic head design have finally enabled, what was once considered wishful thinking, to become an affordable reality. All current card personalisation manufacturers cringe at the thought of encoded cards failing to conform to pre-set or customized limits resulting in ruined production runs, wasted resources, and compromised delivery schedules. This scenario can now be earmarked to the history books as Rinas unveils its inline supervisory system (ISS) delivering 100% quality assurance for card personalisation processes.

 

The small footprint of the Rinas ISS module allows it to integrate within existing production environments where, at full production speeds up to 1.2 m/s (~18,000 cards per hour), it passively checks for amplitude and jitter discrepancies of the magnetic stripe encoding across all three tracks simultaneously. Current random sampling methods applied to finalized cards rely on an external analyser to perform this task, and any discrepancy found here can be a costly and time-consuming business.

 

Equipped with standard industrial interfaces, possessing its own intelligence in the form of compact firmware and being intuitive in its operation, the ISS enables customers to pre-define and set test limits themselves. Any card then failing the test can be identified and processed accordingly, which results in the customer being left with only those encoded cards that have been verified to 100% against defined limits. Working in this manner, the customer has full control over the cards’ quality requirements according to their proposed use. As an added bonus, the Rinas engineers applied yet more thought to the system’s deployment. By enabling amplitude and jitter measurements to be saved for each processed card, yet more possibilities are opened up in the supervision of the personalisation process – particularly where statistical predictions pertaining to magnetic stripe quality and head wear are extensively used.

 

The magnetic head signal waveforms are available in a graphical format, similar to those of a desktop card analyser system, which greatly simplifies read-error trouble shooting or for a detailed summary of the encoding quality. A “teach-in” calibration utility enables the user to compensate, at any time, for head wear or after head replacement, which has the added positive effect that the effective operational life of the read head is further enhanced.

 

---