Patent ID: 9240661
Filing Date: 2016-01-19
CPC Classification: H01R,Y10T

Claim Text:
1. An apparatus for feeding crimp terminals on a carrier strip into a crimping press, the separation between the terminals along the strip being the pitch of the strip, the apparatus comprising: a feeding mechanism for displacing the carrier strip along a feed path; an image capture means adapted to capture an image of a portion of the feed path; and, an image processing means connected to the image capture means and being adapted to (a) determine the position of at least one terminal on the feed path from the image; (b) determine the pitch of the strip from at least one of the image and a pre-stored value; and, (c) calculate an alignment displacement of the strip along the feed path from the position n and pitch such that a further terminal on the strip lies within a crimping zone on the feed path; the image processing means being connected to the feeding mechanism and adapted to provide a control signal thereto such that the feeding mechanism displaces the carrier strip along the feed path by the alignment displacement.