DVT 2004: vision moves past ‘big lie’ perception

Lies and big lies are among previous perceptions promoters of machine vision technologies are fighting on the plant floor, according to Robert Tait, research, General Electric, in his comments, "Future of Machine Vision in Manufacturing."

By Control Engineering Staff September 23, 2004

Lies and big lies are among previous perceptions promoters of machine vision technologies are fighting on the plant floor, according to Robert Tait, research, General Electric, in his comments, “Future of Machine Vision in Manufacturing.” Tait was among speakers at the DVT 2004 Global Business Conference and User Group Meeting in Las Vegas, NV, in mid-September. The 8th annual meeting also emphasized new hardware and software innovations, partner and customer training, and discussed U.S. economic improvements.

Tait says optimization of machine systems sometimes can include thinking about vision while designing the product that vision is supposed to inspect. “If it was engineered for design for manu-facturing, those features could have been designed differently to make it more appropriate for machine vision.” Lighting and [feature] recognition technologies continue to advance, he says, but getting involved in product design cycle can help with things like improving access for vision sensors, and choosing colors and fluorescent dyes to discriminate among parts instantaneously. Small notches, laser marks, and attention to fonts are among other considerations that can optimize design for machine vision. “If you can make the design good for machine vision,” Tait says, then, “Watch the benefits grow.”

DVT news included:

  • New, free DVT Intellect (next generation) vision software. Click here to read more from DVT .

  • Legend Line Scan LS and the stainless-steel Extreme Environment Legend XE camera, which brings Legend 550 high-speed camera performance to FDA-regulated washdown environments for $8,495. It’s up to eight times faster than Legend 540.

  • DVT introduces OPC Server for machine vision .

  • DVT buys MTI Machine Vision to grow in semiconductor industry .

  • Dream bigger: serving customers can lead to success .

Wago applied its I/O device knowledge to offer Camera Break-out Module, a small, economical interface board, compared to previous options.

Among other products introduced by DVT exhibitors include:

Wago Camera Break-out Module , an interface board with LED indication for interfacing 24 V dc signals from a 15-pin high-density connector (female) to Wago 739 Series terminal blocks. At 2.3 x 3.4 in. footprint and $60 list, it’s approximately one-eighth the size and one-third the price of previous options.

Allison Park Group vision enclosures —stainless-steel, explosion-proof, and customized—designed for DVT and other cameras, lighting, and other vision components.

Recent unrelated announcements from other vision companies include: Cognex Corp . made code quality metrics available on In-Sight ID readers and vision sensors. These new verification capabilities include IAQG (International Aerospace Quality Group) Stan-dard 9132 for Data Matrix codes and Cognex supplemental metrics for code readability. Cognex also announced a series of free half-day ID seminars to teach direct part mark identification fac-tors for part traceability in the automotive, aerospace, healthcare, electronics, and defense indus-tries.

Jai Pulnix CV-S3200 , a digital signal processing (DSP) color camera, has YBS and Y/X video output and extends sensitivity by integrating up to 64 fields for low-light applications.

Vision Components introduced the VC2068/E smart camera , with built-in Ethernet/TCP/IP ca-pability, based on Texas Instruments DSPs.

Wintriss Engineering Opsis 7500 linescan camera captures up to 150,000 lines per second at re-duced resolution and 5,000 lines per second at full resolution. It uses a Motorola 860T PowerPC processor running Wind River’s VxWorks real-time operating system and an Altera 10K130 field-programmable gate array.

—Mark T. Hoske, editor-in-chief, Control Engineering, MHoske@cfemedia.com


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