Cognex In-Sight 5000 Series Connection

I have a Cognex In-Sight 5000 Series camera using Ethernet/IP we previously pulled off another machine, with an IP address in the 192.168.0.X range that I cannot find on the network. I have tried using an IP scanner and RSLinx in addition to the In-Sight Explorer discovery to no avail.

Anyone got anything on this?

Thanks in advance gents.

The In-Sight discovery should find it (even if is on a different subnet). Are you connected directly to the camera or through a switch? I'd check your physical layer (cables connected tightly, cables good, switches good, etc) I ran into a situation the other day (actually configuring a 5000 series camera) where I had configured the camera while connected directly to it but then couldn't see it through an un-managed switch...turned out I had a bad port on the switch.

-Benaiah

If it doesn't turn out to be the cables, you can reset parts of Cognex camera settings by manually triggering them on special QR codes.

Out of curiosity, are you triggering over Ethernet/IP or using discrete IO?

Thanks for the hasty replies guys.

Everything on the physical layer seems sound. I thought it could be an issue with the switch port or autonegotiation, but after going right into my computer's NIC I don't think this is the case.

@CapinWinky Triggering over Eth/IP. The QR code point is really interesting, I didn't know about this, but I assume this requires a trigger (don't know if the discrete trigger input will work for this).

I assume you are trying "Add Sensor/Device to network" and it is not showing up there.

Do you know the IP and are able to ping it? That would tell you that camera at least can communicate and In-sight just doesn't want to pick it up.
If you know the IP and can ping, In In-Sight Network try:

Right click In-sight Senors and select Explorer host table.
Select ADD. Give whatever name you want and enter the known IP. A new camera will appear in the list with the name you created. Double-Click and In-Sight will attempt connection to a camera at that specified IP.

Once connected you can change the Sensors network settings.
Once it starts showing up on your netwrok again you can delete it from the Host table.

I have had to do this on cameras that were dropping from the list when In-Sight was closed and re-opened because they were on different subnets.

Str8jCkt's comment reminded me of an issue I was having with subnets and the gateway not being set on the camera. The camera's were on a different subnet from the PC running the Cognex software and I had used a "route add" command in Windows to get to their subnet (Cognex's remote subnet feature was simply not working, so I did the routing manually). Anyway, I could manually add the cameras, but could not ping them and they would drop from the list every time I restarted the Cognex software. As soon as I set the gateway on the cameras properly, all problems were solved.

If you're not familiar with routing and gateways, here is an example scenario:
PC with Cognex on Subnet A; PLC with two network interfaces, one on Subnet A (192.168.1.100) and the other on Subnet B (192.168.2.100); and cameras on Subnet B. The PC needs to add a route to subnet B using the PLC's IP address on Subnet A as the gateway (enter "route add 192.168.2.0 mask 255.255.255.0 192.168.1.100 -p" in Windows command prompt, run as administrator). The cameras need to have the PLC's IP address for Subnet B as their gateway (192.168.2.100).

Deep inside the In-Sight Explorer folder there is a hidden gem: a file named "InSight.exe" (on my PC it is located in C:\Program Files (x86)\Cognex\In-Sight\In-Sight Explorer 4.9.0\Emulator\)

Start it and you will see the good old In-Sight Explorer app of about year 2000 vintage . There is an option to connect to a camera by its MAC address (which is printed on the sticker) rather by the IP address.

This usually helps when any other method fails. It did work for me a couple of times.

LadderLogic said:

Deep inside the In-Sight Explorer folder there is a hidden gem: a file named "InSight.exe" (on my PC it is located in C:\Program Files (x86)\Cognex\In-Sight\In-Sight Explorer 4.9.0\Emulator\)

Start it and you will see the good old In-Sight Explorer app of about year 2000 vintage . There is an option to connect to a camera by its MAC address (which is printed on the sticker) rather by the IP address.

This usually helps when any other method fails. It did work for me a couple of times.

Click to expand...

Nice tip LadderLogic! Didn't know that existed. I'll have to keep that one in mind if I ever have a problem like this.