OT - Questions about Your Experiences with Machine Vision

Hi All,

In a "previous life" at a different employer, I used to frequent this forum, and I've had some great experiences here. I know that this is a place where the "Voice of the Customer" can be heard, and people tell it like it is.

I'm wondering if any of you would be willing to share with me your experiences with Machine Vision. Good or bad, I don't care who's products you've used, I'm not even going to tell you which vendor I work for because I don't want to bias your answers.

If you'd be willing to share, you can comment here, however, I'd really like to have a phone conversation with you. I promise not to take more than 15 minutes of your time. If any of you would be willing to do this, please send me a Private Message, or reply with some contact info.

Thanks,
Steve Maves

I have worked with some older vision systems at my previous job.

1) Honeywell line scan cameras. Very rugged, very obsolete. I bet they're still sending them to Italy for repair. I have not seen another camera on the market that was so well suited to edge guiding with a builit in +/-15vdc output that we had wired directly to a servo amp.

2) Keyence (may have been the CV-701 or its predecessor, the CV-501). Very nice system at a decent price. It had a pretty easy set up process using a wired pendant, and serial and digital/analog I-O. I used its serial port connected to a PLC-5. I had issues with lighting in my test application, and the material I was trying to measure was very shiny and black with gum strips on the edges. Sometimes the edge finding tools would lock on to the inside edge of the gum strip, but I would have solved this with enough experimentation to get the lighting right. I left that company before I finished that trial.

3) DVT. I helped maintain and troubleshoot them, but did not write the programs. These were very powerful systems, and not too terribly hard to set up. They were reliable and rugged. We used them to measure the width of a wide sheet of perforated uncured tire ply material, and also to find defects that had to be a certain size to ignore the perforations.

Each system I worked with was exponentially more powerful than the previous one, and that was 4 years ago.

Someday, there will be one strategically located ZTP binocular camera wired to your PLC to replace all those darn limit switches and level sensors.

We also need machine hearing while we're at it, since the operators tend to put up with squealing bearings and parts slapping together when they shouldn't.

There are many types of machine vision

What do you want to do?
The is color scanning
Dimension scanning 2D and 3D.
Interior scanning like X-ray etc.

The saw/veneer mill industry has some of the best scanners around.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yre_efXIrBk
These guys are tough, very tough to beat. I have seen this at saw mills shows.

Peter, I'm specifically looking for feedback about general-purpose Machine Vision systems. The majority of vision problems now are solved with greyscale cameras with a 640x480 image, but I dont' want to limit the conversation to that.

OkiePC's comments are spot on. I've seen those Honeywell line scan cameras in operation, too, there's still nothing quite like them available on the market. Keyence makes a nice product, but regardless of your vendor, lighting is the critical component, that is a repeated theme that we see over and over again.

If anyone else is willing to share their experiences, again, I promise that this isn't a sales pitch, and I'll only take 15 minutes of your time. I've already had one excellent phone conversation, Thanks!

Hi Steve,
I'm working for an international cigarette producer.
I was tried Keyence cameras to check cigarette packs. It's a good system. But we are allready using a system in our machines as OEM. If you interested it that's a shortcut: http://www.tattile.com/catalogue/14/69/55/doc/Depliant_Smart%20_Reader%20M3_ENG_10_07_OK_WEB.pdf
The check speed is app. 1000 packs/min.

SteveMaves said:

lighting is the critical component,

Click to expand...

This is the most critical and where alot of vendors fall off. Usually the lights are from another vendor than the camera maker. This causes alot of the headaches. Also filtering lenses. In several aplications I have worked on this is how I got around ambient lighting messing with my system. Problem here ... once again you have to get with another vendor. So in my book I like Keyence for alot of aplications because I can usually get everything I need from the same guy, and because it is the same guy he knows something about what he is doing.

I have worked with a few vision systems. I started on an older Avalon stand alone vision system (which was pretty good for its time), and progressed to pc based vision, mac vision systems, and most recently DVT and Cognex.

The DVT systems are (were) my favorite. The software was easy to use, powerful enough for the applications I had to do, and the support was pretty good. It is too bad that they sold out to Cognex.

The last system I did here was a Cognex line scan system. Dealing with Cognex has not been a pleasant experience. The software is confusing, buggy, and not as powerful as the DVT. I found that I could not change the scan direction on some sensors, which made programming a little more difficult. The hardware seems very fast, but the documentation is horrible.

When discussing the software issues with their support, the first thing they said was that the problems were my fault. After having the Cognex rep use his laptop and experience the same problems, he said they would get back to me on when the problems would be fixed. I am still waiting for a response...