Earlier this week I had the privilege of attending my second Automate and Promat show in Chicago. I wrote an earlier post on the Automate 2015 show, but when I went back and re-read it I realized that I actually…
Earlier this week I had the privilege of attending my second Automate and Promat show in Chicago. I wrote an earlier post on the Automate 2015 show, but when I went back and re-read it I realized that I actually…
In today’s post I’m going to ask you to think of sensors in a different way. Most engineers who are specifying equipment think of sensors as discrete or analog devices, proxes or photoelectrics, flow or pressure sensors, thermocouples and the…
This week’s post is presented by Acieta, a robotics integration and automation company with facilities in Wisconsin and Iowa. This article lists some of the advances that have made the use of robots common in various manufacturing areas. ******************************************************** Robots…
Several of my topics in the past have dealt with gauging and measurement. Most of the systems I have worked on in the past used LVDTs, encoders, optical sensors or machine vision when it came to accurately measuring the physical…
This week was my first experience using vision and robots together. I have integrated many vision systems in the past and also done a number of robotic applications but this was my first time using vision to guide the robot.…
In another post I described an air filter tester built with NAS in the late 1990s. These testers were for automotive filters and generally were built around a single automation concept; a Cosmo leak tester or vision system for instance.…
This is another application done with NAS from about 1998. We did a lot of vision, gauging and leak testing applications for Tennex, a Japanese cooperative venture in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. This company has since been bought by Mahle, a German…
This was a contact lens inspection station built in 2005 for Vistakon, a Florida company. It has 2 cameras mounted to X-Y-Z axes with similarly mounted backlighting below the moving pallet. Samples would be taken from the production lines and…
In my previous life I spent about 30-40% of my time doing vision applications. Most of the jobs I did involved using “smart cameras” which are self-contained vision systems where the frame grabber circuitry, image processing and I/O are built…
When I used to do a lot of work for NAS in Knoxville we got a job to inspect rubber gaskets after they came out of the molding process. The gaskets were about 2-3 inches in diameter and were somewhat…
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