With all of the different types of sensors available and so many manufacturers and vendors competing for your business sometimes it can be difficult or confusing to choose the correct sensor for an application. In many cases such as detecting …
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 …
The process industry has used P&ID (Piping and Instrumentation Diagrams) for many years as a method of describing the relationships between piping, instrumentation and system components. Usually this is applied to chemical, batching or fluid transfer projects and is nearly …
Usually it is not very economical to build your own conveyor but occasionally an application requires a product that is not readily available. There are quite a few companies that will build a custom conveyor for you but delivery time …
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 …
*Note: This post was written in February of 2011. Since that time I have written a number of other posts on ladder logic you may find useful. These are listed below for your convenience: Ladder Logic 102: Organization (October 2012) …
It seems like there is a constant battle between mechanical designers, electrical designers, maintenance technicians and engineers over just what a properly fabricated control panel should look like. If it were up to mechanical, the panel would be the size …
I decided to write a little about my first metal-forming job after receiving an e-mail from a gentleman in India who has been in the metalforming business for 43 years (hello Ananth!) It reminded me of some of the good …
Back when I was in engineering school one of the requirements for nearly every class was to keep an engineering notebook. Typically it consisted of a bound book with graph or engineering paper where we would keep a chronological record …
In my previous life as owner of an automation and machine building company, part of my job was the hiring of employees. After placing an ad in the local paper I would usually receive 20 or more resumes for a …
