Mechanical and electrical hardware
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 station was used to measure a small crystal used in the manufacture of medical CT scanners. A Keyence laser scanner was used to measure the crystal in three different axes, providing both dimensional and “squareness” information to an operator. …
This is another machine built with NAS in about the 1998-1999 time frame. As you can tell, NAS was a huge user of aluminum extrusion; for about 5 years or so the were the biggest 80-20 customer in East Tennessee. …
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 …
I was browsing through some old pictures of systems trying to get some inspiration for today’s post and ran across some pictures of the cotton classing system we helped put into the USDA facility in Memphis. This was a cooperative …
Most people who work around electricity are familiar with multimeters. They have been around since the 1920s and used to only be available in analog form with a moving needle that pointed to several scales. Originally multimeters only measured current …
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 …
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 …
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 …
