Input devices
When using control devices in hazardous areas such as explosive or flammable atmospheres special care must be taken to reduce or eliminate the possibility of heat or an electrical arc or spark causing damage to personnel or equipment. Because of …
Some basic info on photoeyes from the Primer: Photoelectric sensors or Photoeyes transmit and receive a light signal. The sensor changes state when the light changes from being received to not being received or vice-versa. There are two conditions for …
One of the first applications I wrote about on this blog back in January 2011 was a Rocker Arm Cover gauge that used a number of LVDTs to calculate a plane and its intercept points. In that blog I concentrated …
Early in my career I became in involved in material handling systems more often than any other kind of project. For one thing, they were generally pretty simple from a controls perspective, just turning conveyor motors on and off, moving …
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 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 …
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 …
