Industrial Machine Vision

[elden25]

Since now i only have experience with systems from Keyence, where all components and the software are from them. Mainly we check for position of contact pins (in 2d and 3d) and all sorts of faults for injection moulding parts.

At first this seems pretty easy with keyence but its pretty expensive as well as limiting if you need anything else. With a strong software background its pretty frustrating how limited they are. Also there is not really a possibility for deep learning fault detection.

So i was looking for alternatives. I was thinking about Halcon, Cognex Vision Pro or even opencv (but i am not sure if it is suitable/less time consuming for industrial applications).

But how do I even get started? The softwares itself for programming the vision programm seem more flexible and better suited but i have no idea where to start in terms of the following, hardware related, points:

which PC to take (or how to set it up according to your requirements like how many cameras and how fast the computation should be)

how to esure real time behaviour (or at least fast enough computation of the vision programm)

how to connect the PC to my PLC (ETHERCAT/PROFINET)

which drivers i need for the communication from PC to camera

frame graber etc for 3d profile sensors?

How to deal with these kind of problems for Halcon, cognex and opencv? Which is best suitable for industrial applications? Is there another library which is better suited? Are there any books or blogs for practical applications with these libraries?

[1100fps]

Where to start..  The Vision Show in Boston, or the Automate show in Detroit offer certification classes in machine vision.  Full disclosure, I teach one of the modules (the one about what can go wrong), but the program covers machine vision, from soup to nuts.  The show floor is also a font of useful information.  Talking to vendors can be an education in itself.  Automate 2023 is Detroit in May. If you can attend the show you will learn a lot.  Bring samples, carry them booth to booth.  You will learn about cameras, lighting, lenses, and software.

Another vision supplier for vision is Matrox (recently acquired by Zebra).

There are strategies related to software.  Runtime licenses from NI are $450 (last time I looked) per machine.  That's super cheap compared to the runtime license from Halcon. It's another thing to pay attention to. Of course with the new NI software rental program, I can't really recommend that path, and rumor has it that the Machine vision environment is not goin to see much or any future development.

I'm old and glad that I can retire any time, so the changes in NI are not affecting me much.  If I were younger and smarter, I would jump on the Open MV or Open CV train.  But the programming environment is just a tiny bit of the iceberg. Cameras, interfaces, lenses, lighting, fixturing are all as important.

Keep us posted on your progress..  Reach out if you thing it will help.

Cheers

Robert