Being loyal to knowledge beyond its use-by date limits our ability to detect and leverage disruptive new technologies. In this light, knowledge may be one of the biggest barriers to technological advancement. Since knowledge has an ever-decreasing lifespan, especially for those developing machine-vision and image-processing systems, keeping up with changes is an increasingly challenging task that is more important than ever. As detail-oriented people that work well together to solve problems, engineers take pride in the ability to use and manage complex information as a regular part of daily work. That’s why the team here at Vision Systems Design work hard to bring you the most comprehensive and global source of information about the latest news, technology trends, machine-vision components andapplications.
Each and every issue includes exclusive systems integration articles that explain how technology is used in a real-world system application. By doing so, we hope to inform you of technology that may be useful in your applications. To complement the magazine, we have our Buyer’s Guide to help you compare and select the components that meet your requirements and our website that contains numerous informative resources such as white papers, editorial digests and webcasts. In fact, two recordings for webcasts presented live in June are now available for viewing at your leisure on vision-systems.com.
The first, How to deploy 3D imaging technology into your inspection application, was recorded on June 15 and presented by Craig Borsack, President, G2 Technologies. You can view the webcast at http://bit.ly/VSD-3DIN and hear insightful tips from Craig’s real-life experience on how to successfully deploy 3D technology. Packed with valuable information on the types of 3D hardware and software products that are available on the market, this webcast also covers common 3D vision challenges and discusses when it is appropriate to use 3D vision while offering insight into which type of 3D camera may be appropriate for certain tasks. Craig also talks about how 3D imaging technology can be used in industrial inspection applications to accomplish various tasks and provides a case-study of an actual automated 3D imaging solution measuring connector pin height and location before answering questions at the end.
The second, When it’s not working – Analyzing and addressing issues in typical machine vision systems, takes a deep dive into troubleshooting machine vision systems. You can view the webcast at http://bit.ly/VSD-NW, which was recorded on June 20and presented by David Dechow, Principal Vision Systems Architect, Integro Technologies. This webcast discusses the many problems that may arise when designing and deploying industrial machine vision systems, and how to identify and resolve these problems as quickly as possible. Dechow provides many specific examples of the types of issues that may arise, and how to address them. Before taking questions at the end, he offers valuable tips on designing for success and how to best prepare to avoid these issues in the first place. As always, I hope you enjoy this issue and these two webcasts.
About the Author
John Lewis
John Lewis is a former editor in chief at Vision Systems Design. He has technical, industry, and journalistic qualifications, with more than 13 years of progressive content development experience working at Cognex Corporation. Prior to Cognex, where his articles on machine vision were published in dozens of trade journals, Lewis was a technical editor for Design News, the world's leading engineering magazine, covering automation, machine vision, and other engineering topics since 1996. He currently is an account executive at Tech B2B Marketing (Jacksonville, FL, USA).
B.Sc., University of Massachusetts, Lowell