Don’t spoil the ship for a ha’p’orth of tar

Whenever I wanted to settle for ‘good enough’ my father would trot out this old English saying as a way of reminding me not to cut corners. And today I’d like to relate it to cables. At the risk of sounding like a salesman, cables are the forgotten component in a vision system. You’re going to squirt your data bits down those pipes for years to come, so doesn’t it make sense to ensure the pipes are up to the job?

With that said, I’d like to introduce Northwire. If you check out their web site you’ll find that they have an excellent range of industrial camera cables, but what I really encourage you to study is their literature section, and in particular this paper titled “How Important is Cable in a Vision application?” (It’s a pdf file.) It will only take a few minutes to read, but it might save you hours of debugging time in the future.