Making a positive IMPACT

It was good to see PPT at the Robots & Vision show. They’re one of the stalwarts of our industry, although in recent years they’ve struggled to remain competitive. You might recall that I’ve been ‘road testing’ their IMPACT software product, so I took the opportunity at the show to learn a little more about the company.

The first point I’d like to make is that being an underdog does seem to sharpen the appetite. PPT are hungry for your business, and they really will bend over backwards to win it (if I’m not mixing my metaphors there!) Secondly, and I’m receiving no consideration for saying this (!) IMPACT has a much wider range of tools than is usual for ‘smart camera’ type packages. I suspect that many of these have been developed in response to specific customer requests, and subsequently incorporated into the main product. This alone suggests that PPT are responsive to customer requests.

I still maintain that the IMPACT package has a steep learning curve, so you’re probably not going to want it for a one-off project. But if you’re looking for a versatile tool that can be deployed in many different applications, and without writing reams of C code, this is definitely worth a look.