Maintaining your machine vision system

In many factories fewer engineers are trying to support more manufacturing equipment, so anything that reduces “help” calls from production is much appreciated. With that in mind, here are “Six Tips for Reducing Vision System Maintenance:”

1. Check the shrouding to ensure both dirt and ambient light are excluded. No shrouding? Then use a filter on the lens that matches the lighting, and add some form of air blow off or positive pressure. (Yes, air costs money, but so does downtime.)
2. Replace fluorescent lighting with LED. LED lighting lasts much longer and is more stable over time.
3. Replace halogen lighting with LED. Admittedly, it can be difficult to get the same light intensity with halogen, but the lamp life is so much longer.
4. Add a ‘light meter’ tool to the inspection program. This can be as simple as a histogram positioned over some unchanging part of the image. Set this to trigger an alarm if the image becomes too dark. (This should let you know if the workplace has become dirty, if the lights are failing, or if the camera has moved.)
5. Provide a live image on a monitor so that the operators can see what the system is doing. Supplement this with a picture of what the image should look like. This way an observant operator will let you know when something has changed.
6. Put a password on the system so that only authorized people can make changes. (Sometimes, for the best of reasons, production will try to “improve” the system themselves, usually because it’s failing too many parts. But that’s a topic for another post.)