Time, the other dimension

With the new “3G7” and the 272 Checker sensors, Cognex have further eroded the gap between the InSight and their entry-level product. The big news is that these have a 752 x 480 resolution sensor, meaning that they are effectively a regular smart camera. Or they would be, if the functionality wasn’t limited to presence detection and measurement. Make that presence detection OR measurement in the case of the 3G7.

Of course, there’s a price to paid for more pixels, and that comes in the form of lower frame rates. Cognex claim these new Checkers can inspect 800 parts per minute, which I interpret to mean that the frame rate is about 13 fps.

I’m a little disappointed by that because one of the novel features of the original Checkers was the 100fps speed. This gave the user the option of grabbing and looking at many images, rather than just analyzing a single picture. If you don’t see where that might take you, I suggest you read the interview with Bill Silver, Senior VP and co-founder of Cognex, available in the Whitepapers section of the Inspect-Online machine vision portal. You’ll need to register, then look for “Everything is in Motion.”