Options for machine vision lighting

Have you looked at the lighting products from Microscan lately? I hadn’t, so when I stopped by their web site the other day I had something of a surprise. It was the new “Hi-Brite” line that caught my eye. These are LED area lights, good for flooding a surface or object with light, but what’s different about these is that the controller is integrated into the light.

This means that, should you want to strobe the lights, you just hook a trigger signal up directly to the light itself. I imagine this means you can use the same signal that goes to the camera, although I’m a little fuzzy on how I would control strobe duration – by the pulse width perhaps?

If you’re wondering what strobing achieves, well from the spec sheets it seems this increases the light output by nearly 3x. That can be pretty significant when you’ve got a target in motion and need a short exposure. Of course, strobed lights can be rather unpopular in a production environment, which is why many folks like to work in the IR part of the spectrum. Unfortunately though, these “Hi-Brite” lights are only available in red and white, which I see as something of a limitation.