Off-the-shelf backlighting product

Backlighting is one of the oldest machine vision lighting techniques, though it’s not without its challenges. Cylindrical metallic surfaces – think Coke can – can be extremely difficult to gauge in a backlighting setup and really need collimated light plus telecentric imaging.

Well it seems Keyence have identified this as a niche in which they didn’t have a presence, until now. Writing on SensorTips, (December 26^th, 2011,) Randy Frank describes the TM-3000 2D Dimensional Measurement System, which seems to include those aforementioned essential components. Randy also provides a link to the Keyence product page, though I suspect you will have to register for access.

Now I should mention that I’m pretty sure I saw Spencer Luster of Light Works demonstrate a very similar system a few years ago. If I’m correct, the big difference was that Spencer had a larger field of view, which, depending on what you might need to gauge, could be useful. So by all means, invite the Keyence salesperson in to give you a demo, (they’re very good at that,) but in the interests of doing some due diligence, ask Spencer what he could do. He might just have a few tricks up his sleeve that Keyence haven’t considered.