Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Leaving DVT smart cameras behind


Much water has flowed under the bridge since Cognex completed their acquisition of DVT, but a lot of the old DVT cameras are still in service, plugging away at mundane and undemanding inspection tasks. Sadly though, the time comes for every camera when it can no longer perform its duties, and at that point a replacement is required.

This creates two challenges for the engineer assigned such a task: find a new camera to do the job, and get the application rewritten. Neither of these are trivial, but help is at hand.

Integro Technologies have on their website a handy little DVT to Cognex Cross Reference table. This shows which InSight Micro or 5000 series smart camera is equivalent to the old 500 series models.

What I found especially interesting though was the direct comparison of the old DVT cameras in terms of sensor, frame rate, speed and enclosure protection. Since these cameras are dying off this is of little more than curiosity value, but old timers might enjoy perusing the tables, if only to recall the earlier days of machine vision.

Such maudlin sentimentality makes me wonder if someone should launch a museum of machine vision. What do you think?

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