Troubleshooting

It’s the rare vision system that never needs any loving. It shouldn’t be that way, but factories are rough places for electronics, and that’s before all those nightshift tweakers get their fingers in the system. So inevitably, long-suffering vision engineer gets called to fix a system that isn’t working.

Now definitions of “not working” vary. It might mean that everything is being rejected, or that the system won’t power-up, or something in between, so said vision engineer needs some good troubleshooting skills.

This is something I’ve tried to address over my years of blogging, and now I’ve come across an article on the Assembly website, (“Machine Vision: Troubleshooting Vision Systems,” December 22^nd, 2010,) that seems to repeat many of my suggestions.

One of those interesting of the points made concerned camera mounting. To quote writer John Sprovieri, quoting Mark Sippel of Balluff“A standard 3/4"-inch screw mount is fine for attaching a camera to a tripod, but it’s ridiculous for industrial applications.”

Does that call to mind my recent post, “We need a new camera mountingsystem”?