Thursday, March 21, 2013

How to measure dust


I just sweep dust under the carpet, but there are people who want to look at it closely. Likewise, some folks want to look at the particles in liquid. For those of you with such interests, I present… the FlowCAM.

This scientific imaging system has been around since 1999, but because I deal in the manufacturer of hard stuff it’s not something I’ve needed. But when I stumbled across Fluid Imaging Technologies and their suite of tools for measuring tiny particles I was, as my British co-worker likes to say, well impressed.

In machine vision terms, it’s a back-lit system with high frame-rate color imaging, high magnification and good depth-of-field, and a blob analysis toolset. In other words, it’s nice but not exciting. What I do like though is the speed with which it works and the spreadsheet nature of the user interface.

Now I know there’s another company with a spreadsheet interface, but this is completely different. The spreadsheet makes it possible to sort the blobs that have been extracted from the various images. It’s a neat trick that I may want to incorporate into my future systems – when the customer recognizes the value of the information a vision system can provide anyway. And that gives me an idea for my next blog post.

2 comments:

Lew Brown said...

Thank you for your kind words about FlowCAM and VisualSpreadsheet... I am glad that I discovered your blog, and have mentioned your blog and this article on my blog, www.particleimaging.com .

I was curious to find out where you saw the FlowCAM system.... I couldn't tell from your site where you are located.

Best Regards,

Lew Brown
Director of Marketing
Fluid Imaging Technologies, Inc.

Anonymous said...

Hi Lew,

Glad you're enjoying my scribbles.

I'm sorry but I don't recall how I found your website. I just remember thinking it was interesting technology that would appeal to my readers.

Thanks for the link back.

All the best, Brian