Software tips

Every machine vision application involves programming, even those on vision sensors, and programming is a pain. Few of us vision folks ever received any computer science education; we just tend to bumble along writing code that gets the job done.

This is not a good approach. The main problems are:

• It’s hard to update the code or additional functionality
• It’s hard for others to follow your code
• Inefficient execution
• Bugs that are hard to find and harder to fix
• Add your own here

What’s the solution? Well, other than taking a good CS class (Stanford has some online that I think are excellent,) how about reading “10 software tips for hardware engineers” published in EDN magazine January 28^th, 2013?

This covers the basics, like “flowchart first”, and use “state machines”, before getting in to more complex areas, like interrupt service routines. It’s good, practical advice. If you ever program, which includes working on Cognex InSights, I suggest you take a few minutes to see if there are any tips you can use.