When you’re selling vision systems in Europe

Occasionally I need to ship inspection machines to Europe, and inevitably that means I have to know about CE marking and the Machinery Directive.

You might think Google would serve up all the information I need on this, but you’d be wrong. The problem is that a large consulting industry has grown up around CE marking, and those guys aren’t about to share their knowledge for free.

However, Control Design magazine (www.controldesign.com) published some useful links in their August 2013 issue. You should check out Control design because they have lots of stuff relevant to machine vision people, but I’m going to share the links directly.

Rockwell Automation has a pdf titled, “European Directives: An Overview for OEM’s and System Integrators,” which does exactly what it says in the title. And the European Commission themselves have a useful portal, “CE marking”. If you’ve ever needed to send any kind of equipment across the ocean you need to be aware of the issues involved. Click those links, read, and learn.