Am I the last to know?

Another one to file under “why wasn’t I told?” – Festo, a name I associate with pneumatics, also offers vision sensors. If you take a look at their website, under Products – Image Processing you’ll find the SBOI and SBOC smart cameras. A glance at the specs suggests these are reasonable enough products, the differences being that the SBOC runs up to 1.3Mp resolution and takes a C-mount lens. But on the same web page there’s also a product called “Checkbox”.

Being the curious type, I took a look, and blow me if it isn’t a linescan smart camera! The Festo website isn’t particularly friendly, so it’s hard to learn much about this product – actually two products because there’s Checkbox and Checkbox Compact. Also lacking is much in the way of application case studies, so all told, it’s hard to figure out just how capable a product this is.

Now I imagine Festo isn’t actually manufacturing these products – the SBOI in particular looks quite familiar – so where does the Checkbox come from? And why haven’t I heard about it before?