I’m worried what you’re reading

I spend a fair bit of my working month reading Vision Systems Design. Okay, it’s only an hour out of 200 or so, but I do go through it from cover to cover.

Trouble is, the distance between those covers is getting ever thinner, and that worries me. Pretty soon VSD will disappear, and then I’ll feel obliged to do an extra sixty minutes of work each month. And as for the esteemed Mr. Wilson, well perhaps he’d be forced into retirement, and that would, in all seriousness, be a real loss to the machine vision world.

What’s to be done? I have a three point plan.

First, you need to subscribe and you need to read. Andy packs each month’s edition with far more real, technical info than you’ll find in a dozen other trade magazines, and there’s always something useful in there. Each month I probably follow up on half a dozen web links that he provides, and some inevitably result in business for the companies mentioned. Which leads me to point number 2.

Make VSD your vision Google. Follow up with companies mentioned. Quite frankly, if Andy says a company is doing something clever, they are and it’s worth knowing about. And it might solve one of those nagging problems you can never get rid of.

And point 3: if you make or sell machine vision products – cameras, lights, lenses, cables, filters, mounts, brackets, stands, motion control or software - advertise in the damn thing, and tell Andy when you’re doing something new.

This is all important stuff, so take heed. If we don’t use it, we will lose it.