I felt extremely sorry for my brother last month. He had to attend his son's wedding -not in England where he lives - but in Changsha in the Hunan Province of China. As many world travelers know, Changsha is a long way from England and he was obliged to travel there on a flight that lasted over 13 hours.
Personally, I am getting rather too old to fly such distances. Six hours on an aircraft is all I can manage. So it was that last month, I was invited by Smart Vision Lights to what the company intends to be an annual conference about lighting and systems design.
Since the seminar was to be held in Acme, MI, USA, I was rather pleased that -even if I woke at 2:00AM in the morning - I would arrive by 10:00AM the same day, even with one connecting flight.
Unfortunately, American Airlines had other plans.
After sitting on the runway for two hours watching "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg," on my computer, the aircraft took flight. Needless to say, I missed the connecting flight. With no apologies from the airline staff, I found that the next flight was five hours later. At approximately, 5:00PM the next day, I entered the doors of the Grand Traverse Hotel where the seminar was held. It had taken me longer to fly to the Midwest from Boston than it had my brother to fly from England to China!
During the next two days, there were numerous tutorials and presentations on machine Vision Systems Design. Unlike many other such events that I have attended, Smart Vision Lights was smart enough to have asked no less than six of their current customers to describe their applications and the lighting, cameras, frame grabbers and other OEM components used to design these systems.
Perhaps one of the reasons that speakers were willing to divulge such information was the $2,000 award for the best presentation that was given to Harris Jones from Advanced Control Solutions (Marietta, GA, USA; www.acs-ga.com) who described a system that identified threads on clear glass bottles. After the presentations, there were numerous questions from the audience members, many of whom were design engineers.
Luckily, if you were unfortunate enough not to attend, the company informs me that these presentations and videos will be placed on their website. It is rare that I use this editorial page to congratulate a company upon their efforts. However, it must be said that the conference was well worth attending (even after a 15-hour trip) and one that I hope will be repeated next year.
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