Gravity-fed vision system checks connectors
NOVEMBER 20--Merten (Wiehl-Bomig, Germany), a manufacturer of appliance connection boxes, has contracted Pulsotronic Merten GmbH (Wiehl, Germany) to develop a gravity-fed-parts machine-vision system to inspect the boxes at a rate of approximately 40 parts per minute. Dubbed the Video Check system, the finished system implements a two-stage PC-based vision system.
After images are captured using a PCI-based PCI-MVSG frame grabber from Matrix Vision (Oppenweiler, Germany), they are processed using the Pulsotronic Director PC-based machine-vision software package. This PC-based imaging software allows developers to construct a number of machine-vision routines using a set of primitive functions such as image capture, histogram, and filtering. In the first stage of the connector inspection, this software is used to determine the presence of a number of surface contacts on the electrical connector.
During inspection tests, images are displayed on a PC-based TFT flat-screen monitor. From this display console and a Siemens OP170B flat-panel monitor, operators can view the results of the tests and store them in database format for further analysis.
For more information, see Vision Systems Design, Nov. 2001, p. 11.