Andy Wilson, Editor in Chief
[email protected]
If you plan to attend any type of tradeshow, it always pays to book in advance. If you do not, you may have to stay in a really low-cost motel located miles from the convention center. I learned this the hard way when attending this year's NI Week Conference in Austin, Texas. After failing to convince National Instruments' public relations people that I was only too willing to share a room with NI president Dr. James Truchard at the nearby Hilton, I was forced to book a room in a hotel five miles away.
After obtaining a significant amount of information on the first day of the conference and loading it onto my computer, I felt rather pleased. However, on the second day, things took a turn for the worse. Returning to my room after a late-night reception, I was shocked to see a rather large lizard scuttle under my bed from the bathroom.
Being of nervous disposition, I immediately ran from the room and to the hotel reception to report the intruder. The receptionist promptly agreed to ready another room and find a "technician" to remove the monster. Upon returning to the room, I was met by a burly fellow wielding a rather large rubber flashlight.
At this point, I panicked. Foreseeing the rather large man whacking the rather large lizard with his rather large flashlight, I entered the room first, yanked the power cord from the computer, threw it and all my clothes into my suitcase, and rapidly exited.
At nearly midnight, I entered the second room with dire trepidation, scouting around for any signs of habitation. Luckily, no such infestation was to be found. Always a company man, I decided to power up my computer to check my e-mail. I was horrified to discover that by rapidly removing the power cord, I had blown away the boot block on the machine. It was as dead as I imagined the lizard to be.
The next day, in a taxi cab driving back to the show I retold my tale to the driver. Being an inquisitive chap, he asked how on earth a lizard could possibly have entered a room on the 17th floor of such a hotel. Rather wittily, I replied that it had probably taken the elevator.
Those developing machine-vision and image-processing systems for harsh environments should not discount the havoc that living creatures and/or water and dust contamination can wreak on a system. Who hasn't opened an old home computer to find dust layered around the fan and PCBs?
In applications such as autonomous robotic vision systems and automotive or food production systems, special care must be taken to ensure that such unwanted objects (living or not!) do not enter the systems. Luckily, standards such as the IEC 60529 define an Ingress Protection (IP) that is used to classify and rate the degrees of protection provided against the intrusion of solid objects, dust, and water.
By using components specified for harsh environments, system integrators will be safe in the knowledge they may never have to send a rather burly technician armed with a flashlight to resolve such a problem at their customer's location.
