Wednesday 30 October 2013

High-Performance LED line scan camera illumination



The CORONA II LED line scan camera illumination features an exceptionally high illumination strength and an outstanding homogeneity of its light distribution. The photometrical properties were increased eight-fold compared to the CORONA I thanks to outstanding homogeneity. Therefore, illumination values of up to 2,500,000 lux can be reached.

Chromasens offers with the LED line light family Corona II a standardized high-performance lighting system for applications with line scan cameras. Main features include a very high intensity (up to 2,500,000 Lux), an excellent homogeneity by using our reflector technology, narrow selected LEDs, a wide range of standardized focal- and illumination lengths and different light colours (standard colours as as well as infrared). The product portfolio is continually expanding, therefore further length variants will be available soon.


Tuesday 29 October 2013

Adept Robotic-Automation Products Specifically Designed for Food Packaging Applications


As an innovator of industrial automation products, Menzel has consistently led the industry in the development of innovative and powerful industrial automation products for manufacturing, packaging, material handling and factory automation. We pioneered Direct-drive robots, Flexible feeding, Database-driven applications software, Integrated vision and Conveyor tracking, Digital servo control networks, and other products and technologies critical to the flexible automation industry.


Systems Help Food and Beverage Companies Meet New Government Safety and Sanitation Mandates, Lower Labor Costs and Future-Proof Packaging Lines

Adept Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq:ADEP), a leading provider of intelligent robots and autonomous mobile solutions and services, today announced the availability of primary and secondary food packaging robots and peripherals that are designed specifically to help food processing companies to meet new government safety and sanitation mandates, lower plant operating costs, decrease waste and future-proof packaging lines.

Robotic automation is a proven solution for both primary and secondary food-packaging lines, which typically require rapid, repetitive, labor-intensive product handling. A primary or secondary packaging line that combines Adept's robotic components, application software, and game-changing SoftPIC gripper/grasper technology can yield significant productivity gains while improving safety and sanitary conditions.

"Food processors are looking to robotic automation with integrated vision and conveyor control to provide the speed and efficiency of hard automation but with flexibility for quick changeover between products," states Glenn Hewson, Adept Senior Vice President of Marketing. Our game-changing SoftPIC grippers are designed specifically for primary packaging of raw protein and fruits and vegetables, and when combined with Adept's industry-leading vision guidance and conveyor-tracking enable a variety of products to be packaged on the same line."

Hewson further adds "Robotic automation can also help processors dramatically lower distribution labor costs by packing mixed-product cases for specific store orders on the secondary packaging line and eliminating repacking at distribution warehouses."

Adept's differentiating food packaging innovations include the Adept Quattro™ s650HS, the world's only USDA-approved robot; PackXpert™ a powerful software solution for the rapid development of robotic packaging applications; SoftPIC™ advanced gripping/grasping technology that supports handling different products in a variety of packaging patterns from a single production line; and industry-leading integrated vision and conveyor tracking, for applications where robots must package products that are presented randomly on a moving conveyor belt.


Know More About Adept Robotic-Automation Products

BitFlow and MVTec announce 64-bit HALCON support

MVTec and BitFlow are proud to announce 64-bit operating system support for BitFlow's frame grabbers under MVTec's HALCON machine vision tools. BitFlow has had 64-bit drivers for it's frame grabbers since summer of 2006 (see below) and MVTEC has had a 64-bit version of HALCON for quite some time. However, the good news is that these two can now work together. The new 64-bit driver supports all of BitFlow's 64-bit boards (R64, Karbon, Neon) and supports all MVTec's products that run on 64-bit Windows operating systems. BitFlow is the first frame grabber supported under 64-bit HALCON.

Highlights of HALCON

  • The solution for the full range of applications in the field of machine vision and board, wafer & die inspection, medical image analysis, automotive and robotics, surveillance, and remote sensing
  • Large library of more than 1800 operators for low, medium, and high level image processing
  • Integrated development environment (IDE) for machine vision: HDevelop
  • Easy programming in C, C++, C#, Visual Basic .NET, and Delphi
  • Usage: product development, research, and education
  • Available for 32/64-bit Windows XP / 2003 / Vista / 2008 / 7 / 8, 32/64-bit Linux, Mac OS X 10.7 / 10.8
  • Support of multi-core and multiprocessor computers
  • High performance by using SSE2 and AVX, as well as automatic GPU acceleration
  • Support of hundreds of industrial cameras and frame grabbers, also for standards like GenICam, GigE Vision, IIDC 1394, USB, and Camera Link

64-bit operating system support provides a number of advantages for machine vision applications. First and foremost is the ability to use almost unlimited amounts of memory for images. This is a big help for sequence capture, golden template storage, long line-scan image buffer, etc. 32-bit operating systems are limited to 4 GB of memory for images, applications, and the operating system. In addition, 64-bit processors offer speed improvements for some classes of image processing algorithms.

HALCON is the comprehensive standard software library with an integrated development environment (IDE) for machine vision that is used worldwide. For more information on HALCON and MVTec. 

Karbon-CXP2 Two-Link Frame Grabber



BitFlow has a frame grabber model for almost every camera manufactured. Whether your camera is Camera Link, Differential (LVDS or RS422) or even analog, BitFlow can provide the interface. At the high end is the Karbon-CL, which is a quad Base CL frame grabber that can take in up to 160 bits at 85 MHz, and DMA at speeds of up to 2.0 GB/S.


WOBURN, Mass., Oct. 12, 2013 — BitFlow Inc. has introduced the Karbon-CXP2 two-link frame grabber for one two-link camera or up to two single-link cameras in smaller vision systems. 

The device offers video acquisition speeds up to 6 Gb/s and will send control commands and triggers at 20 Mb/s over a single piece of 75-Ω coaxial cable in lengths up to 135 m. A maximum 13 W of power can be transmitted to the camera along the cable. Engineers leveraging the Karbon-CXP2 can repurpose existing coaxial infrastructure to reduce system complexity. 

Cameras can be synchronized or unsynchronized, and a separate I/O is in place for each camera. The system supports serial communications to all cameras.