Machine Vision System Reliability – it’s often a simple fix
Machine Vision Systems can appear to be quite complex. Cameras, lighting, and software all work in harmony to deliver a precise outcome every time.
We often receive new enquiries from people experiencing reliability issues on their current systems. The downtime from an unreliable system can mount up very quickly and before you know it, you’re wasting thousands of hours every year.
Many people assume a new camera system will be needed. But in the majority of cases, the problem can be solved relatively easily without such a large investment.
This is because of one simple thing that has a huge impact on the reliability of a machine vision system – lighting.
As any photographer will tell you, light is key to the quality of an image. And it’s that final image which is being used by the machine vision system software to carry out the desired task.
Often, a simple change to the lighting setup can remove errors and dramatically improve the reliability.
The biggest culprit when it comes to lighting problems is ambient light.
Correcting Lighting Issues
One of the techniques we often use to correct lighting issues is to install a coloured light in combination with a band pass filter.
A band pass filter simply filers out all other wavelengths of light, except that of the coloured light source we’ve installed.
Therefore, any ambient light from windows, internal factory lights etc. will be eliminated.
This means we control the lighting on the products and enable the machine vision system to pick up the information it needs for the next phase of the operation.
The Right Solution
As much as we’d love to sell everyone a new camera system, it’s not always the right solution to your machine vision system reliability issues.
We value long-term relationships with our customers over making a quick buck. So, we’d much rather fix your issues with a lower cost solution, if that’s the optimum answer.
If you’re experiencing machine vison reliability issues, book a discovery call now.
We’ll help figure out how to solve it in the most efficient way so you can reduce downtime and increase profit margins – happy days!
