Wednesday, May 1, 2013

Easy setup, thanks to Keyence

Dialing
in the lens, by which I mean setting aperture and focus, can be one
of the hardest tasks for an engineer or tech with little to no vision
experience. Banner tried to help some years back with their focus
number indicator and an auto exposure tool, but now Keyence have gone
one better with their IV series of vision
sensors.

I
wrote about this sensor back in February 2012, (“Vision
sensors from Keyence”)
but it was only today that I finally got to work with one. And what a
great impression it made!

Setup
is really straightforward, thanks to a stylus-operated touchscreen
and a menu that walks the user through each step of the process. An
auto brightness function sets the exposure, and auto-focus does the
same for the lens. Both can be overridden if you don’t like the
results, but I would think they’d be fine for the routine
presence-absence type jobs this product is aimed at. I should also
mention that I thought the image quality was really good.

Only
two image analysis tools were available on the sensor I was using:
Outline and Area. Outline is essentially a pattern-matching tool that
learns a shape and compares the acquired image to this master. Area
is similar but really just counts pixels that meet a specified
criteria. Not a lot of options, but probably enough. There is also a
location tool that finds a shape and relocates the inspection tools
to deal with variation in part position.

I
didn’t get a lot of time to test the performance of the tools, but
they seemed to run both fast and reliably. I should also mention that
interfacing with a PLC was a breeze too.

Overall,
the IV vision sensor is extremely intuitive. I especially like the
auto-focus, which makes it possible for someone with little vision
experience to get a simple application up and running in minutes. How
do I know this? Because I watched the shop electrician do it after
receiving just a few minutes of explanation.

When
I first wrote about this Keyence sensor a commenter asked how it
compared to the Cognex Checker. Now I have some experience I can
answer: I like the Checker, but for ease of use, image quality, and
performance, the IV wins.