If you ever get a chance to watch an aircraft being built, take it. Walking through the aircraft hangar at Northrop Grumman’s Palmdale, CA, facility, you will see two unmanned aircraft, each with a 130-foot wingspan, parked behind yellow tape. The scale of the aircraft and the desert setting make it feel like a movie set.
Pick up any shaft or threaded fastener. How are you going to check it? An outside micrometer is most often the go-to tool for measuring diameters. A height gage or drop indicator could be used to check dimensions between part features, while an optical comparator is a good way to inspect thread forms or measure a groove width.
Each new journey begins with a single step. That common proverb applies to most aspects of life, including the decision to start a new business or organization. A company can look back fondly to that first bold and courageous decision to merely begin.
As with every other function in modern manufacturing operations, inspection is subject to the management team’s efforts at cost control or cost containment. It is good business sense to maximize the value of every dollar spent, but it also means that hard choices must be made when selecting handheld gages.
I am in my tenth year as a part-time instructor at Western Michigan University, currently working with junior- and senior-level engineering students. I instruct the hands-on metrology lab of Dr. Pavel Ikonomov’s metrology class. We have about 15 weeks for this three-credit hour class to introduce metrology, focusing on precision measurement. We have about 45 students taking three hours of lecture and three hours of lab each week.
Bridging the gap is a popular idiom derived from Old English. In its earliest use—and not surprisingly—bridge meant “to make a causeway” and gap meant “an opening in a wall.” So, to the drywallers, civil engineers, and road construction crews of the early 14th century (Ha!), bridging a gap was quite literal.
Today’s manufacturing industry relies on the use of GD&T definitions, and the ability to verify parts directly to them for first article and production inspection and reporting. Only then do orders ship and the manufacturer gets paid. Price and scheduling are negotiable, quality is not!
I have received a couple of emails from readers recently concerning what does or does not have to be calibrated within a quality system. In both cases, the companies already have a program in place to ensure their measuring equipment, masters, etc., are calibrated on a regular basis but an odd item has popped up leading to debate within the company on whether that odd item has to be included in their calibration program as well.
It’s a rare company that doesn’t want to implement a better quality system, resulting in performance excellence for their company, employees, customers and stockholders. However, the pursuit of quality is easier said than done.
For quality professionals, the modern 3D smart sensor has moved to the center of conversations around quality in the automated age. Though 2D imaging remains popular, the rising affordability and strategic advantages of 3D vision for the smart factory are difficult to overstate.
Lighting selection and setup play a critical role in the success of a machine vision application. Vision systems rely on specific types of lighting to optimize contrast or to highlight a specific feature of interest.
In industries like consumer electronics, battery, and solar, the race for ever faster scanning, measurement, and control is critical to delivering 100% inspection of small parts moving at production speed.
More and more industrial manufacturers are moving towards automated solutions both to improve efficiency and solve staffing dilemmas. These jobs are often boring, repetitive, and/or prone to injury due to the work environment or the repetitive motion.
Quality control applications that require precise measurement can be some of the most challenging applications to solve. Very tight tolerance requirements demand a reliable solution that can measure parts in micrometers to detect the smallest variations in part size, thickness, orientation, placement, and more.
The Merkur camera series combines a line scan camera with a smart camera and makes it a high-speed system for the inspection of endless material, printing material, paper web and steel band, in the printing industry and textile production.
Pixelink, a Navitar Company, has released their new polarization machine vision camera built around the Sony IMX250MZR Pregius global shutter CMOS sensor.
Keysight Technologies, Inc. announced a comprehensive transmitter (Tx) and receiver (Rx) testing solution providing the speed and margins needed to meet the Peripheral Component Interconnect or PCI Express® 5.0 Technology (PCIe® Gen5) standard.
Omron Automation Americas announced the release of a brand-new FHV7-series smart camera featuring the world’s first multi-color light alongside a range of best-in-class image sensors (0.4MP to 5MP, with 12MP coming in the near future). This unique technology is designed to achieve the industry’s highest standards of precision in vision inspections on high-mix production lines.
With a firmware update, Allied Vision extends the feature set of the Mako G cameras equipped with Sony Pregius CMOS sensor. The Mako G-040, Mako G-158, Mako G-234, Mako G-319as well as Mako G-507 now support IEEE 1588 Precision Time Protocol (PTP) support and action commands for triggering the camera via the Ethernet connection (ToE).
Fluke Calibration introduces the 5322A Electrical Tester Calibrator, a multi-device calibrator built to facilitate compliance with exacting international standards such as the United Kingdom’s BS7671 17th Edition, IEC/EN Standards, Australia and New Zealand’s AS/NZS 3000 and Chinese verification/calibration regulations for various electrical testers.