Once the gift-giving ends, it’s time for the quality equipment spending to take off. January is typically when quality professionals start filling their quality wish list.
Document control is the cornerstone of quality, compliance, environmental health and safety (EHS) and process excellence. Quality process information, work instructions, job descriptions, and specifications must all be created, revised, distributed, tracked and “retired” with consistency and efficiency.
Intelligent factories, electric vehicles and traceability are just some of the factors that are influencing change in automotive part inspection, say experts in the field.
Although automotive parts suppliers use a variety of testing equipment to conduct a wide range of tests and inspections—and within specific tolerances, which warrant highly precise tools and processes—original equipment manufacturers have refined these inspection practices over the course of decades.
An electronic component on its way to being installed in a system has, it is hoped, no cracks, voids or other internal structural defects that may cause an electrical failure in service.
What is tension? The application of tension involves stretching or pulling a piece of material. Tensile tests are conducted to help specify materials for engineering applications.
The quality lab is a critical component to manufacturing companies, especially when preparing parts for production, routine inspection and also product development.
Before you leap forward into another eventful year, let's look back.
January 8, 2020
The holiday season is over. You made it! You can take a breath. You are ready for the hustle and bustle of 2020. There will be new projects, challenges, and successes.
It all started with the wheel. Moving things, and ourselves, across distances became easier and more efficient with the wheel. Over the centuries, we progressed from carts we pushed ourselves to wagons pulled by animals we domesticated and trained.
I hopped into my rental car in Fort Lauderdale, impressed with how much the whole process of renting a vehicle has improved from the days when it felt like you were signing your life away for a few days of local transportation.
More companies than ever are downloading decisions to calibration laboratories causing perfectly acceptable gages and instruments to be ‘failed’ by them. How could such a thing happen?
As a Master Black Belt I teach Lean Six Sigma courses and often provide definitions of common terms. One such term is “value” which I define as the ratio between quality and price (value = quality/price).
When the subject of quality is discussed it’s a safe bet that many would suggest it needs to improve. Additionally, many consider that senior management is most responsible for that improvement.
Lens and camera sensor technology tends to co-evolve. As cameras drive to smaller and smaller pixel sizes with growing formats, lenses need to be designed to match those higher capabilities.
The official definition of “machine vision” encompasses all industrial and nonindustrial applications in which a combination of hardware and software provide operational guidance to devices in the execution of their functions based on the capture and processing of images. In short, machine vision helps companies manufacture quality goods, repeatably.
Visual display testing is rapidly being automated using systems that are capable of objectively quantifying visual qualities like brightness, color, and contrast of displays.
Human perception is the ultimate standard for determining the visual quality of a device. However, the use of human inspection as a quality control method for development or production of devices is problematic because of the statistical variation between observers.
In today’s manufacturing environment, automatic vision inspection has been widely applied in many different industries including semiconductor, electronics, food and beverage, pharmaceutical packaging, automotive, and many others.
Understandably, designers of high-throughput, multi-camera machine vision systems have grown dissatisfied with those aging standards and have found a new champion, CoaXPress (CXP), a high-speed, point-to-point, serial communications interface that runs data over off-the-shelf 75Ω coaxial cables.
Teledyne DALSA announced its Xtium™2-CXP series of high-performance frame grabbers. The new series transfers image data to the host memory at maximum acquisition rates with zero CPU utilization, allowing host applications to operate at maximum efficiency.
IDS Imaging Development Systems GmbH is expanding its USB3 Vision camera range by more than 100 models in the coming weeks. The company integrates the entire range of Sony sensors in several camera families, which it currently already offers with a GigE Vision interface.
JAI announced the availability of four new 3-CMOS prism color cameras designed for use in microscopy-based systems where maximum control of dust, lint, and other foreign object debris particles (FODs) in the optical path is critical.
With three new models incorporating the latest 2nd Generation Sony IMX sensors the camera manufacturer Allied Vision expands its robust high-resolution camera family Prosilica GT for demanding applications.
Laser Components USA manufactures high-quality custom quartz glass lenses within a very short time. At the production site in Olching, Germany, substrates with diameters from 0.5 to 2 inches can be shaped into plano-convex, plano-concave, biconvex, biconcave, and meniscus lenses with radii of curvature from 12 mm to 15,000 mm.