Check out the September 2020 edition of Quality: Essential testing for essential industries, software scalability, eyepiece-less microscopes, the cost of quality and much more!
The COVID-19 pandemic has created an unprecedented surge in demand for healthcare and consumer products. This crisis has demanded stockpiles of supplies and has shifted the supply chain to local production.
It seems that everyone is interested in noncontact gaging these days. Laser scanners, structured light, confocal chromatic sensors, and CCD cameras have all made significant advances in the last decade, leaving us to wonder if this century old technology is still useful today.
All the buzz these days is about laser micrometers and vision systems. If you visit a tradeshow or get any online advertisement, many companies are promoting these measuring methods.
How a cost of quality approach, already customized for software and information technology, can be applied toward the deployment and implementation of Quality 4.0 in an organization.
Existing models and quality characteristics used for software, systems, and data quality can be leveraged to identify cost categories and support the creation of a Cost of Quality System for Quality 4.0.
As the immediate threat of Covid-19 subsides, companies are creating plans for introducing safe working practices. When it comes to sharing equipment, especially microscopes, there are concerns regarding cross-contamination and effective cleaning because most of the time an operator’s eyes come in direct contact with microscope eyepieces.
When do you need to be concerned about the effects of temperature in your inspection process, how significant is it and how do you deal with it? These can be tricky questions to answer.
In 1969, I had a microphone perched next to the radio, prepared to record each Beatles song played, just to satisfy my obsession at the time. What resulted on my old reel-to-reel player was a series of songs missing the first five seconds of each.
More important than the inventor, the first company to market, or even the technology itself, is adoption of the technology. Whether a technology is adopted early or late can make or break not only the technology, inventor, company, or entire industry, but also an entire economy.
In a recent gathering of quality professionals, the subject of unsuccessful change implementation surfaced. Most people understand change is necessary for survival, but in this era it is happening at an unprecedented, almost vertical rate. The bottom line though is that change is uncomfortable for most and it is common for people to resist change.
In my last column I mentioned the Market Research Study: United States Testing Laboratories done by the Consulting Group at Virginia Tech with Rachel Trebour as the project manager.
When an engineer begins the process of specifying a new machine vision system, they will often think very carefully about the line speed, the optics, and the image processing software.
Systems integration is the process of bringing together diverse and disparate components and sub-systems and making them function as a single unified system.
You’ve learned about light sources, lenses, cameras, camera interfaces, and image processing software. Now, you may be wondering exactly how to design and implement a complete, successful machine vision system.
The future of quality inspection is one that will see quality professionals working side-by-side with collaborative robots fitted with easily-swapped vision systems.
Over the past decade manufacturers have increasingly turned to flexible, customizable automation platforms to meet the demands of high mix/low volume orders and ensure their long-term survival in a competitive manufacturing environment.
In the world of machine vision, as in any tech field, there is a distinct divide between hardware and software. The hardware includes components of machine imaging systems such as the physical camera, lensing, cable interfaces, the PC or processor, etc. and are defined by rigid specifications (i.e. resolution of a camera, processing power, bandwidth of interface).