Outcome summary
We built a vision system that captures two images of each part under two different lights, in one machine cycle, and delivers them straight to the customer's equipment, which stays in control.
Starting situation
The customer needed images of a component's side contacts and of its central area, each under the lighting that shows it best. The images had to be taken automatically at the right moment of the customer's own machine cycle and delivered straight to their equipment. The existing machine had to stay in control.
The system
- An industrial camera and two different illuminators, a side bar light and a centre ring light, driven by a small dedicated lighting controller.
- On each trigger the controller fires a two-shot sequence: one frame with each light, a fraction of a second apart.
- Software that pairs the two frames and crops the regions of interest from each.
Implementation
The customer's machine stays the master. Our system acts as a vision server: trigger in, synchronised dual-light capture, region extraction, results out. The customer's equipment talks to it over a simple network protocol. The lighting sequence is set in the controller, so it can be tuned without new firmware. The same pipeline also runs offline on stored images for testing and validation.
Results and evidence
The full chain was validated end to end on the real production hardware with the real camera and lighting. It delivers synchronised dual-lighting images directly to the customer's equipment, without changing how their machine is controlled.
After launch
The system was then integrated with the customer's line.