Category: New Product Releases

Ideal for industrial applications requiring precision, reliability, high speed, and high resolution, AT – Automation Technology’s XCS 3D sensor laser profiler 3070 WARP achieves speeds up to 200 kHZ with the dual head model. Even the single head can achieve 140 kHz. The key innovations in the XCS series are in the laser-line projection technology.

Aren’t all 3D sensor laser profilers similar?

Many indeed share underlying similarities. Often they use triangulation to make their measurement. And the output is a 3D profile (or point cloud) of a target, built up by rapid laser pulsed stepwise “slices” of the X dimension as the target (or sensor) moves in the Y dimension. Triangulation determines variances in the Z dimension based on how the laser angle reflects from the target surface coordinate onto the sensor. For a brief refresher on the concepts, see our overview article and illustrations.

What’s special about AT – Automation Technology’s XCS Series?

Key attributes are shown in the video and called out in the following text.

Homogeneous thickness laser line

Using special optics, the XCS series projects a laser line of homogeneous thickness across the target surface. AT – Automation Technology uses Field Curvature Correction (FCC) to create the uniform projection, overcoming the so-called line “bow” effect. This enables precise scanning of even small structures – regardless of whether such features are in the middle or edge of the laser line. What’s the benefit for the customer? It enables applications with high repeatability and accuracy – such as for ball grid arrays (BGAs), pin grid arrays (PGAs), and surface mount devices (SMDs).

Clean Beam Technology

The XCS Series utilizes AT – Automation Technology’s own Clean Beam function to insure a precisely focused laser beam, effectively suppressing side lobe noise interference.. Clean Beam also assures a uniform intensity distribution, which also contributes to the reliably consistent results.

Optional Dual Head to avoid occlusion

X FOV 53mm +/-

X Resolution 13mm +/-

Z Range to 20mm

Z Resolution to 0.4 µm

GigE Vision interface, GenICam compliant

For plug and play configuration with networking cables and adapter cards familiar to many, the GigE Vision interface is one of the most popular machine vision standards. And GenICam compliance means you can use AT – Automation Technology’s software or diverse 3rd party SDKs.

Additional features

Automatic RegionTracking, Automatic RegionSearch, Multiple Regions, MultiPart, AutoStart, History Buffer, Multi-Slope, MultiPeak

Is the XCS 3D sensor laser profiler best for your application?

AT – Automation Technology is confident there are demanding users for whom the XCS 3D laser profiler delivers just the right value proposition. Is that what your application requires? But AT also provides 3 other product families of laser profilers, including the CS Series, the MCS Series, and the ECS Series. It all comes down to speed and resolution requirements, field of view (FOV), and cost.

1st Vision’s sales engineers have over 100 years of combined experience to assist in your camera and components selection.  With a large portfolio of cameras, lenses, cables, NIC cards and industrial computers, we can provide a full vision solution!

About you: We want to hear from you!  We’ve built our brand on our know-how and like to educate the marketplace on imaging technology topics…  What would you like to hear about?… Drop a line to info@1stvision.com with what topics you’d like to know more about. 

Derived from 10 Gigabit Ethernet, and adapted to GigE Vision standards, Teledyne DALSA has continued buildout of the Nano series from 1GigE, 2GigE, 5GigE, and now 10GigE.

The Genie Nano series is now extended from 1, 2.5 and 5GigE with new 10GigE camera models M/C8200 and M/C6200. These are based on Teledyne e2v’s 67Mp and 37Mp monochrome and color sensors. These high resolution sensors generate a lot of image data to transfer to the host computer, but at 10GigE speeds they achieve frame rates to:

• 15fps – for the 67Mp cameras
• 20fps – for the 37Mp cameras

There are four new models offered, in color and monochrome versions for each sensor variant. All are GenICam, GigE Vision 2.0 compliant. They are multi ROI with up to 16 x Region of Interest (ROI). The cameras have all-metal bodies and 3 year warranties.

Further, the M/C8200, at 59 mm x 59 mm, is the industry’s smallest 67M 10GigE Vision camera, for those needing high-resolution and high-performance in a comparatively small form factor.

These 10GigE models share all the other features of the Teledyne DALSA Genie Nano Series, for ease of integration or upgrades. Such features include but are not limited to:

Power over Ethernet (PoE) – single cable solution for power, data, and control

Precision Time Protocol (PTP) synchronization of two or more cameras over GigE network, avoiding the need for hardware triggers and controllers

General Purpose Input Output (GPIO) connectors providing control flexibililty

Trigger to Image Reliability (T2IR)

• Manage exceptions in a controlled manner
• Verify critical imaging events such as lost frames, lines, or triggers
• Tag images for traceability

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Across the wide range of Teledyne DALSA (area scan) cameras shown below, the Genie Nano 10GigE cameras are at the upper end of the already high-performance mid-range.

1st Vision’s sales engineers have over 100 years of combined experience to assist in your camera and components selection.  With a large portfolio of lenses, cables, NIC card and industrial computers, we can provide a full vision solution!

Who needs another 2.8Mpix camera? In this case it’s not about the pixel count per se, but about the frame rates and the dynamic range.

With more common interfaces like GigE and 5GigE we expect frame rates from a 2.8 Mpix camera in the range 20 – 120fps, respectively. But with the Camera Link High Speed (CLHS) interface, Teledyne DALSA’s new Falcon4-M2240 camera can deliver up to 1200fps. If your application demands high-speed performance together with 2.8Mpix resolution, this camera delivers.

Besides speed, an even more remarkable feature of the Falcon4-M2240, based on the Teledyne e2v Lince 2.8 MP, is a pixel well depth, or full well capacity, of ~138 [ke-]. THAT VALUE IS NOT A TYPO!! It really is ~138 [ke-]. Other sensors also thought of as high quality offer pixel well depths only 1/10th of this value, so this sensor is a game changer.

Why does pixel well depth matter? Recall the analogy of photons to raindrops, and pixel wells to buckets. With no raindrops, the bucket is empty, just as with no photons quantized to electrons, the pixel well is empty and the monochrome pixel would correspond to 0 or full-black. When the bucket, or pixel well, becomes exactly full with the last raindrop (electron) it can hold, it’s reached it’s full well capacity – the pixel value would be fully saturated at white (for a monochrome sensor).

The expressive capacity of each pixel admits the widest range of values in correlation to the full well capacity before charge overflows, so the camera is calibrated by the designer according to the sensor’s capabilities. Sensors with higher full well capacity are desirable, since they can capture all the nuances of the imaging target, which in turn gives your software maximum image features to identify.

This newest member of the Falcon4 family joins siblings with sensors offering 11, 37, and 67 Mpix respectively. The Falcon4 family represents continues the success of the Falcon2 family, all of which share many common features: These include:

• CMOS global shutter
• High dynamic range
• 1000x anti-blooming
• M42 to M95 optics mount
• Camera Link or Camera Link HS interface

Even before the new firmware update (V1.02), Falcon4 cameras already offered:

• Multiple triggering options
• Multiple exposure control options
• In sensor binning
• Gain control
• In camera Look-up-table (LUT)
• Pixel correction
• … and more

Now with Firmware 1.02 the Falcon4 family gets these additional features:

• Multi-ROI
• ROI position change by sequencer cycling
• Digital gain change by sequencer cycling sequencer cycling of Digital Gain
• Exposure change by sequencer cycling
• Sequencer cycling of output pulse
• Meta Data

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Multi-ROI

Region Of Interest (ROI) capabilities are compelling when an application has defined regions within a larger field that can be read out, skipping the un-necessary regions, thereby achieving much higher framerates than having to transfer the full resolution image from camera to host. It’s like having a number of smaller-sensor cameras, each pointed at their own region, but without the complexity of having to manage multiple cameras. As shown in the image below, the composite image frame rates are equivalent to the single ROI speed gains one might have known on other cameras.

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Sequencer cycling of ROI position:

Cycling the ROI position for successive images might not seem to have obvious benefits – but what if the host computer could process image 1, while the camera acquires and begins transmitting image 2, and so forth? Overall throughput for the system rises – efficiency gains!

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Sequencer cycling of output pulse:

For certain applications, it can be essential to take 2 or more exposures of the same field of view, each under different lighting conditions. Under natural light, one might take a short, medium, and long exposure duration, to hedge on which is best, let the camera or object move to the next position, and let the software decide which is best. Or under controlled lighting, one might image once with white or colored light, then again with an NIR wavelength, knowing that each exposure condition reveals different features relevant to the application.

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Metadata:

Metadata may not sound very exciting, and the visuals aren’t that compelling. But sending data along for the ride with each image may be critical for quality control archiving, application analysis and optimization, scheduled maintenance planning, or other reasons of your own choosing. For example, it may be valuable to know at what shutter or gain setting an image was acquired; or to have a timestamp; or to know the device ID from which camera the image came.

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The Falcon2 and Falcon4 cameras are designed for use in industrial inspection, robotics, medical, scientific imaging, as well as wide variety of other demanding automated imaging and machine vision applications requiring ultra-high-resolution images.

Representative application fields:

1st Vision’s sales engineers have over 100 years of combined experience to assist in your camera and components selection.  With a large portfolio of lenses, cables, NIC card and industrial computers, we can provide a full vision solution!