Smart camera for industrial inspection

Stemmer Imaging now offers the BOA Pro smart camera from Teledyne DALSA. This new camera combines the robustness of the BOA hardware with the flexibility of the Sherlock inspection software to provide an extraordinarily versatile industrial vision solution for a host of applications.

Key to the BOA Pro performance is the versatility of the Sherlock software, which offers machine vision system professionals extensive tools and capabilities for design, development, debugging, and user administration. Sherlock's extensive library of instructions, preprocessors and advanced algorithms can be combined in a variety of ways to solve simple or very demanding tasks. Maximum design flexibility is provided to allow users to customize algorithms, construct scripts and develop operator interfaces that best suit their factory environment.

This rich range of capabilities include an extensive set of preprocessors that can be applied to a variable shape user-defined region of interest prior to analysis. A comprehensive range of measurement and analysis tools is complemented by advanced pattern recognition tools for object alignment and robot guidance, together with calibration correction facilities to convert pixels into real world co-ordinates. Other facilities include 1D and 2D code reading and verification and optical character recognition.

All of this and more is underpinned by a versatile JavaScript based scripting tool, complete with drag-and-drop instruction editing, for the development of custom formulas or inline and background operations, as well as the ability to add custom algorithms into the development environment.

With a choice of sensor resolutions from VGA to 1600 x 1200 pixels, an ultra small form factor of 44 x 44 x 44 mm and an industrial IP 67-rated housing, the BOA hardware platform is a compact, robust camera that can be mounted in the most demanding industrial environments. Ethernet and RS-232 connectivity, discrete and expandable I/O and vision lighting control ensure simple factory integration.

The embedded software for the camera is setup via a local PC connection to BOA Pro using Ethernet for complete development flexibility. Once configured for runtime, the Ethernet link can be disconnected or used to communicate with other devices on the factory floor, such as PLCs, Robots and HMIs.