The DISTek elves were once again busy this holiday season. As in years past, we were fortunate enough to be able to adopt two area families again this year to help provide them with holiday necessities and wish list items to make their Christmas one to remember.
Welcome back to the blog! Today, I will be talking about how to operate a Cognex smart camera via a LabVIEW program. The way I will be communicating with the camera is via TCP/IP. There are other potential ways to communicate with the camera from LabVIEW, but this was determined to be the best way, giving us the most control over the camera. I will walk through some basic terminology that is necessary to discuss building a Cognex vision test. Then, I will create and set up a vision test and finally, I will briefly describe how to program LabVIEW to send/receive information to the camera and to trigger an image acquisition.
Anyone who stops by my office will notice that I have many puzzles laying around my desk. There are blocks, rings, metal puzzles, wood puzzles, and my favorite, Rubik’s cubes of all sizes. I really enjoy the Rubik’s cube and it is often regarded as something only a few people are able to solve. To learn to solve this puzzle requires many hours of practice to reliably solve it every time.
As the summer ended and fall began, we made our way to Las Vegas to attend MINExpo International on September 26th – 28th. There were no signs of fall whether approaching in Sin City, but that was okay because all of the action was inside the {air conditioned} Las Vegas Convention Center. While the convention center is very large it was busting at the seams with 50 foot tall haul trucks with the ability to haul payloads over 400 tons!
This past Friday, we took a little time out from our work day to have a little fun and celebrate Halloween! In keeping with tradition, we all gathered in the training room at noon for the annual parade of costumes. Check out the photos below to see who showed up at the Cedar Falls DISTek Office!
As LCD vehicle displays have become more prevalent and versatile in both on- and off-highway, the time it takes to ensure proper display functionality after a software release has increased dramatically. It is not uncommon for displays to have 15, 20, or even 30 different screens, each of which having multiple sub-selections available. If you take into consideration different supported languages, the scope of the test grows dramatically. DISTek, as a company, is always attempting to define the future needs of customers in the off-highway industry, of which vehicle display testers are one of those needs.
Another successful AEF ISOBUS Plugfest is in the bag. You can check out some of my prior blog posts if you want more detail on what a Plugfest entails, but in short, it is a meetup of Ag electronics manufacturers to test their own equipment with other manufacturers’ equipment. This was a record-breaking Plugfest in terms of participation and it made for some challenges in getting enough time for all participants to test with other manufacturer’s products.
As promised, here’s my Part Two blog posting regarding the raspberrry pi.
The default kernel in Raspbian Jesse, the latest release of the raspberry pi’s official OS, could use a tune-up before being fit for duty running time-sensitive machine controls. On a vanilla Linux kernel program, latencies depend on everything running on the system making consistent and punctual tasks difficult to guarantee. The RT PREEMPT patch is a popular fix for this problem. The patch converts Linux into a fully preempt-able RTOS. If you want to control physical processes with your pi, as I intend to in DISTek’s training curriculum update, this is the way to go. But how big of a difference does it make on a pi?
The 63rd annual Farm Progress Show was recently held in Boone, Iowa. Among the 100,000+ visitors, a few of the DISTek Integration employee-owners were there to check in on the industry and enjoy a day out in the field.
Ever design a system, and then see a human operator lock it up by behaving in a manner you never imagined they would? If yes, your system is vulnerable to Off-Nominal Behaviors (ONBs). ONBs are behaviors invoked upon a system (often, by unpredictable human operators) that were unaccounted for by the system’s designers because of their human tendency to assume that operators will use the system in a nominal manner.
In a paper to be presented at SAE COMVEC 2016, DISTek Integration, Inc. looks at addressing ONB vulnerability by using a requirements modeling technique known as Causal Component Model (CCM). You are welcome to attend the presentation or access the paper being……..
It is that time of year again – the kids are back in school, the nights have started to get cool, and Plugfest is just around the corner. The Ag electronics community from around the world will descend on Bologna, Italy, on September 13th for another edition of the ISOBUS Fall Plugfest.
Recently, I’ve been launching a little office project to develop a new training curriculum for DISTek engineers. Because it is hands-on training, it will require a toolchain. Since our customers use everything from off-the-shelf professional solutions to home-brewed ones, it’s important to prevent the nuances of a new toolchain from being a distraction in the training’s purpose of conveying good software practices and controls concepts.
