Demo of the machine vision camera and 3D printed parts

Today was my team’s first meeting with Johnson Matthey and Keyence.

So the camera that our team plans on using is from Keyence and it’s called “Inline 3D Appearance and Dimension Camera unit 24‑mm 0.94 type .” I wish I could’ve taken a video of the demonstration. I thought it was pretty cool that this camera can take a picture of a part, and create 2D and 3D images out of it.

Unfortunately, the odds of our team getting the camera in time before October (which is when we’re supposed to be doing our troubleshooting) is highly unlikely. On the bright side, we’ll be able to use a demo camera from Keyence.

However, because it’s a demo camera, it does not have integration capabilities (ex. we can’t hook up the camera to an Arduino) but we’re still able to build our project. We basically need to make sure our apparatus can deliver marker bands to the camera, and then we’ll move the servo arms to sort the marker bands based on what the camera reads (ex. bad or good).

Also, we got our vibrating bowl feeder parts 3D printed! Thanks team at Johnson Matthey!

Vibrating bowl feeder parts

I can’t assemble the parts yet. Still need to order the vibrating motor and a couple other things for the vibrating bowl feeder. Chaz (our main point of contact at Johnson Matthey) is currently taking care of ordering our materials for the project. The plan is to have all our materials ordered and ready to go by the start of the Fall semester.

Also, Khang (our other contact at Johnson Matthey) and Chaz told us to look into acetone vapor baths if we want to smooth out our printed parts. I’ll have to look into that.