They gave me plenty of swag, but if I wanted to play with one of their cameras I'd have to go out on the production floor.
The promise is - as you say yourself - in systems that are easily maintained by non-vision experienced engineers. As I noted in another post, these are usually controls engineers that overwhelmingly prefer ladder logic on their PLCs and have little exposure to modern software engineering practices such as source control. Obviously it's not "up in an afternoon" - any sales rep that promised that got sent away (Keyence, I'm looking at you) - debugging consists of a lot of product test runs and more mechanical/controls work and definitely takes more than a day.
I tried on more than one occasion to put forward PC-based systems, but the customers wanted the smart cameras. Though I did frequently use OpenCV for batch image analysis in-house, I ought to write an article or two about that bit.
>I tried on more than one occasion to put forward PC-based systems, but the customers wanted the smart cameras.
Oh, all those that you listed also use PC-based systems. I know because all of them are also customers of ours.
Sidenote, I feel partly responsible because we bought a ton of systems from McGarry's previous company Acumen, then I guess he took off and created the InSight. Colorful guy, I remember him showing up with his fancy Porsche around that time...
I wound up writing an in-house tool that pulls the program files from each camera on the machine LAN over FTP and commit them to a local Git repo. There was also some futzing around with XML to get the backup metadata to work seamlessly, but it's not too hard to figure out.
Now getting co-workers to use Git and not various combinations of "Copy of (1) Copy of visionproject (FINAL) 3-2-16 2a.zip" was a different challenge.
