Over the past 35 years, Adept Turnkey has gained extensive experience and expertise in machine vision. Adept Turnkey share this knowledge with their customers daily, not only by helping them select the optimal components for their systems and projects but also by ensuring those products perform as required and by providing ongoing support throughout the product's lifecycle.

A service that Adept Turnkey haven't emphasised until now is the ability to provide customised solutions. Adept Turnkey does not typically integrate systems directly. Instead they leverage expertise and a broad range of machine vision products to support a select group of expert integration partners. However, there are cases where customers require a machine vision device or system that goes beyond simply integrating off-the-shelf components. This could involve hardware, software, or a combination of both.

In such situations, Adept Turnkey has successfully designed and built bespoke solutions. Adept Turnkey tailor these solutions to meet the specific needs of customers or integrators. Unique or complex challenges allow Adept Turnkey's machine vision engineers to showcase their technical expertise. They thrive on solving intricate problems and embrace the challenge of tackling seemingly difficult applications.

Over the years, some of these customised designs evolved into standalone products. This series of editorials is designed to introduce some of these products. You might find them interesting or have your own customisation requirements that Adept Turnkey can assist with.

The customer approached Adept Turnkey because existing commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) solutions were either not ethernet-controlled, significantly larger than required, too expensive and not repeatable across multiple units and so required calibration for pointing position, zoom, iris and focus for every one of the hundreds of sites which would have caused huge installation costs and ongoing maintenance.

The approach taken by Adept Turnkey’s engineers was novel. They initially
a. Selected a Gigabit ethernet camera to meet the resolution and speed required to meet the customer’s needs.
b. Selected a lens to meet the customer’s system budget
c. Selected a Pan Tilt Unit to meet the budget and performance requirements
d. Selected an off-the-shelf enclosure

The camera selected was a Teledyne Dalsa Nano GigE camera. Chosen for its small size, high quality and its industrial robustness with very wide operating temperatures.

The lens selected was chosen primarily for its wide zoom range and its low cost but it lacked repeatability across multiple units i.e. if any of its axes was controlled to a position using the same value, the physical position between two lenses would be different. Finding a zoom lens with the precision required was near impossible and the cost would have been too high.

Adept Turnkey used the FLIR PTU-D48E Pan-Tilt Units as they were available at market and met the specifications, durability and cost requirements. These units provide a real-time command interface to support advanced applications such as video tracking. Built for high-duty cycles and reliable 24/7 operation in all-weather environments, they feature a flexible bracketing system to accommodate single or multi-part payloads.

That was the simple part.

The customer needed to know that if a system was installed, they could connect to it and send it a set of parameters that would ensure its zoom position and field of view, its focus, aperture size and pointing direction were exactly the same across hundreds of units. In theory easy to do but not so, with a cheap zoom lens. In order to meet the budget, the design needed a low-cost zoom lens with potentiometer feedback, inherently inaccurate regards repeatability of position in all three lens axes.

To ensure that every system behaved like every other system Adept Turnkey designed a lens controller board. By setting up custom calibration rigs and calibrating each unit in the factory, calibration parameters for each lens were stored in the lens controller board. The lens controller would then interpret commands from the customer’s software and adapt them to each specific lens and its calibration parameters, so ensuring that the zoom position, field of view, focus and depth field and iris size was exactly as required.

The lens controller board was designed with a Gigabit ethernet interface and by using a small off-the-shelf GigE switch the customer’s application software could connect to the camera, the lens controller and the Pan Tilt Unit (which also had an ethernet interface) via a single cable over long distances.

The system has now been deployed hundreds of times and continues to operate successfully on all sites. If this customisation has sparked your interest regarding an application you have, or if you have a totally different problem please contact Adept Turnkey and the team will be happy to help.

How can Adept Turnkey help you?