Data matrix decoding system claims top performance

A The Value Engineering Alliance product story

Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team Aug 12, 2005

Piati, a new product line of machine vision solutions offered by the Value Engineering Alliance, announces its high-end ECC200 data matrix decoding system, the Piati-XPL.

Piati, a new product line of machine vision solutions offered by the Value Engineering Alliance, announces its high-end ECC200 data matrix decoding system, the Piati-XPL.

Capable of operating in either area or line scan mode, the Piati-XPL ensures outstanding decoding performance even when reading codes under challenging and demanding conditions.

The Piati-XPL is able to decipher codes in virtually all practical situations, including: when companies are unwilling or unable to mark their codes in accordance with the established standards; when the codes are imaged using poor lighting, low contrast, or optical setups that produce undesirable effects; when codes are marked on textured or treated surfaces; when codes reside in scenes that contain potentially confusing structures; and when codes exhibit significant degrees of degradation or feature data cells as small as 2.5 pixels in width/diameter.

The Piati-XPL can also be used to read codes on the sides of cylindrical items and in varying locations on articles of appreciable length, as well as codes marked on reflective or shiny surfaces, such as glass, metal, ceramic, silicon and glossy plastic.

Other typical Piati_XPL applications include the automatic decoding of data matrices that have been machine-marked (laser scribed, dotpeened/pinstamped, inkjet printed, electrochemically etched etc) on wafers/PCBs/substrates, glass lenses/moulds and containers, electronic components and carriers, medical/dental devices and instruments, automotive or aerospace components, direct mail pieces and packaged goods.

The Piati_XPL can be used to identify, match, sort, track, or verify these products as they move through various manufacturing or material handling processes.

The Piati-XPL's internal triggering capabilities, parallel image acquisition and processing and use of Direct Pixel Access to acquire and analyse the minimum number of pixels required to decipher codes enable it to achieve decode rates of up to 125 per second on items moving at 12m/s.

To simplify and accelerate the decoding solution development and implementation process, the Piati-XPL includes an application development suite (ADS) that consists of a job configuration wizard, an emulator and a job manager.

Controlled via a powerful graphical user interface (GUI), the ADS enables users with no machine vision experience to interactively create, test, optimise, run and deploy applications in minutes, without doing any programming.

Components of the Piati-XPL include a CMOS image sensor with 1024 x 1024 randomly addressable pixels, an embedded digital signal processor, SRAM, Flash memory, RS232 and RS485 serial interfaces, eight digital I/O lines (four of each), and an SVGA (800 x 600) video output, housed in a 164 x 60 x 40mm black anodised aluminium industrial enclosure that features M4 size threaded holes which support mounting hardware and the system's standard red LED (660nm) on-axis, adjustable off-axis and dark field/low-angle lights.

Blue and infra-red (IR) LED lighting units are available as options.

Compatible with standard C-mount lenses, compact 9, 16, 25 and 35mm Fujinon lenses with adjustable irises and focus rings are offered for purchase along with the Piati-XPL.

The Piati-XPL is the premium offering from the Piati (Place It And Trace It) suite of data matrix decoding software and systems that is available from The Value Engineering Alliance.

The product suite includes fully integrated general-purpose products, application/industry-specific appliances and robust data matrix decoding software that is supplied in a library function format.

This format facilitates the integration of code reading into automation solutions or vision application development and implementation environments that include other application-specific software such as OCR, OCV, test, precision registration/alignment, or inspection modules.

The library also enables organisations and individuals who are so inclined to roll their own code readers.