Tag: News

IVS has enhanced its product offering with the launch of a new enclosure to protect vision system cameras placed within harsh working, industrial environments. The IVS-SVP camera housing, which supports all standard IVS camera options, is readily available for current IVS customers.

In terms of accessibility, the front of the enclosure cover can be easily removed to provide the user with full access to the vision system camera and optics, allowing changes to the focus and aperture settings.

The camera housing also fosters flexibility; it is designed to readily accommodate large diameter lenses and it boasts telescopic adjustment to allow the lens to be altered close to the viewport to minimise reflections.

Ready to mount on standard fixings, the enclosure also includes an anti-reflection optical viewport and, at the rear of the product, the IP65 cable gland is configurable to provide a watertight seal around one or more cables. The housing is designed to be used in medical device, pharmaceutical, automotive and food production environments.

Earl Yardley, Industrial Vision Systems Director comments: “Designing and producing high quality machine vision products have been the cornerstone of our success. The new camera enclosure will help protect the thousands of cameras at risk from dust, dirt, water and oil mist and enhance the performance of the vision systems at our customer sites across all industry sectors.”

Further details and a datasheet can be found here.

IVS install 15 camera vision machine to prestigious automotive customer for the inspection of a key part of the main drive chain. The front corner braking assembly quality control system is integrated as a final inspection of the complete unit prior to release to the main production line. The fully integrated machine vision system provides 100% inspection of the full sub-assembly.

Device makers look to on-line vision systems to quality check the FDA’s unique device identifier requirements.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the US have released a final ruling requiring that most medical devices distributed in the United States must carry a unique device identifier (UDI). With the directive starting in September 2014 it has become increasingly important for device manufacturers to put the necessary quality control procedures in place now to confirm the UDI is both legible and traceable. As the FDA sees it, “A unique device identifier system has the potential to improve the quality of information in medical device adverse event reports, which will help the FDA identify product problems more quickly, better target recalls, and improve patient safety.” The UDI allows the device or product to be traced back to its roots in manufacturing.

This directive has implications for the whole of the medical device and pharmaceutical business but at a fundamental level during the production of the device or product the UDI needs to be applied and quality checked to confirm it meets the necessary specification.

Industrial Vision Systems (IVS) have been working with a number of companies to tackle these problems through the use of ever more sophisticated automated machine vision systems and processes. The FDA demands that automatic identification and data capture (AIDC) technology is used for the inspection process. By combining Optical Character Recognition/Optical Character Verification with print quality inspection and ID/code reading the UDI can be checked in real time through the whole production cycle to confirm compliance to the FDA specifications. The UDI can be applied to labels, boxes, products, components and devices – therefore a generic approach to the quality inspection needs to constructed. The UDI directive also states that all devices that will be implanted or sterilised must have permanent marks so the vision inspection system has to cope with confirming marks on varying material types, including implants.

Typically the code would be applied to include both a human readable and a machine readable mark, be it a 1D or 2D/Data Matrix code. Both need to be inspected to confirm they reach the necessary quality standards. For symbols this is according to the ISO standards 15415 and 15416. Digital cameras are used throughout the production process connected to a central IVS vision system which then communicates to the Factory Information System database to provide historical information and conformance. Full track and trace is now seen as the ideal solution. Most medical device companies run varied quality systems, data management and IT applications for their UDI requirements. The flexible user interface allows data storage, image storage and historical statistical process control (SPC) data to be easily managed independent of the background IT infrastructure.

These latest generation vision systems provide full audit logging and traceability to allow systems to be validated to Good Automated Manufacturing Practice (GAMP) standards. The UDI quality can be tracked through the process to make sure that it has not degraded through the production cycle and that multiple elements (e.g. inserts and instructions) have gone together correctly.

The UDI program will provide consumers with a better quality product, increased traceability against forgery and assurance that the product has been through the necessary production cycle and checks.

Further details can be found on the FDA website www.fda.gov/udi and information on quality checking the UDI can be found at www.industrialvision.co.uk/industries/medical-devices-pharmaceuticals

Industrial Vision Systems (IVS) are pleased to announce the new line-up of digital vision system cameras offering even greater speeds of inspection, coupled with higher resolution. The latest NCHG220 color camera offers a resolution of 2048 x 1088 at 105 frames per second, offering the ability to inspect up to 6,300 parts per minute on a single camera – one of the fastest vision systems available on the market today.

IVS vision camera systems can be configured and deployed with ease thanks to plug and play support within the industry standard NeuroCheck® software suite. These latest generation machine vision cameras provide state-of-the-art digital technology, offering precise signal processing and superior image quality.

The IVS suite of factory communication solutions ensures that IVS vision systems can connect and communicate with a diverse range of factory floor PLC and control devices. The new cameras can be configured for hundreds of different applications covering presence verification, measurement, guidance and identification.

New IVS Vision System Cameras Datasheet