While good at protecting from dust, camera body caps are rarely used with industrial cameras. After the camera is unpacked and the lens is installed usually it stays this way for a very long time. And even if lenses are switched over, the camera very rarely stays with an unmounted lens. Adhesive Polyamide tape is […]
Read MoreExperiments with parfocal motorized zoom lens
Motorized zoom camera C1_PRO_X18 has two independent stepper motors for Zoom and Focus control. More specifications can be found in the documentation area. By design, this varifocal lens means the focus will be lost after the magnification motor is moved. However, the lens has linear rail reference points and it is possible to calibrate the lens so it will behave like […]
Read MoreC1 PRO vs C2
Preparing to release new cameras and presenting comparison table. C2 camera is still based on Sonix chip-set and IMX290/1 sensor, but superior in many aspects. Most noticeable cosmetic changes are: size, integrated heat-sink and USB-C connector. However many other new features are hidden inside. Below is comparison table: Parameter C1 PRO C2 Chipset SN9C292 SN9C292 […]
Read MoreCooking C2 camera for science
C1 PRO camera was known for surviving fairly high temperatures. New C2 was designed with better heat management in mind thus the picture is still usable at 100*C (aluminum enclosure) temperature. Keep in mind that this is not a full-featured test in the thermal chamber, both cameras were cooked on 200W preheat the oven. But I was pretty happy […]
Read MoreMaking fine pitch PCB prototypes with fiber laser
There are quite a lot of inexpensive and fairly reliable PCB manufacturers that can produce double-sided PCB’s with solder-mask and silkscreen in a day or two, but what if you need it now? I will not cover expensive prototyping machinery nor messy printer/etching process instead let’s use a 20W Fiber laser. Because… who does not […]
Read MoreC2 family cameras
C1 family cameras have been a great success with installations around the world (eyes for underwater and flying drones, scientific process observation flying 408km above the Earth on ISS in a low gravity environment, many universities doing computer vision researches, a few industrial environment installations, and many more) It is time to start introducing new […]
Read MoreManuals, instructions, and documentation has a new place
Kurokesu uses multiple places to store and announce information. The main place was a blog (the one you are reading at the moment), GitHub, and manually created documentation HTML pages. After content expanded it become harder to manage it without CMS, so finally created to a wiki-like page here. Some information will semi duplicated across multiple […]
Read MorePulling full resolution from a webcam with OpenCV (Windows)
OpenCV while being the most popular tool for a lot of machine vision applications it relies on a third party and some poorly maintained code. Capturing MJPEG compressed video from a UVC USB camera was always the case and it did not work or worked with some issues. This situation is especially bad for Windows OS. […]
Read MoreMeasure linear rail quality with camera and excel
No matter how precise and rigid your mechanical system is, it will always have some imperfections. These imperfections can be measured and described. If measurements show opposite it means your measurement tools are not precise enough or you are doing it wrong. There are a lot of expensive and highly specialized tools to measure every […]
Read MoreUVC camera exposure timing in OpenCV
USB cameras can have the exposure set to manual (cheaper ones have only full auto mode). It’s a pretty straight forward function in OpenCV, but insufficiently documented thus hard to find exact times and calculations. Also there are two major implementations for Linux and Windows. Linux – exposure times are set in units 1/s (all […]
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