Machine Vision, Calibration & Weld Path Correction Adding a camera to a laser welding system sounds like it should solve a basic problem: Find the joint, tell the scanner where it is, and put the weld there. And in principle, that’s exactly what machine vision can do. Researchers have demonstrated camera systems that look through … Read more
What questions should we answer before writing a precision motion specification? One thing I’ve learned from working with precision motion and machine automation is that it’s easy to start specifying hardware before we fully understand what the machine needs to do. We start discussing accuracy, repeatability, resolution, velocity, acceleration, and controller performance. These are all … Read more
A customer wants production data from a machine—cycle counts, alarms, recipes, process parameters, maintenance information, MES connectivity, or perhaps data for future AI tools. The simple answer can be: “We’ll put the PLC on the plant network.” For a machine builder, I don’t think that should automatically be the first choice. The PLC or motion … Read more
MWL Automation Note In the last Automation Note, I argued that working code and maintainable code are not always the same thing. A machine can run perfectly well while its control program slowly accumulates inconsistent naming, one-off logic, old comments, startup modifications, and those famous “temporary” fixes that somehow earn permanent residency. One of the … Read more
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. That’s an old rule in industrial automation that has probably prevented as many problems as it has created: I respect that rule. If a machine has been running production reliably for five years, opening the PLC program and reorganizing code simply because we don’t like how the original … Read more
When someone says a machine has “motion control,” that does not tell you very much. A PLC controlling two positioning axes has motion control. A CNC following thousands of G-code blocks has motion control. A six-axis robot carrying a laser head has motion control. A galvanometer scanner moving a beam across a small field has … Read more
One thing I have learned over the years is that programming the automatic cycle is sometimes the easy part. The machine starts in a known condition.You tell it what to do.It moves through the sequence.Everything happens in the order you expected. Then somebody asks: “What happens if it stops right here?” And suddenly the simple … Read more
What CNC machines—and an established part of the automation industry I should have paid more attention to—taught me about building more flexible machines I have spent much of my career programming machines. Some have been conventional PLC-controlled machines built around sequential operations. Others have been CNC-style systems where the machine programming and the part programming … Read more
The laser source may be the heart of the system, but beam delivery, motion, controls, safety, process knowledge, and maintainability determine whether the machine actually succeeds. Fiber lasers have changed industrial manufacturing. They are compact, efficient, reliable, and increasingly available in power levels and configurations that would have been difficult to imagine just a few … Read more
Automation Notes What If We Standardized the Control System Before Building the Next Laser Machine? The machine should be custom. The control foundation does not always have to be. One thing that has bothered me for years in custom machine building is how often we solve the same control problems over and over again. A … Read more