At KTM Research, we have been testing the recently release Cognex In-Sight 7802 Gen II camera.  One of the most interesting features of the In-Sight 7000 Gen II series cameras is the new on-camera illuminator.  This is a major new feature that opens up a lot of new possibilities like the SurfaceFX tool that we looked at more in depth on an earlier blog post.

One of the less touted features, but one that we think will be really useful is the 360 degree status light! Cognex has taken one of the two user-controllable status lights and redesigned it to encircle the entire camera.  This makes the status light visible from any direction.  The second user-controllable status light (red) remains located on the interface panel with the other lights and buttons.

Controlling the status lights

Cognex documentation could do a better job informing users of the user-controllable status lights in general, and how to use them specifically.  If this is something you have not done before, it’s pretty straight forward.  If you have ever used discrete outputs on the In-Sight line of products, this will look very familiar to you as it is essentially the same  process.

It’s always best to use a relatively up to date version of In-Sight Explorer.  I am currently using In-Sight Explorer version 5.4.0 for this example.  You can always find the most up to date version from Cognex’s In-Sight Support Page here.

Open In-Sight Explorer, log into your camera, and open a new spreadsheet view.  If you are in EasyBuilder mode, switch to spreadsheet view by pressing the Ctrl+Shift+V keys.  Once in spreadsheet view, you are going to setup two cells.

In cell A1, type “CheckBox” without the parenthesis and press enter.  You will get a popup window like the one shown below.  If you copy/paste it, make sure that the leading tick mark (‘) is deleted or else it will be treated like a comment.  Type “Light” into the Name field as shown and click the OK button.

In cell B1, type “Button” and press enter.  You will get the button configuration popup window like the one shown below.  Type “Set Light” into the name field and press the OK button.

In the next cell to the right, C1, type “WriteDiscrete” and press enter.  You will get the WriteDiscrete popup window like the one shown below.  In this window, we are going to change several of the fields.  For the event and value fields, you can either type in the data shown in the image, or you can double-click on the name portion of the window for the field and then double-click on the spreadsheet cell you want to set it to.  For the event field, this should be the button created in cell B1.  For the value field, this should be the check box created in cell A1.  Set the start bit field to 4 for the green wrap-around status light.  When you have your box setup like this, press the OK button.  (Note: you can come back to this step and set the start bit to 5 to toggle the red user-controllable light.)

Now you should have a spreadsheet that looks like mine below.  When you are ready to test this, put the camera into “online” mode by clicking on the online/offline button in the top menu, or by pressing Ctrl+F8.  When the camera is online, you should see the green box with “Online” as shown at the bottom right of my screenshot below.

With the camera online, you can set the light status with the check box.  To make the light change, you will need to trigger the DiscreteWrite to update the bit registers.  In this example that is done by pressing the set light button.  Go ahead and play with checking or unchecking the check box and pressing the button.  You should be seeing the light turn on and off.  If not, make sure that you are in online mode.

You now have the basic framework to start exploring the user-controllable lighting.  By using different value cells that are automatically calculated, and events triggered by your software instead of the button, the use options are almost endless.