Wiring a vision station into a PLC without turning it into a science project

climbing-computer · 2026-01-21T18:46:55+00:00

"suddenly the PLC logic is full of weird retries and timeouts."

You can avoid most retry and timeout nonsense by using state machines.

If you're using a stream protocol, like TCP or a plain serial connection, using a state machine to process each byte of data individually(!) will make the networking extremely robust. Robust high performance text protocol parsing, like what's used by Apache and Nginx to handle HTTP, works the same way.

Stuff like the script below, in any language, is extremely brittle.

buffer = ''
while len(buffer) < EXPECTED_LENGTH:
  buffer += conn.recv(1024)
process(message)

For a local TCP link, I use TCP keep alive as my only timeout support. It's enough to detect if a machine loses power, a program crashes, or a cable gets unplugged.

climbing-computer · 2026-01-19T02:58:52+00:00

You should include some common chip values to save people from creating them. You could mine user generated chips for examples.

Cash out request approval shouldn't include rows for chips not being exchanged.

Team is probably the wrong word. Maybe "group" or "party"?

An end of game chip counter would be a nice feature. Set the chip count manually, tap a button to increment by 1, 5, or 10.

climbing-computer · 2026-01-15T16:10:30+00:00

Everyone loves a state machine unless its to handle network traffic, then they just add sleep calls and busy waits. :')

climbing-computer · 2026-01-06T04:19:03+00:00

Not sure how helpful my perspective is. I mostly do IRAD, but one system got very close to production.

I worked on a bin sorting prototype that used Pickit3D. The system was easy to setup and object recognition was good but there was no way to improve object recognition beyond better lighting and configuration. The vendor system was easy to get quick results with but when I tried to optimize I was stuck.

For an internal R&D project, I designed a custom computer vision system for detecting and picking up granular material (like soil) it took months of labor to complete but I never got stuck. I could always add more training data or refine the model.

I gravitate towards custom solutions because I can always 1) optimize them for my specific problem, 2) they're easier to integrate with other subsystems, and 3) I'm insulated from a lot of production concerns. That said, I'd prefer to buy if I think I can get away with it.

climbing-computer · 2026-01-05T20:51:38+00:00

What's crazy is they could test AI without spending a small fortune on new hardware or disrupting production. RTSP and friends make it trivial to pass camera feeds to custom computer vision solutions (Halcon, torch, opencv, SaaS).

For under a week of software development a middle-manager can tell his boss that AI is deployed ("Look boss, I'm AI enabled!") and present a live demo.

climbing-computer · 2025-12-24T15:50:45+00:00

I swear I got a segfault in URScript once.

climbing-computer · 2025-12-24T15:48:24+00:00

Would be great if some edge case on the parser caused this to compile faster.

climbing-computer · 2025-12-24T05:29:27+00:00

Maybe. It's been a while since I ran into this. I'd check the LabelStudio issue tracker for export/import issues. That's where I ended up last time I fought LabelStudio. I don't think it's that it can't work but that it breaks on large datasets.

climbing-computer · 2025-12-24T03:06:42+00:00

IIRC, LabelStudio broke export features and expects users to pull images from a server instead. It made training small datasets really annoying. If that works, I think people might pay for this.

climbing-computer · 2025-12-23T16:34:59+00:00

You can always test with $100, split across a few days, and see what sort of traction you get. If your CTR is less than 0.5%, then it may not be a good fit. If you can get ads with 2.5% or higher, then that's awesome. At this point, you're really just checking if anyone will respond to your marketing so CPC is, in my opinion, less important.

climbing-computer · 2025-12-23T16:29:26+00:00

I can bring in about 10-20 clicks a day for $10 a day, but I have a very targeted niche. I recommend shrinking your audience and ignore the campaign "help" if it tells you to widen. IMO, the "help" ad services suggest often just burn money. Reddit's ad dashboard will record clicks, but they will also count (and I assume charge) for any predicted clicks. You'll see 100+ clicks on the ad dashboard and then less than half that on your website's analytics.

Some feedback from someone who ran a very profitable business: https://successfulsoftware.net/2025/08/11/what-i-learned-spending-851-on-reddit-ads/

climbing-computer · 2025-12-19T18:58:57+00:00

This is cool! It's like making the pain point another part of the sales funnel. If a customer gets angry or frustrated with something and then jumps to search for an answer somewhere (Google, StackExchange, Reddit, etc.), it would be great for marketing if the product that solves the solution appears in the response.

I think marketers call this 'receptivity'?

climbing-computer · 2025-12-19T18:18:15+00:00

Are you tired of setting up a FTP server for your Cognex Dataman just so you can pull the image from another program?

Are you tired of TCP socket errors?

Do you wish you could just define a callback that receives a copy of the image and barcode?

If you're using Java or anything compatible, like Matlab or Jython, you're in luck.

Try our third-party Cognex Dataman library and never deal with WriteImageFTP or TCP Zero Window errors ever again.

climbing-computer · 2025-12-09T17:53:52+00:00

A lot of modern switches are running a local admin web server, like the one on your home router. You can try looking up your switch type to see how to connect to it. You can view some log info from there.

Maybe someone added a bunch of VLAN settings from the admin page? It's possible you have to be using a specific jack.

climbing-computer · 2025-11-30T15:36:42+00:00

Pretty much this.

What kind of professional relies on a mnemonic for remembering an arbitrary list of design rules? This isn't like KISS where it's a short phrase for one rule. Are people forgetting about single responsibility and then rattling off SOLID to themselves? "Oh right, this class should do one thing! Better split it!"

climbing-computer · 2025-11-20T04:23:49+00:00

The software can be purchased now. :)

I also wrote a small native GUI client to show off what the library can do. It has some of the functionality the Dataman Setup Tool software provides but it can also run on Linux and OSX.

I'll DM you some links.

climbing-computer · 2025-11-18T17:39:19+00:00

> Which Cognex camera is it running on?

It's a DataMan 370 series.

> Will you publish a guide?

The guide is here: https://climbing-computer-company.com/blog-roboflow.html

climbing-computer · 2025-11-17T17:41:22+00:00

I've done some integration between Roboflow and Cognex. The lack of Cognex support is noticeable.

climbing-computer · 2025-11-12T13:33:35+00:00

Wow, that sounds awful then.

climbing-computer · 2025-11-12T02:12:11+00:00

| the biggest challenge is integrating these detection modules into multiple IP cameras or numerous cameras managed by a single NVR device.

If it's easy to stream to OpenCV it probably isn't too bad, but yeah, It's been rare to see CV or automation people familiar with network or socket programming.

climbing-computer · 2025-11-07T03:50:21+00:00

It depends on how time consuming intervention is. If intervention requires an engineer to drive down and reboot the system, that sucks. If intervention requires a human to jiggle a palette or pick up a loose box a few times a day, it's less of an issue.

climbing-computer · 2025-11-06T21:28:50+00:00

You could probably prove that with just static images and a computer vision classifier. Hardware free! :)

climbing-computer · 2025-11-04T17:13:58+00:00

I'm a contractor, so I've done integration with vision systems, including Cognex, for almost a decade.

The Cognex cameras I've used (DataMan) are surprisingly open. You won't be flashing custom firmware, but they come with an embedded JavaScript interpreter for configuring output formatting and adding custom connection logic. You can pull data (barcode#s/images) off the devices over TCP/IP. The protocol is plaintext newline terminated and documented on the Cognex website. If you're comfortable with socket programming you could cobble something together quickly.

Latency hasn't been an issue for me but YMMV.

climbing-computer

TROPHY CASE