Vision
Plug in a camera, see it live in the app and on your HMI, and build an image pipeline by wiring nodes — the same editor, the same wires. Click any stage to see exactly what it sees. Results flow back into the graph as live values you can control with.
Status Core shipped
Cameras appear in Melanite's device manager like any other device — CSI cameras are auto-discovered, network MJPEG cameras are added by URL. You build a CV pipeline by wiring image-typed nodes (crop, normalize, threshold, locate, detect) in the node editor, and the results — a feature's position, a confidence, an angle — come back as live scalar values, in pixels or in calibrated millimetres. The pipelines execute off the real-time loop by construction, on worker threads, so vision can never disturb control timing; with no camera connected the whole subsystem costs nothing.
CSI cameras auto-discovered (including long-run coax cameras up to 10 m with power over the same cable), network and IP MJPEG cameras added by URL, and file replay for repeatable golden testing.
Fiducial location verified to better than 0.01 px against a known-truth reference, running through the production stack — with live full-frame location at 30 fps on the device.
Click any pipeline stage and watch exactly what it sees, with optional annotation overlay, streamed to as many viewers as you like. This is the feature that turns vision setup from guesswork into work.
A move-and-measure calibration wizard maps pixels to machine millimetres, so a located feature comes back in the same units as your axes and lands on the right place in your 2D overlays automatically.
The compiler lifts image-wired islands out of the graph and runs them on worker threads. Vision cannot steal cycle time from control — that is structural, not a scheduling promise.
A detect-many stage returns every match at once, and the 2D and 3D planes turn each one into its own overlay item or scene object — automatically, with smooth enter and exit.
A focus meter with peak-hold for fixed-focus lens setup, still capture and freeze-frame that survive a recompile, live tuning of detection settings over wires, and a dynamic region of interest.
Camera streams, fiducial and focus overlays and any pipeline stage embed directly in your branded /device page.
A part arrives in roughly the right place; the machine must pick it exactly.
How
A pipeline crops to the region of interest, normalizes, thresholds and locates the feature. The offset comes back in calibrated millimetres and is added to the axis target before the move — closing the loop between what the camera saw and where the machine goes.
A fixed-focus camera needs to be focused and aimed on an assembled machine.
How
The focus meter gives an exposure-normalized sharpness number with peak-hold, so you turn the lens until the number stops improving. The per-stage taps show precisely what the threshold stage is producing, so a bad result is diagnosed in seconds instead of by trial and error.
Industrial vision is normally a separate product with a separate licence, a separate configuration tool and an integration problem in the middle — TwinCAT Vision and Cognex-class packages are priced accordingly. Melanite wires vision into the same graph as the control logic, with per-stage visual debugging built in, and it is included.
No, by construction. Image pipelines are lifted out of the real-time graph at compile time and executed on separate worker threads. Measured real-time execution is unchanged with pipelines running, and with no camera connected the subsystem is entirely dormant.
Fiducial location has been verified at better than 0.01 pixel against known truth, through the production code path. In real terms the limit is your optics, lighting, mechanics and calibration — not the software.
No, and that is deliberate. The reference hardware has no video encoder, so continuous recording is an explicit non-goal. Melanite streams live views, captures stills and freezes frames for inspection.
CSI cameras (including long-run coax cameras with power over the same cable, for cameras mounted metres away from the controller), network and IP MJPEG cameras, and recorded files for repeatable testing.
One binary runs every tier — the licence only toggles entitlements, never the feature set.