My group has been asked to help a customer with a gage he recently found, specifically getting it to report its measurements in a useful format. Their integrator has not been able to extract data from the gages at all, and the customer now has a problem meeting a schedule.
The gage is a set of 3 keyence TMX5065 optical scanners (basic vision system heads) and between them they have two plcs to drive them.
The output from these to the rest of the world is a pain to get set up; all these can do is rs232, ftp file transfers, or removeable storage. And, since each plc only handles two heads, that means there are two plcs (oh yeah - that cannot communicate measurements with each other) so one part measurement cycle results in 2 output data files that have the same name (keyence says they can only use the date and time as a file name) that have to be saved in 2 separate directories, which makes retrieving part dimensions for any single part a pain as well.
Usually we don't have any issues connecting to older equipment, but on these there isn't even a way for keyence to alter the file name or the file contents to identify which part has been measured. And to make it even more confounding, when consecutive parts are measured, the data file just gets appended with new dimensions stuck at the end of the existing file... with no added spaces or commas or crlf characters between the existing data and the new data. The last dimension of the previous part just gets the first dimension of the next part pasted after it on the same line with no breaks, no way to tell that a new dimension has started. (00001.2301,00000.4927,00004.235400001.2297,00000.4938,00004.234800001.2305 etc)
Has anyone used one of these before and figured out how to manipulate either the file name, or the file contents? Keyence simply... can't. If we could even store a unique number in the data file for each part number, then we could parse the information into a useful format that the customer could use, but keyence says all they can do is add a "1" or a "0" to the data, not enough for the 6 part numbers he wants to be able to run. Currently, they have to plug a laptop into the cell, copy any data they want from it, then try to figure out which entries go with which parts from the two separate data files. (Almost faster to just measure the parts with hand gages.)