It has been far too long

It has been far too long since I've given an update to the web world, so here goes!

I'm now off on my own, running Slaughter Systems, LLC out of my home office in Round Rock, TX. I'm hoping to still do a fair amount of machine vision, but as of right now I'm primarily doing LabVIEW and LabVIEW RT development outside of the vision world.

I've been working on getting my certifications up to snuff. I recently completed both my CLAD and CLD certifications (Certified LabVIEW Developer exams). I've also gotten to work on some rather large LabVIEW applications for the past several months, which has been wonderful. I love getting to expand my engineering mind and solve some problems on a daily basis.

I've also gotten to do a bit more travel. I took my wife to Costa Rica for 10 days in December, and it was a life changing trip. Costa Rica is such a beautiful place, with a great culture and wonderful people. Plus, I got to surf every day!

Anyway, life keeps bringing amazing surprises. I hope everyone else has also had an amazing start to 2013! Hopefully I'll get more time to update this blog!!

Pura Vida!

Vision 2009, Stuttgart, Germany

The Vision Show in Stuttgart, Germany is now over, and it was quite a good time. Tons of new technology was on display, and there were several new tools that we're quite excited about here at Cyth! We also got to network with many of our colleagues and friends in Stuttgart. This event is the largest in the world for our industry and it was a relief to see that the show was full of life and active, even in these economic times.

Some of the cooler things at the show:
Our Guitar Hero playing robot made an appearance in the SVS/PixeLINK booth!
USB 3.0 cameras from Point Grey Research
Some amazing feature extraction based pattern matching algorithms
And of course, the NET booth's main marketing - a young woman being body painted live at the show..... quite distracting.

A wedding and a hurricane

I got married on August 29th, and it was a smash hit! Things just went beautifully.



Then we went on to our honeymoon, a cruise down the pacific. We were supposed to go to Puerto Vallarte and Mazatlan, followed by Cabo. Hurricane Jimena prevented the first two stops, and we ended up going to Catalina followed by Ensanada. On Friday we did get to go down to Cabo and swim with the dolphins (expensive, but worth every penny!).

Now I'm back a married (and slightly heavier) Matt Slaughter.

Cheers,
-Matt

One week to go

One more week until the Robots and Vision demo. I'll be spending a good deal of time in the NI booth this year, but will also be seen at the Edmund Optics booth and the SICK booth too. I'll also be spending a fair share of time walking around shaking babies and kissing hands.... or maybe the other way around. Anyhow, things are going fast and furious with just 1 week to go. Anyone know where the evening gathering places of choice are this year?

-Matt

Robots and Vision

Any of you bloggers going to the R&V show in Chicago? I'd love to meet a few of you in person. I'm sure Mr. Andy Wilson will be there. :-D

-Matt

New Job

Wow, it has been a turbulent month! I now live in Sunny San Diego, and am the new Business Development Manager of Machine Vision for Cyth Systems, an integrating partner for National Instruments and Edmund Optics. Posts soon on exciting vision applications we're working on, and some insight from a different point of view.

I was recently at the Vision Show in Phoenix. The show was a little slower than we had hoped (and by a little I mean a lot), yet the folks there seemed to have applications on hand and hopefully we see some responses out of the leads we collected. No really exciting new technologies, but I did get to bump into our friends at Vision System Design, so that was fun.

More coming soon!

NI in top 100 places to work

For the 10th year in a row NI has been put on Forbes' 100 Best Places to Work list. We moved up from last year. To see the full list, check here:

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/bestcompanies/2009/full_list/

Enjoy!
-Matt

Happy New Years!

The holidays have come and gone. I am one puppy and five pounds (the weight, not the currency) richer, now it's time to get back to the grindstone, for two days. Tomorrow I venture to Hawaii to see a friend get hitched.

Just a quick post to wish everyone a happy new year.

Any exciting stories from the machine vision engineers out there?

Cheers,
-Matt

Economic downturn good for vision?

This economic downturn has been a nightmare for many industries, and rightly so. Housing, automotive, and financial institutions have had bigger than tolerable growth for years, and that couldn't go on forever. Eventually a bubble will pop, even if the government tries to slow down the pop.

Now, instead of ranting about how things could (and should) have been handled in a different manner leading up to now (hindsight's 20/20), I wanted to discuss why this might be a great time of growth for machine vision.

The cost for machine vision solutions are dropping as technology improves. The need for automation in many industries is increasing, and the number of tasks that can be automated increases daily. Combine these two facts with the state of the economy today, add a few engineering managers the right mindset, and it makes a great case for adding new optimizations.

The main reason people don't automate is the fact that they don't want to take a large hit on the books today, even though it will make the books look better from now on. If a company is expecting to take a loss in the coming quarters, why not take a bit more of a hit knowing that it will provide for long term cost savings? There are caveats here of course.... don't put yourself out of business trying to cut future costs, but if you can set your company up to take more advantage of the upturn when it happens now may be a good time to do so.

Just my $.02

Machine Vision Fundamentals

It seems that there are plenty of places to learn about machine vision on the web, but it appears to me that there isn't one place to find it all. I look to remedy this somewhat, although it may take me some time. If anyone that reads this has any feedback, it would be greatly appreciated.

My thoughts are as follows:

What is machine vision?
Machine vision software
Configuration based machine vision
Programmable machine vision
Machine vision hardware drivers
Machine vision hardware
Frame Grabbers
Camera Buses - pros and cons of each
Benefits of PCIe/PXIe
Embedded Machine Vision
Vision Systems
Smart Cameras
Machine vision application architectures
Machine vision lighting
Machine vision optics

Hopefully I can get this pulled together in a reasonable amount of time. Again, any feedback on these thoughts would certainly be taken to heart.

Cheers,
-Matt