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