National Instruments NI myRIO, Essentials Manual

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1
Introduction
Welcome to the NI myRIO Vision Essentials Guide , and welcome to the exciting
world of machine vision with NI myRIO! Machine vision systems play a critical
role in manufacturing automation, shape and color analysis, and robotics. With
little more than a USB webcam you can create NI myRIO applications that
interact with the visual world to sense motion, take physical measurements,
read barcodes and printed labels, inspect products for defects, and respond
to colors. Add LCD displays, switches, and servomotors and you can create
a complete stand-alone application that controls physical apparatus such as a
marble sorter and an auto-panning camera.
This book serves as your guide to the essential techniques necessary to add
vision to your NI myRIO project. You will learn through a mixture of written
materials, video tutorials, and guided hands-on projects. Part I, Machine Vision
Fundamentals , introduces you to a generalized application development flow
suitable for all of the machine vision projects in this book. The development
flow includes defining the application’s requirements, configuring the imaging
system and acquiring representative images, calibrating to real-world units, de-
veloping the vision processing script with NI Vision Assistant, and developing
and validating the complete machine application with NI LabVIEW. Part I also
introduces you to the “Queued State Machine” design pattern that serves as
the basis of the “Machine Vision App” (MVA) LabVIEW project template that
you will use to implement each of the application projects. With this template
you concentrate on the relevant details for each application (vision script and
application-specific LabVIEW coding) instead of getting bogged down trying
to create the entire application from scratch.
Part II, Introductory Machine Vision Projects , presents four projects to
ground you in the basics of image acquisition, stereo vision, NI vision-related
software tools, and application development with the “Machine Vision App”
project template. These introductory projects include detailed step-by-step in-