Suitability for pick-and-place bottom camera

Hello, I’m wondering if I could use an H7 with global shutter module as a smart ‘bottom camera’ for a PCB component pick-and-place machine. The goal is to look at an SMD part held by the nozzle and check whether the rotation or position needs alignment. Ideally this would have “fly-by” capability where the nozzle does not stop over the camera.

The overall procedure would go like:

  1. Receive package type (eg. 0805, SOT23 etc) to be identified, over UART probably
  2. Wait for external trigger
  3. Grab frame buffer and process, probably 320x160 mono
  4. Output xy offset and rotation over SPI

So far I can’t see any obvious roadblocks to achieving this, let me know if I’m wrong about that. I’m also wondering what kind of time I might expect the processing to take, because if the nozzle gets to the destination first and has to sit around waiting, the advantage of the fly-by is kinda lost. The trigger latency also needs to be highly consistent.

Hi, the triggering can be done precisely. As for the frame rate. You can achieve 40 FPS usually in triggered mode. So, you’d need to keep your algorithm down to 25ms. Depending on what you are doing this is possible.