Definitely not the case at my old job - we deployed a bit over 200 Cognex In-Sight cameras over my five-year stint there, almost all for bespoke inspection applications for customers.
They gave me plenty of swag, but if I wanted to play with one of their cameras I'd have to go out on the production floor.
Sounds like you worked for an integrator, so it stands to reason that you had a high success rate. Cognex, Keyance, DVT, et al sold a lot of smart cameras in batches of 1 and 2 to non-vision experienced engineers based on the lie that they could bolt it up to a conveyor and in an afternoon of programming on their game controller they could be up and running and miraculously improving their quality by 30% by next Monday. I think the vast majority of these cameras never saw production.
As an OEM the ones we deployed definitely saw (and are probably still seeing) production. I can personally confirm off the top of my head that Proctor & Gamble, Revlon, Duracell, Mars Candy, Bausch & Lomb, Pfizer, Gilead Sciences, Boehringer Ingelheim (and more) use Cognex cameras in their product packaging lines.
The promise is - as you say yourself - in systems that are easily maintained by non-vision experienced engineers. As I noted in another post, these are usually controls engineers that overwhelmingly prefer ladder logic on their PLCs and have little exposure to modern software engineering practices such as source control. Obviously it's not "up in an afternoon" - any sales rep that promised that got sent away (Keyence, I'm looking at you) - debugging consists of a lot of product test runs and more mechanical/controls work and definitely takes more than a day.
I tried on more than one occasion to put forward PC-based systems, but the customers wanted the smart cameras. Though I did frequently use OpenCV for batch image analysis in-house, I ought to write an article or two about that bit.
>I can personally confirm off the top of my head that Proctor & Gamble, Revlon, Duracell, Mars Candy, Bausch & Lomb, Pfizer, Gilead Sciences, Boehringer Ingelheim (and more) use Cognex cameras in their product packaging lines.
>I tried on more than one occasion to put forward PC-based systems, but the customers wanted the smart cameras.
Oh, all those that you listed also use PC-based systems. I know because all of them are also customers of ours.
Your end-users, do they mess around with the spreadsheet programming interface, via some kind of remote PC interface or not at all? We deployed quite a few Cognex InSights in the early days but version control and distribution of updates was a major headache.
Sidenote, I feel partly responsible because we bought a ton of systems from McGarry's previous company Acumen, then I guess he took off and created the InSight. Colorful guy, I remember him showing up with his fancy Porsche around that time...
> version control and distribution of updates was a major headache
I wound up writing an in-house tool that pulls the program files from each camera on the machine LAN over FTP and commit them to a local Git repo. There was also some futzing around with XML to get the backup metadata to work seamlessly, but it's not too hard to figure out.
Now getting co-workers to use Git and not various combinations of "Copy of (1) Copy of visionproject (FINAL) 3-2-16 2a.zip" was a different challenge.
Apologies, I forgot the rest of the question. The end customers generally only interacted with the Cognex cameras via HMI applications (VisionView on panels running various versions of FactoryTalk View), rarely would we hear about their plant engineers actually re-programming the cameras.
They gave me plenty of swag, but if I wanted to play with one of their cameras I'd have to go out on the production floor.