Omron F160-2 Visual Expert Guide

Omron F160-2 Visual Expert Guide

The core value and applicable scenarios of expert menu

Omron F160-2 Vision Sensor is an embedded system designed for industrial inspection. Its Expert Menu provides 17 measurement methods, covering area, defect, center of gravity, edge, search, character recognition, classification, and almost all common machine vision needs. Compared with simple conversational menus, expert menus allow users to make fine adjustments to measurement areas, binary thresholds, filtering processing, output expressions, etc., making them particularly suitable for applications that require strict customization of detection logic, processing of complex workpieces, or data exchange with PLCs and robots.

This article is based on the F160-2 expert menu operation manual, and from the perspective of engineering practice, it systematically explains the entire process from startup, image adjustment, position compensation, measurement method setting, to data output, scene switching, and fault troubleshooting.

Startup and Basic Operations

2.1 System Startup and Mode Selection

After powering on F160-2, first enter the selection menu screen. Use the directional keys to move the cursor to "Expert Menus" and confirm, then enter the camera settings screen. In this screen, it is necessary to specify the connected camera model (such as F160-S1, F160-S2, etc.) and whether intelligent lighting (LTC20/LTC50) is used. After completing the settings, enter the Basic Screen of the Expert menu.

The expert menu has five operation modes:

SET (Set Mode): Configure detection conditions, including image adjustment, position compensation, measurement area, output expression, and display content.

MON (Monitoring Mode): Measurements are performed under set conditions, and the results are displayed on the screen but not output to external devices for debugging.

RUN (running mode): The measurement is officially executed, and the results are output to external devices through parallel or serial interfaces.

SYS (System Mode): Set camera parameters, communication format, display mode, password, startup conditions, and other system environment settings.

TOOL (tool mode): perform data backup (to computer or memory card), clear stored images, line brightness check, I/O monitoring, etc.

2.2 Menu Tree and Data Input

The expert menu adopts a hierarchical structure. Move the cursor with the directional keys, press the ENT key to enter the next level, and press the ESC key to return to the previous level. Items marked with inverted triangles indicate a multiple-choice list. When entering a numerical value, use the left and right keys to move the cursor to the number of digits to be modified, and use the up and down keys to increase or decrease the value. When entering characters, the software keyboard pops up on the screen, select the character and confirm.

Standard process for setting detection conditions

In SET mode, follow the following seven steps to complete the configuration of a detection task.

3.1 Step 1: Enter the setup mode

Move the cursor to "MON" on the basic screen, press ENT and select "SET" to enter. If the current scene has never been set, the camera mode selection interface (single camera or dual camera Camera 0+1) will appear first. For the F160-S2 camera, you can also set the "Number of input lines". Reducing the number of lines can shorten the image acquisition time, but it will lose some vertical image areas.

3.2 Step 2: Adjust the image

Image adjustment includes shutter speed, intelligent lighting control, filtering processing sequence (position compensation and measurement can be set separately), filtering methods (smoothing, dilation, erosion, median, edge enhancement, vertical/horizontal edge extraction, edge extraction, etc.), and background suppression (BGS).

Shutter speed: Suitable for fast-moving objects to prevent image trailing.

Intelligent lighting: The light intensity of each LED segment can be adjusted in sections (0-7), and there are also 15 preset lighting modes built-in, which can be switched through shortcut keys.

Filtering: For example, smoothing can reduce the interference caused by slight surface irregularities; Edge extraction can enhance contrast and facilitate subsequent edge detection.

Background suppression: Set the upper and lower limits of grayscale, only retaining the grayscale range of interest, and turning the rest into black (0) or white (255).

All these adjustments can be previewed in real-time and can be independently set for position compensation and measurement area.

3.3 Step 3: Position compensation

When the position and angle of the tested workpiece are inconsistent, the position compensation function must be used. F160-2 provides two position compensation regions (1st region and 2nd region), each of which can be measured using one of six methods: centroid and area, centroid and axis angle, label, grayscale search, edge position, and rotation search. The compensation directions can be set separately for X, Y, and θ compensation sources.

A typical compensation strategy is to first perform a coarse compensation on an area with distinct features (such as a circular hole), and then perform a fine compensation on another area to improve stability.