The most-watched clips from our shop floor - washdown robots at work, in-house test runs, a window display for Old Town Auburn, and one very good dog.

25 article teasers on the bench right now - vision installs, lighting, torque witness marks, casino-town commissioning runs, a backwards-milled California, and how AI might find Black Barts treasure. Tell us which to write first.

Electronics recycling has a sorting problem that classical machine vision cannot touch. The product arriving on the belt is not a product - it is everything the industry shipped over a decade, coming back scuffed, cracked, missing parts, and in every possible orientation. We built a system for an electronics recycling operation that identifies items on a moving conveyor with a deep-learning classifier and then tells the operators what it found in the most direct way we could

A high-payload robot with an 11.5 HP spindle, a granite-backed vacuum table, line-scan inspection, and the dust, static, and handling lessons that came with machining hundred-inch acrylic castings.

A dried fruit processor dries tomato halves on large trays, cut side up. Halves that land cup down or on edge do not dry properly, so somebody has to walk the line and flip them by hand. The plan was a robot flipper - but before anyone builds a robot line, there is a cheaper question to answer: can a camera even tell which way a tomato half is sitting? This is the story of how we scoped and built that prototype, and why we think feasibility prototypes are a discipline of thei

This week we ran an experiment on our own back catalog: could we harvest real, fab-proven part footprints out of ten-plus years of panel layout drawings, automatically? The answer was yes - 72 drawings in, over a thousand unique blocks out, and our parts geometry library tripled in two days. Here is what worked and what bit us, because none of it is in any manual. Your old drawings are a dataset If your drafters ever named footprint blocks after the catalog part number - and

This is the anatomy of a web inspection system we built for a medical device line running adhesive product on a carrier web at 800 feet per minute - every major component, why it was chosen, and where to learn more about each one. The customer details stay private; the engineering does not. The problem shape Small repeating products on a fast-moving web, defects invisible under white light, and a requirement to inspect both sides without slowing the line. Manual inspection wa

Onions are a miserable product to automate. No two are the same size, the same shape, or even close to the same orientation when they arrive. The skin flakes, the roots trail dirt, and everything in the room gets hosed down at the end of the shift. This is the story of a machine we built for an onion processing facility that tops and tails onions robotically - the kind of job that has historically been done by a row of people with knives. The problem shape The facility needed