Keywords for a google search about the subject: Data buffering, buffering, queue implementation, FIFO buffer, ...
Lately I come across similar questions about buffering mechanism in automation engineering forums. I've already written a simple introduction to this problem two-three months ago in Turkish. When I see the same question in linked-in, I wanted to translate this blog into English...
The very first introduction is to understand when to decide to use a buffering mechanism.
Assume, there is conveyor and a camera is evaluating parts on the entrance of this conveyor. At the end of the conveyor, there is a gripper to pick&place the incoming parts, and a boxer is taking out the defected products out of the converyor belt. To make it simple, lets assume that any two parts gap distance is fixed. So a conveyor with a limited length can carry a fixed number of parts. Which can simply be calculated as;
iMaxPartNumberOnConveyor := iDistanceBetweenCameraAndConveyorEnd / (iPartLength + iGapLength);
So our buffer should have at least that much empty cells...
The very first introduction is to understand when to decide to use a buffering mechanism.
Assume, there is conveyor and a camera is evaluating parts on the entrance of this conveyor. At the end of the conveyor, there is a gripper to pick&place the incoming parts, and a boxer is taking out the defected products out of the converyor belt. To make it simple, lets assume that any two parts gap distance is fixed. So a conveyor with a limited length can carry a fixed number of parts. Which can simply be calculated as;
iMaxPartNumberOnConveyor := iDistanceBetweenCameraAndConveyorEnd / (iPartLength + iGapLength);
So our buffer should have at least that much empty cells...
