Plant manager, biscuits. We want to check product thickness after the oven, target 7.0 mm, reject outside ±1 mm. Today an operator checks 10 pieces an hour with calipers. I saw Hermetry Forge listed for production and quality and hoped it could take the measurements, track out-of-tolerance counts per shift and give the line a reject signal.
Two questions: what sensor gets 1 mm repeatably on a moving belt (0.4 m/s, product is light brown, slightly shiny)? We tried a cheap ultrasonic sensor and it jumps 3 to 4 mm. And is Forge something we can switch on? I can’t find it on our plan page.
Ultrasonic won’t do 1 mm on small moving products, the beam is too wide. Laser triangulation is the usual answer, a sensor head above the belt with a reference on the belt surface. Plenty of industrial heads do ±0.05 mm. Shiny surfaces can be tricky, ask for a demo on your product.
Thanks, I’ll get a demo. Any idea on the Forge part?
I looked into this for a friend’s small bakery. I couldn’t find a doc page for Forge either, so I can’t tell you what it does for quality or how it gets on a plan.
What works with the normal IoT part: have the sensor’s controller (or a small PLC) send the thickness of each piece, or the min/max/average per 10 s, as telemetry, e.g. {"thick_mm": 7.12, "rejects": 3}. Then an alarm rule on the profile for out of tolerance. There’s no “between” operator, but you can group conditions with any:
{ "any": [
{ "key": "thick_mm", "op": "<", "value": 6.0 },
{ "key": "thick_mm", "op": ">", "value": 8.0 }
] }For counts per shift, send a growing rejects_total counter and chart it with the increase aggregate per hour. The reject gate itself must be driven locally by the sensor controller or PLC, not from the cloud; a belt at 0.4 m/s can’t wait on a round trip.
The conditions reference is Alarm conditions reference.
Clear, thank you both. Demo of a laser head next week; the supplier’s controller can push the reject gate and give us an analogue output we’ll send to Hermetry. Out-of-tolerance rule is set up with test data. Calipers stay until we trust it.
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