How to Trigger More Than 4 Cameras Via Factory Floor Protocols

The CC24 has 4 different Engines and only a single CC24 card is supported in a single PC in Designer. How do I control more than 4 cameras?

Answer

When setting the “Trigger Camera X (0-3)” an acquisition is taken on a specific camera when the Trigger Enable bit is set. These four bits fire the FFP TriggerAcquisition script point and the FFP TriggerAcquisition 0-3 Task triggers.  

Having 4 different bits for trigger events makes it easy to trigger 4 different cameras by putting the 4 camera acquisition blocks into 4 separate tasks and set the Task Trigger event to the 4 different FFP triggers.

If you want to use more than 4 cameras, you can :

• Use only one Engine (for example Engine 0),
• Send via User Data the camera number you would like to trigger,
• Set to 1 the trigger signal bit of Engine 0 (“Trigger Camera 0”),
• Configure a task in Cognex Designer which is started on the Engine 0 Trigger Event,
• This same task should check the User Data received (camera number) and trigger the corresponding camera (for e.g. by calling a separate task which contains the specified camera’s acquisition block).  

Note: If you want to trigger more than 4 cameras in parallel, you can use a binary coding for the camera number where each bit means a single camera.  

See Also:

Network Data Model (Cognex Designer) - Cognex Designer - Network Data Model - Documentation | Cognex

Using NDM to interact with FFP - Cognex Designer - Using the NDM to Interact with the Protocols - Documentation | Cognex

NDM Control Signals Description - Cognex Designer - NDM Control Signals Descriptions - Documentation | Cognex

Trigger Logic - Cognex Designer - Trigger Logic - Documentation | Cognex