G'Day, all. So, I have a grid of identical parts in a 2D-grid style rack that makes all their locations 100% repeatable -- they're simply bolts, inserted into holes, and my camera is looking straight down onto the bolt heads from above. The bolts are shiny metal, and the background is matte black for contrast.
The only uncontrolled variables is that each position in the grid could have three states: Empty, bolt without washer, or bolt with washer. The washer is roughly double the diameter of the bolt head, so ID'ing these states seems to be working okay using a simple Histogram -- a number of "bright" pixels within a certain range equates to one of the three states.
But now I'm running into the limits of my TP and iRVision know-how. I can "brute force" this solution by simply having a separate VT for each grid position, and having the TP program call each of them sequentially and store the results. But that looks to be not good for cycle time.
So I looked at the Blob tool. That seems like it might get me what I want -- a number of blobs found, how large, and at what XY locations. But I can't figure out if I can get this data from the VT using TP language. FOUND_POS looks like it might be part of what I want, but I'm still trying to figure out how to populate the VR from my iRVision VT. I have a lot to learn, here.
So, is what I'm trying to do even possible? Or am I overreaching, here?