Sensors face specific challenges in today’s high-speed, high-volume inline inspection environments. For example, what happens when a sensor runs out of memory, cannot run fast enough, or needs to handle data from more than two sensors in a sensor network?

In these cases, developers have to use an SDK and move all the raw data for processing onto a PC. This change in strategy is not a simple task. It requires writing code to communicate to many sensors, creating and managing queues to receive incoming streams of raw data, as well as having to synchronize those streams to a common encoder or timestamp and transform the data to a common coordinate system (for multi-sensor setups).

By moving data to a PC, you also abandon any built-in measurement tool functionality on the sensor. In short, you are on your own to process 3D point clouds.

Gocator Accelerator (GoX)

To solve these sensor roadblocks, LMI created the Gocator Accelerator (GoX). This is a PC application that allows you to connect with real Gocators and set them up for acceleration. GoX does this by instructing the real Gocator to send its data streams to the GoX application in order to speed up data processing (both point cloud generation and 3D measurement).

As a result of acceleration, you get a ton more memory to work with (2-4 Gigabytes is typical for a PC whereas unaccelerated Gocators are limited to 0.5 Gigabytes). This gives you the ability to effectively handle networks involving 10-20 sensors.

Another benefit of GoX is that you don’t lose Gocator’s communication support, so when measurement decisions are completed on GoX, you still have the protocol stacks (EthernetIP, Modbus, ASCII, etc) to send results to the factory.

User Experience

The GoX application is a silent partner to Gocator––seamlessly redirecting on-board processing from real sensors to a PC. For ease of use, GoX presents itself like a virtual Gocator, with the same web-based user interface as a real Gocator.

Using GoX is as easy as firing up a real Gocator, setting up your measurement job, and then switching to GoX to run the same job––only this time leveraging the power of a PC. The GoX approach quickly gives you increased memory, increased speed, and a way to manage and process data from a multi-sensor network.