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Machine Management

Machine management is where you configure and monitor the physical lanes (conveyors) connected to a vision system: adding and editing conveyors, calibrating robots, watching live status, and reviewing recipe log warnings.

Open Machine management from the navigation menu. It shows one card per connected vision system. If no vision system is connected, the page shows a "No systems connected" message.

Each system's card can be expanded or collapsed with the arrow in its header, and has three buttons:

Button Description
Refresh Re-reads the current lane configuration and live status from the system.
Save Saves any conveyor/lane changes you made to the system.
Add Conveyor Opens the conveyor editor to add a new lane.

Inside each system's card is a grid of tiles, one per configured lane.

Lane Types

Each lane has a type, chosen when it's created:

Type What it shows and does
Basic A vision-only lane. Shows a description and a Recent recipe log warnings feed (see below).
Weighing A lane with a weighing module. Shows live gross weight, connection status, a Tare button, a Calibrate button (scale calibration — unrelated to camera or robot calibration), and a Logs panel.
Pneumatic Sorting A lane with a pneumatic actuator. Shows the live up/down relay state, a Move up / Move down button, configured output and relay IP, and a Logs panel.
Marel Sorter A lane connected to a Marel sorter over Modbus. Shows connection status, IP/register info, a recent writes feed, and a Logs panel.
Robot A lane that sends detections to a robot picker. Shows connection status, the live encoder value, Modulo Min/Max, IP/Port, a recent sends feed, a Logs panel, and a Calibrate robot action.

Every lane with a drive also shows a connection badge and a speed stepper. A shared unit selector lets you choose the unit (for example mm/s) used for speed readouts across every lane.

Adding a Lane

  1. Open Machine management.
  2. On the card for your vision system, select Add Conveyor.
  3. Choose the lane Type: Basic, Weighing, Pneumatic Sorting, Marel Sorter, or Robot.
  4. Fill in the common fields — Name, Description, and the grid position (Row, Column, and span).
  5. Fill in the type-specific fields, for example:
  6. Weighing: IP address, Port, Slave ID, start/stop distance, auto-tare.
  7. Pneumatic Sorting: trigger distance, sorting output index, relay IP/Port/Slave ID, and the up/down relay outputs.
  8. Marel Sorter: IP address, Port, Slave ID, register, write delay.
  9. Robot: IP address, Port, Modulo Min, Modulo Max, and Pulse per mm.
  10. Select Save in the dialog.
  11. Select Save on the system's card to send the updated lane configuration to the device.

Editing a Lane

  1. Open Machine management.
  2. On the lane's tile, select the cog icon.
  3. Update the fields as needed.
  4. Select Save in the dialog, then select Save on the system's card.

Deleting a Lane

  1. Open Machine management.
  2. On the lane's tile, select the trash icon.
  3. Confirm the deletion.
  4. Select Save on the system's card.

Disabling a Conveyor

Every conveyor tile has a power button in its top-right corner, next to the cog and trash icons. Use it to take a conveyor out of use without deleting it, for example a robot or Marel sorter that is being serviced.

  1. Open Machine management.
  2. On the conveyor's tile, select the power button (Disable conveyor).
  3. Confirm. The change is saved to the device straight away.

A disabled conveyor is disconnected and not used for sorting: nothing is sent to its robot or Marel sorter, and its pneumatic and weighing scheduling stop. Its tile shows a Disabled: not connected or used for sorting banner and its speed controls are greyed out. Select the button again (Enable conveyor) to connect it and use it again; no restart is needed either way.

Calibrating a Robot Lane

Robot lanes have a Calibrate robot icon on their tile. See Calibrating a Robot for the full calibration steps, and the Robot stringbuilder section for choosing which detection data is sent to the robot.

Logs

Every conveyor card ends with a collapsible Logs panel, closed by default. Its badge shows how many entries there are, coloured by the most severe one. Open it to see the latest 20 entries for the lane's hardware, newest first:

  • Each entry has a time, a severity (information, success, warning, error or critical, shown as a coloured bar and icon) and the source it came from: Scale, Relay, Marelec, Robot or Drive.
  • Identical entries in a row are collapsed into one, with a count (for example x12).
  • The drive's entries (faults, recoveries, emergency stops and speed changes) are merged in with the device's own.

Recipe Log Warnings

On Basic lanes, the Recent recipe log warnings feed lists products whose detected spot(s) were too small, or scored too low, to match a defect condition in the active Sorting Recipe. Select the eye icon next to a warning to open the product's detail: its image, measurements, and the individual spots that were detected.

Use these warnings to spot near-misses and decide whether your recipe's defect thresholds need adjusting.