Leading LED lighting designer for machine vision since 2005, TPL Vision has established itself as an expert in machine vision illumination. What was once a small French family company is now a well-known name in the industry, supporting robotics and factory automation applications across the globe.
In 2021, TPL Vision became part of the wenglor sensoric family. The acquisition marked the start of an exciting new chapter of growth, fuelling many ambitious projects to this day and beyond.
The Importance of Illumination in Today’s Vision Landscape
The demand for cutting-edge technology in automation has never been higher. High-quality images, good contrast, robustness to environmental factors, high speeds, reliability and efficiency are paramount to any successful vision system.
The missing element that brings these critical parameters to life is illumination. One of our main goals at TPL Vision over the last few years has been to design flexible lighting solutions that simplify the product selection process, provide cost-effective testing and high performance imaging results.
Our modular products are the next step towards future-proofing our customers’ projects by ensuring their vision systems remain adaptable. This is why we are constantly reviewing and updating our portfolio to match the current challenges in the industry with powerful and feature-rich lighting solutions.
Flexible Lighting Leading to More Efficiency
The increasing demand for seamless integration with other hardware is driving users to seek uncomplicated lighting solutions. The crucial factor lies in finding versatile products that preserve the optimal combination of brightness and uniformity. By allowing our customers to easily configure their lighting to suit their particular operating conditions, they can optimise their systems, leading to fewer read-errors and more efficient operations.
This modularity “theme” is found throughout our range. With every product we launch, we introduce modular designs and versatile platforms wherever possible. This enables a more streamlined production, which is critical for short lead times, high quality, and lower costs for our partners.
The Start of a New Era
The first step into TPL’s modular world started in 2014 with the introduction of our SDOMEII & LOWANGLEII products, which were both based on a single, standard PCB and LED light “platform”.
After the success of these products, TPL Vision further developed the modular theme, and launched an even more versatile offering to our customers with the Modular Ringlight.
This was initially revealed at VISION 2016 in Stuttgart and was received with great success due to packing many features into a single light unit: dome, ring, low angle + darkfield lighting options, multi-wavelength, IP65, overdrive, dome-hole aperture reducers and sector control.
https://www.tpl-vision.com/overview/ring-lights/modular-ringlight/
With much anticipation from customers, we launched the Modular M-EBAR in 2021. Extending the principal of modularity, the M-EBAR is a universal bar light that can easily be adapted to meet the unique requirements of all kinds of machine vision applications.
Users get full flexibility to easily customise the product’s beam angle to suit their application, using Angle Changers that securely clip on to the light. By varying the intensity of illumination across a bar light, the Angle Changers can also be used to eliminate “hot spots” in applications using TPL Vision’s patented Curve Effect. Users also benefit from an outstanding balance of brightness and homogeneity and an IP65-rated design. Taking the guesswork out of the product selection process, the M-EBAR’s performance and flexibility allow it to cover many applications with just a few part numbers.
https://www.tpl-vision.com/overview/bar-lights/modular-m-ebar/
Our latest modular launch is the Modular Tiny M-TBAR, which also uses Angle Changers and comes with a high brightness strobe OverDrive mode. Equipped with easy mounting options to suit confined spaces, the M-TBAR offers maximum convenience and flexibility, including the option to chain several lights together.
The Angle Changers are attached with a magnet or can be fixed with screws for the final application. 9 different Angle Changers are available, including polarised options, allowing users to make easy adjustments. The M-TBAR is IP67-rated and perfect for end of arm tooling and other robotics applications.
https://www.tpl-vision.com/overview/bar-lights/modular-m-tbar/
The Benefits of Flexible Illumination
Our customers benefit from the high degree of modularity in several ways:
Modularity means customers don’t need to compromise or worry about having to make the “perfect” lighting selection from the start – the flexibility of our designs help to guarantee a successful application with the best results.
Products can be produced and kept on stock – meaning the lead times can be very short – perfect for those last minute requirements!
Our free evaluation loan service helps customers to simplify the product selection process. It’s easy to request a loan product together with a few accessories, and quickly identify the best solution based on our flexible platforms.
Modularity means we can provide products with a lot more features, whilst the standardisation that results helps us to pass on cost savings to our customers. This also allows us to focus on lean manufacturing processes and ensure the quality is extremely high on every product we produce.
New Projects & New Employees
Being part of the wenglor family brings a huge boost in new projects, capabilities, customers and colleagues – and not just with our new wenglor colleagues – as the investment in TPL Vision’s product development department has also brought us several new engineers, product development tools, quality processes, and more. It’s an exciting time to be part of TPL Vision!
Although TPL continues to operate as an independent business unit, being part of a larger group has also helped us to improve our existing supplier relationships whilst simultaneously opening us up to new capabilities and suppliers across the world.
The Future Of Machine Vision Technologies
The machine vision industry is driven by the sum of many elements. This of course includes lighting as a key parameter for creating contrast and robustness but there is also software, cameras, optics, controllers and more that build the wonderful industry we’re a part of.
For lighting specifically: production lines will get faster and faster, this will lead to a need for more brightness, which should be in line with LEDs becoming more and more efficient due to the demands from climate change. The AI revolution will take over and machine vision will move away from rule-based algorithms. This revolution will accelerate the growth in the industry by making Vision systems and image processing easier for anyone to install. Lighting will continue to play a key role in ensuring that the image is seen as the same every time, reducing the exposure time for image acquisition and improving parameters such as depth of field and reducing ambient light impact.
Always Moving Forward
TPL Vision has always been motivated by utilising technology to ensure we bring the best lighting to our customers, and this is set to continue. We have an ambitious product roadmap planned, with goals to bring out new patented and market-first features in the years ahead.
This growth in new product releases, new colleagues in new markets, striving for continuous improvement in our products / quality and investment from our parent company is a great recipe for moving the company forward in a very positive way.
For a free consultation or to request a product loan, you can reach out to TPL Vision:
Email – contact@tpl-vision.co.uk or contact@tpl-vision.fr
Phone – +44 (0)1738 310 392 (UK) +33 (0)2 40 56 10 99 (France).
Web – www.tpl-vision.com
