This article outlines how a user can output strings from an FH/FHV vision system utilising the TDM editor function.

This is broken down into FH/FHV and PLC sections.

FH/FHV

1. Setup the FH/FHV camera to perform OCR on the desired text

2. Open the TDM Editor Screen

3. Create the necessary String Variables, with the desired names, in the “Scene Variable” tab in the TDM Editor….

4. Once these have been created return to the “Edit Flow” tab in the TDM Editor Window. From here select an OCR unit that you wish to output the character string from, click on the “Set” dropdown box and select “Open the unit Setting UI”….

5. In this window then proceed to the “Output parameters” tab. To be able to assign a variable to any data you will need to ensure that you have checked the box located in the bottom of the window for “Variable assignment”. Proceed to find the desired data and select one of the variables that you have created… 

6. Repeat these steps for all the OCR units you are outputting data from…
7. Once this has been done add the “Result output (I / O)” recipe to the flow…

8. In this window make sure to select “Fieldbus” for the output device and then select the “Output data” tab. From here select “Insert” and add in each of your variables to be sent to the PLC setting the Data Type, Data (variable), Title (optional) and Size…

PLC

1. For the receiving of the string the normal tag sets and EtherNetIP configurations for communications to any FH system is required. Once this has been completed and the data structures for the EtherNetIP data have been created in SYSMAC you will simply need to modify the incoming data structure to accommodate for the incoming strings in place of the usual DINT data. This can be seen below for this example:

2. The data will now be visible in the Watch Window as seen below.