In order to protect consumers from fake or wrongly labeled medicines, the American Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the European Commission have imposed regulations for the complete monitoring of manufacturing and delivery chains of medicines.
To ensure compliance with these legal requirements, each medicine’s packaging has to have a distinctive identification label. 2D barcodes are becoming more and more popular in the industry as they, in comparison to the barcodes in food packaging, have a much higher information density per unit of area.
In comparison to one dimensional barcodes, the 2D barcodes, cannot simply be read by a laser scanner. Capturing 2D barcodes requires high resolution optical reading devices such as CCD scanners or cameras to reliably identify the pixel pattern of the codes which often measure no more than 9 x 9mm. The physical form of cylindrical plastic bottles presents the packaging industry with a further challenge: the horizontal position of the individual bottles (and consequently the position of the barcode which has to be identified) on the conveyor belt is another variable. It is, on the one hand, possible to mechanically place the bottles in the right position in front of the reading device by, for example integrating an additional module to turn the bottles. On the other hand however, apart from this meaning a further intervention in the packaging line, it also can slow down the throughput rate.
The German company Seidenader Vision, a leading manufacturer of optical inspection systems for the pharmaceutical industry, has developed a solution which overcomes this problem efficiently. The SV360 Vision Inspection Module examines cylindrical objects such as plastic bottles or small glass vials by generating a 360° view of the bottle on the conveyor belt. This panoramic view eliminates the need to carry out time-consuming positioning of the bottle on the conveyor belt. The inspection module, which has a throughput rate of up to 400 containers a minute, can be flexibly integrated at any place on the conveyor belt.
To ensure that this high performance system provides long-term and interruption-free service, Seidenader required a high performance hardware platform to fulfill
its tough demands. Kontron supplied Seidenader with the individually designed and application-ready industrial Box PC SVIM X2. Apart from the high performance and five year long-term available Kontron Flex ATX motherboard 986LCD-M/Flex, the Box PC also integrates a customer-specific extension board. Along with the application-specific tailoring of the Box PC, Kontron offers Seidenader the necessary overall reliability of the system, as a high level of failure safety plays a major role for Seidenader.
