What the Cognex Designer actually is?

• Cognex Designer relation to Cognex VisionPro
• Quick Build -> ToolBlock
• Visualisation fix – when high resolution monitor is used
• Tasks explained
• How errors are logged
• Quick functionality tour

Cognex Designer is kind of and wrapper or extension of VisionPro.

Before Cognex had a Designer, Cognex only had a library of tools called Cognex VisionPro and most advanced tool which could be used to control VisionPro was QuickBuild. Now QuickBuild is integrated into Designer under name VisionPro ToolBlock – which makes it perfect for big and complicated inspections, since you can make the application easy to understand and navigate during the development.

There is little bit of a problem with visual components of QuickBuild and VisionPro ToolBlocks. When using display with high DPI – most often windows sets scaling to deal with it. But the Cognex components do not like the setting. So we have to explicitly adjust properties of Cognex Designer (If you are using Quick Build, do it for the Quick Build application too):

        Right mouse button on Cognex Designer icon -> Properties -> Compatibility Tab -> Change High DPI Settings -> check Hight DPI Scaling Override -> System Enhanced

To run inspection Designer uses Tasks. 

Blocks inside Task are executed in sequence, based on the first edge position. So the one that has the edge more to the left goes first, and the one that has the edge further to right goes later.

When any error occurs, when designer catches them, it create logs about in in Output windows. After clicking on the log we can see where the error occurred and what was the cause of it. We will be talking about logs in future videos since it is a very powerful tool in Designer.