Connectivity 3.0 in a Nutshell

As the beating heart of a Hammer-IMS solution, Connectivity 3.0 is directly linked to all commercial products and innovations developed by our company.

Features

Connectivity 3.0 includes a range of integrated functionalities:

It encloses measurement and inspection algorithms and tools, allowing sensors and cameras to remain calibrated via its built-in calibration algorithms.
The system supports both Marveloc (measuring systems) and Edge-Vision-4.0 (machine-vision systems). By embracing a unified software environment, it helps reduce development and operational overhead.
A recipe configuration tool is included, enabling users to create and edit recipes, as well as define advanced parameter settings based on recipe dependencies.
Thanks to its plugin architecture, it supports customer-specific plugins that can implement case-specific algorithms.
It provides both graphical and numerical visualizations of physical parameters in continuous production environments (as further detailed in our add-ons brochure).
Industry-specific KPI calculations are supported, including the Uniformity Index, Coefficient of Variation, and real-time FFT for monitoring periodic behavior.
Language support includes French, English, German, Korean, and Japanese. The system is easily translatable into other languages through loadable text databases. In specific cases, customers can switch languages themselves, although this feature is not enabled by default.

Minimal design

Our main software window only displays the features that really matter to our users. This is basically: a visualization (e.g. basis-weight as a numeric value), a Measure/Pause button, a Clear button and a Stop button. Furthermore, some buttons that are intended to make life easier: a Cleaning button (to disable the touch screen for 60 seconds to allow cleaning), a Keyboard button to show the touch keyboard and a Mute button to mute auditive alarms (e.g. a buzzer).

HD-widescreen experience

The HD-widescreen main software window stands for easy interpretation of measurement graph data. Zooming-in on graphs is possible by means of simple touch gestures.

Industry-specific visualizations

The flexible design of the software enables us to deliver tailor-made visualizations for your industry. An installation on a plastic extrusion line would probably ask for a plugin showing the thickness for each tuning bolt, whereas a plastic calendering line does not deal with tuning bolts and therefore requires another plugin on its turn.

Built-in recipe selection

We do not need you to be an M-Ray professional to operate Hammer-IMS's measurement systems and Connectivity 3.0. The measurement system's configuration is pretty easy. We offer a single-click configuration of the software according to the recipe that is currently being processed/produced by your production equipment. Do not waste your precious time checking all configurations over and over again and do not let human mistakes or improper configurations be directly responsible for the quality of your products. Production managers can upload recipes from an Microsoft Excel-compatible file into Hammer-IMS's Connectivity software.

Language support

In order to optimize the user's experience, Connectivity 3.0 supports your language. Ask Hammer-IMS what is possible for your language.

Color Graph add-on for full 2D visualization

Our recently-developed Color Graph add-on gives the operator a clean view on variations of the produced material in both the machine-direction and the cross-machine direction.

Data integration features

Connectivity 3.0 also delivers strong integration capabilities:

It can report measurement data directly to Microsoft SQL database servers or FTP/SFTP servers.

Optional Grafana dashboards can be shipped and configured, allowing customers to store and analyze historical data from their office environments over longer periods. Grafana furthermore provides attractive and interactive visuals. It enables report generation, integrated with the customer’s recipe and/or batch system. It can be made available on a remote server or straight from the Hammer-IMS HMI system. The system is connectable with PLC technologies such as Beckhoff and Siemens, via a Beckhoff-based bus coupler. Real-time feedback can be provided to the production process through Modbus TCP/IP server and OPC/UA software implementations. Feedback control is supported for both die and knife systems. Furthermore, PROFINET and Ethernet/IP are also supported via Beckhoff PLCs acting as ADS-PROFINET or ADS-Ethernet/IP bridges.

Connectivity 3.0 Video walkthrough

Check out the software walkthrough video. Make sure you enable the sub-titles in the video for a detailed explanation of the shown functionalities!

Edge-Vision-4.0 Specific Features

The software makes efficient use of the underlying computing power, making it an ideal choice for machine-vision tasks—this is achieved through implementation in the C++ language.

For Edge-Vision-4.0 applications, Connectivity 3.0 brings additional capabilities:
It integrates smoothly with third party GenICam-supported cameras.
The system is capable of processing real-time image feeds from cameras and can annotate detected anomaly classes directly on a running defect map.
It keeps a record of historical image data through a built-in image browser.
Various OpenCV-based detectors, classifiers, and processors are included for enhanced machine vision performance.
Neural network support is provided via Microsoft ONNX Runtime (our current standard) and Google TensorFlow. This allows both supervised anomaly detection and classification, as well as non-supervised anomaly detection.