Material rollers run dry. Hoppers drift toward empty. Feeders skip a beat. Each is a small event that becomes a big event when no one's watching. Vision-based fill-level monitoring tracks every roller, every hopper, every feeder — and warns before the line stops, not after.
On a 12-station line, the operator has 11 other things to watch. Roller-empty events that get caught manually are the ones that already caused 30 seconds of bad output. Predictive vision catches the *trend* — fill level dropping faster than expected — and alerts before the empty event happens.
Photoelectric sensors at the bottom of a hopper only fire when material is already at zero. By then, you've already missed feed events. We add overhead vision that measures fill *level* continuously across all rollers in the line. Existing feed actuators stay; the vision layer adds predictive trend.
Specify the IX-AS/01 overhead in the line layout. Single camera, single PoE+ cable, zero feeder modifications. The vision system becomes the primary fill-level sensor; the photoelectrics become the redundant safety layer. Cleaner cabling, fewer instruments, better data.
Overhead camera captures all rollers continuously. Each roller indexed to a known position.
Fill level per roller calculated as a percentage. Trend line per roller updated every second.
Trend extrapolation: if consumption holds, when will this roller hit empty?
Tiered alerts (20% / 10% / 5%) routed to operator HMI. Auto-feed actuators triggered on threshold.
Tell us your line, your existing equipment, and your tolerance window. We'll come back with a retrofit assessment, a greenfield specification, and a rough cost estimate within two business days.