Support / How do I import and use images and videos?
An assembly image/video history is one of the fundamental tools Instrumental offers to help product engineers save time, improve yields, and reduce scrap. Images/videos in the Instrumental Web App from across your lines and supply chain support many different use cases, such as:
- Discover unknown issues: Instrumental’s Discover AI scans assembly issues to automatically identify problems that engineers might not know about.
- Accelerate failure analysis: among other tools, Instrumental’s Explore capabilities allow virtual teardowns, and Correlations capabilities support root cause analysis.
- Monitor and report: Instrumental Monitors allow automatically intercepting defects early, and these tests combine with functional test results to provide easy yield reporting and guidance for where the biggest problems are appearing on each line.
You can read more about Instrumental use cases for images by browsing our support articles or requesting a demo from your Instrumental representative.
Uploading images and videos
Instrumental provides several different ways to get images and videos into the Instrumental Web App. Our Solutions Architects can work with you to determine the best approach for your needs.
Option 1: Instrumental-provided inspection stations
Instrumental rents camera stations to our customers that have a built-in integration with our cloud. These stations come in several different configurations to accommodate different needs. Chances are, if you’re reading this article, you’ve already discussed these options with an Instrumental Solutions Architect. Instrumental stations are a great solution if you want to get new views of your products during assembly.
Option 2: Self-Service Image and Video Streams integration
Instrumental provides an API for uploading images and videos captured by sensors that are already on your assembly lines. We can also provide guidance regarding the setup. In short, there must be somewhere you can run code that will have access to your images and upload them to our API over the internet. Then it usually takes about 1 day for a test engineer to program an integration. To learn how to write a Self-Service Image or Video Streams integration, visit the Image and Video Streams API Documentation.
Option 3: Managed Image or Video Streams integration
If you already have image/video sensors on your lines but don’t have the capacity to write your own integration, Instrumental can often do it for you. How this works depends on whether you or your factory can make the images/videos available somewhere outside of the factory network, such as on an SFTP drive, or if the images/videos are only accessible inside the factory. In the former case, Instrumental will set up a system that can pull the images/videos from their internet-accessible storage and upload them to our cloud. Otherwise, Instrumental will provide hardware to place inside the factory, and we will work with all stakeholders to coordinate piping the images/videos through our hardware.
FAQ
What kinds of images/videos can I send?
You can send any images you want in JPEG format and videos in MP4 or WEBM format. Instrumental most often works with images from an industrial camera, but we also work with other sources like AOI and X-Ray machines. We do not currently support 3D scans, but if you are interested in that, please discuss with our team. Uploaded files are limited to 32MP and 50MB, so very large stitched files may need to be scaled down or split up.
If you want to send text-based data such as numbers and pass/fail results, please see How do I import and use functional test data?
Can I get the images/videos back out of Instrumental once they’re uploaded?
The Instrumental Web App allows downloading images and videos one at a time, and customers may request to download all images/videos if Instrumental service on a program is ending. We do not currently offer a way to download images/videos programmatically.
Does Instrumental’s AI work on videos?
No, Instrumental’s suite of AI tools only work on images. However, Instrumental normally collects images alongside videos (e.g. before and after a video). Since these images are more consistent across units, they are more powerful for detecting product defects. We recommend using videos as a supplementary failure analysis tool by recording tricky assembly processes so that specific defective units can be reviewed to see which deviations from an SOP caused a defect to occur.