About Us

Thank you for the opportunity to introduce our company, FlashBack Vision Solutions, LLC. Since our inception over ten years ago our company specializes in one thing and one thing only; using high speed vision technology to increase your profitability.

FlashBack has provided rapid return on investment in a variety of industries. The system allows you to “bore to root cause” and identify event driven line failures. Whether you are troubleshooting high-speed manufacturing lines, working on waste reduction, improving your process, or mentoring new employees, FlashBack captures event clips that can be played backward or forward in slow motion. This allows maintenance, operators, engineering, six sigma black belts, and production individuals to monitor line and product quality. Sustainability and OEE programs now have a visual metric support tool. Process improvement, waste reduction, and efficiency increases are key in today’s economic climate.

FlashBack can be offered as a portable or fixed multiple camera system. The fixed system can be designed to meet any plant or line specifications. The compact portable system is laptop based; battery operated and sets up in less than five minutes anywhere in your facility. FlashBack is simple to operate and anyone can learn the system in a matter of hours. We utilize a single CAT5 cable to power the camera and LED light through our power over Ethernet unit. All color high resolution cameras can be mounted inside waterproof/dust tight enclosures. We offer various color cameras, lens options, wireless triggering methods, and camera mounts, all contained in a roll around soft case. We have the most innovative software that is consistently exceeding our customer’s expectations. We are a custom software house and a vertically integrated company under one roof.

Whether you’re like one of our automotive customers videotaping one car per minute or one of our beverage customers watching 1,800 cans per minute, FlashBack is truly the vision system for you. 

What is FlashBack?

FlashBack is a flexible, high speed video based trouble shooting tool for solving assembly and manufacturing problems. Especially those small ones that accumulatively make the difference between 80% and 90% efficiency.

FlashBack allows a user to see a malfunction on a machine that happens too fast for the human eye or too seldom for a human to be present. Maintenance personnel tell you: “If we can see the problem, we can fix it”. This is where FlashBack comes to the fore. Flashback is Easy to set-up, easy to use and is portable. Open the bag, power-up, connect the components, and you are ready to start trouble-shooting.

FlashBack Brochure

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Download the FlashBack Specifications Brochure

How Does FlashBack Help Us?  "Get ahead by looking back".

On occurrence of a trigger, Flashback stores a video clip of the event. Stored video clips can be reviewed in slow motion, frame by frame, backward or forward at speeds up to 400% or down to 1% of the original recorded speed or played in a repetitive loop. The review allows the cause of a problem to be easily identified.
The video clip can be trimmed to a new clip of smaller size for export.

What is an Event?

An Event is an AVI video clip showing the three stages of an incident: what happened up to five minutes prior to the incident, the incident itself and the aftermath. These parts of the clip are referred to as the pre-trigger period, the trigger point and the post-trigger period.

What is a Trigger?

A Trigger is a signal that an event has occurred. This initiates the recording of a video clip associated with the event. Triggers can be generated from many sources either manually or automatically.

What else can FlashBack do?

FlashBack can be scaled to work on a laptop, a mini PC or a server PC. A single camera laptop system fits in an aircraft carry‐on size bag and weighs only 23lbs. FlashBack is ‘Truly Portable’. Both the cameras and laptop can be operated from batteries. Multiple cameras can be used. Up to four on a laptop, up to six on a mini PC and up to twelve on a server PC.  Each camera is equipped with a cool High Power LED light. Power to the cameras and LED lights is fed using Power over Ethernet (POE) technology, which means that the only cable to each camera is a standard CAT5 Ethernet cable. Cameras of different speeds (frame‐rate) can be used at the same time. (30, 60, 120, 150). This is useful, because lower speeds need less light, and high speeds can capture faster action.

FlashBack supports a ‘Time Shift’ Display. This allows a ‘live view’ to be paused, replayed at full speed or in slow motion, single stepped backward or forward. A portion of the ‘Time Shifted’ display may be selected and saved as an ‘event’ for review at any time later. FlashBack uses a variety of triggering methods. Hand-held Honeywell remote, Touch of a key on the keypad, Touch of a ‘hot spot’ on the live view display, Wireless Stack Light Trigger, Hard-wired contact closure, Motion Detected in an Area of Interest (AOI) in the live view, Auto recurring at user specified interval or any point monitored by a PLC (uses an OPC server). The captured video can be slowed down so that the eye can see what actually happened and as a result be able to diagnose what went wrong. Playback can be slowed to less than one frame per second, can be stepped frame by frame forward or backward. Limits can be set so that the video can be played in a loop between the two limit points. Up to four videos captured from different cameras of the same scene at the same time can be played back synchronously. This allows multiple views to be analyzed in a time synchronized fashion. The time between each display can also be adjusted, allowing down-line and up-line views to be displayed at the same time.

Cameras can be adjusted for any lighting conditions, automatically or manually. The disk space is managed, so that video clips will be deleted with age, to keep the used space below a user set limit (e.g. 75%). With each clip FlashBack stores a set of Metadata, so that the user can see the settings that were present on the camera at the time the video clip was captured. (E.g. shutter speed, frame speed, ISO rating and size of clip on the hard disk).

The video can be trimmed to a short and precise video showing only the significant information.  Video may be removed from the Flashback PC by exporting to a thumb-drive, CD or DVD. Video may be emailed directly from the Flashback PC using a wireless internet connection. Video may be exported or emailed at a frame rate that allows playback in slow. A live view is available at all times for up to six cameras at a time. This is useful for keeping an eye on normal daily procedures.

 

FlashBack Consists of the Following Five Areas of Operation:

A) Live View:

The default display is a real‐time view of the camera(s) in use. Up to six camera views may be displayed at one time.
The live view may be replaced with the ‘Time Shift’ display, allowing the ‘live view’ to be paused and replayed.

B) Event View:

The view allows the users to find and display video clips.
Analyze a recorded clip.
Trim clips to a smaller size.
Export clips to external media.
Display metadata.
Synchronously display up to four events recorded at the same time.

C) Camera Controls:

Allows the camera settings to be adjusted: Shutter speed, ISO rating, White Balance, Frame-rate and Iris.

D) User Login:

Allows security and enables System Admin.

E) Configuration:

Allows setup of Events, Recording Intervals, Disk Management and Motion Detection.

F) System Admin:

Allows Non-user system parameter setup.

System Advantages:

• Battery pack operation - go anywhere, shoot anything, eliminate power cords
• System setup to record in less than 5 minutes
• No roll around bulky cabinets
• Wireless triggers - stack light, 24 volt, dry contact
• Waterproof/dust tight camera enclosures
• Mobility
• Single camera cable powers light and camera
• Shutter speeds from 1/60 of a second up to 1/100,000
• Many color camera options
• Multiple cameras can be used and synchronized to the same frame rate
• Ease of Use

Cutting Edge Software

• Hard disk management
• Time shift recording – Operational Excellence through Vision Analysis – define what just happened
• Video clip editing
• System screen tab navigation allows user customization – event triggers, aspects of clip length, playback speed, and saved files
• Wi-Fi email clips directly from the plant floor in slow motion around the globe
• View clips while recording new ones
• Export video to thumb drive, CD, DVD, or Email
• Custom software development house

System Options

Description	Advantage
Memory upgrade	Increased pre-event recording time
High power LED lights	Supplies above average lighting, which is useful when using camera at 150fps or when heat (from light source) is an issue
Magic arm mount	For easy position of cameras in difficult to reach locations
Trigger video recording from Plant to Outputs	Any contact which closes when the problem occurs can be used to start the video recording
Trigger video recording from PLC on a Network	Any data point in a PLC that goes true when the problem occurs can be used to start the video recording
Cameras can be supplied in NEMA 4 wash-down proof housings	Can be used in areas where cameras have to be positioned near equipment where splashing is a problem
System hardening available to minimize security risks	Provides extra security when the FlashBack system is left connected and unattended for extended periods of time
Longer cable to camera	Allows laptop to be positioned further away from the camera

Technical Specifications

Camera: 640x480 full color at 150fps

Light: Cool LED

Laptop: CPU- Core 2 I5             RAM - 2 GB (3 GB optional)             Hard Drive - 320 GB, Advanced Graphics Card             Display - 15" WXGA