Toby, an AOI Revival

The Rexxam Sherlock 300 is an automated optical inspection machine: a camera on a fast gantry that photographs every board coming off a production line and flags anything that doesn't look right. Missing parts, parts on an angle, bad joints. The defects you otherwise find one multimeter probe at a time, after the customer finds them first.

This one came off the scrap heap. The mechanics are genuinely good: the gantry is solid and repeatable, and the camera is still sharp. What lets it down is the software, which is 20 years old and shows it.

So rather than fight two decades of legacy software, I'm writing a replacement. It's called Toby, after Sherlock's dog, and it's been a vibe coding project from the start.

The goal: drive the gantry, read the camera, and have it inspecting panels coming off the SM321 line.