Yesterday I bought a machine vision camera for the project my buddy Gene and I are doing to build a (semi-)cheap little machine to inspect coffee beans. We need something called a global shutter camera because the beans will be in motion when we capture their images. In the past a camera like this would have cost in the $1000 range. Over the years they dropped to $300-$400. Yesterday, I paid $135 for this camera–quantity 1–and that included shipping. If this is coupled with a Raspberry Pi and OpenCV (~$200 with a power supply, heat sink, and other necessary stuff), it is possible to build a vision system that is faster (by a lot) and smarter (by a lot) than the vision systems we used to sell when I started at Intelledex in 1983 for $30k (~$74k in today’s dollars). The upshot is that it is now possible to do tasks for cheap that no one would have ever thought possible. There are large categories of machine vision problems that companies are accustomed to paying through the nose to solve. That is truly not necessary anymore if one is smart enough to put the pieces together. I hope we are smart enough.