CognexParser Fleet — Multi-Station Camera Inspection Plugin

CognexParser was a monolithic app with no integration points. Three different cell configurations needed to be served without maintaining three separate codebases. Refactoring it into an Automato plugin was the path to covering all variants from one deployable.

The plugin had to handle single-camera, dual-station, and future multi-camera configurations. Each station needed to reliably open full-screen on a specific physical monitor — a requirement that had to survive reboots, display order changes, and varying hardware setups across different cells.

Windows APIs were used to query live display geometry at runtime. The settings pane renders a diagram of the detected monitors; clicking one assigns a station to it. That assignment is persisted in the plugin configuration so the station always opens full-screen on the correct display, regardless of how the OS enumerates monitors on startup. Multi-camera multiplexing was also built in as a latent capability — the configuration model supports it without surfacing complexity to users who don't need it.

One plugin configuration covers all known cell variants in production. Latent multi-camera support is built in, ready for future cycle-time improvements without a code change.