Machine Vision Store

OVERVIEW

This frame grabber from BitFlow is the ideal choice for many Camera Link installations. It enables grabbing from one Base, Medium or Full camera. It's DMA engine delivers a sustained bandwidth of about 680 MB per second. (For Camera Link Full extended or 10-tap cameras running near full frame rate, please see the CRBW205.)

FLOW-THRU ARCHITECTURE

BitFlow's camera interface products are built around a revolutionary FlowThru architecture. Comprised of a user-programmable Video Pipeline, a flexible Camera Control Unit, efficient high-speed video FIFOs and a highly-optimized scatter/gather DMA engine, the FlowThru architecture allows the Karbon-CL to control, acquire, reformat and transfer video data directly into the user's application at camera speeds with zero latency or CPU usage. The FlowThru architecture has been continuously optimized and enhanced to support a wide variety of imaging applications such as document/package processing, semiconductor, continuous web inspection, sequence capture and motion analysis and can easily be adapted to the specific needs of your application.

PCI EXPRESS INTERFACE

The Karbon-CL uses a x8 PCI Express bus interface. The PCI Express bus offers huge increases in DMA performance over the PCI bus. However, what is less well known is that the PCI Express bus is always peer to peer. This means the the Karbon-CL does not share the bus with any other devices. In most motherboard architectures, it will talk directly to the PCI chipset that is on the memory bus. This direct connection equates to higher sustained DMA bandwidths regardless of system load. Also, most motherboards support concurrent full DMA speed on all of their PCI Express slots. The board will work in any slot that it fits in. This means not only x16 and x8 slots, but also, as is becoming the trend, x4 and x1 slots that use x16 connectors. Performance will be degraded in x1 and x4 slots, but the board will work fine in applications that don't require maximum data rate.

CAMERA CONTROL AND I/O

Supported by a GUI camera file editing utility (CamEd), the Karbon can acquire fixed or variable size images and features a programmable ROI (Region Of Interest) sub-windowing capability. The board provides a full set of camera control signals (CC1, CC2, CC3, CC4) and sync inputs (LVAL, FVAL, PCLK, trigger and encoder) for each camera connected to the board (up to four cameras can be connected). These signals are completely independent, although there are provision for driving all cameras from a signal set up encoder/trigger signals. There is also a large number of programmable general purpose outputs and inputs that are not tied to the camera's timing. The Karbon-CL board, as with our past interface products, supports not only simple triggering modes but also complicated, application-specific triggering and control interactions with your hardware environment.

SOFTWARE

BitFlow frame grabbers are compatible with most software environments. Drivers are available for interfacing with Cognex VisionPro, MathWorks Matlab, MediaCybernetics Image-Pro, National Instruments LabView, and Stemmer Imaging Common Vision Blox. MVTec Halcon offers support, and there is a TWAIN driver for interfacing with additional applications. We also offer an SDK (Windows 32 and 64, or Linux) for developing your own applications in C, C++, or .net languages.