Frame Grabber For High Speed Machine Vision

Description

Compatible with a Base, Medium or Full Camera Link® camera, the X64-CL Full frame grabber is universal PCI slot compliant and supports a wide variety

of multiple tap area and linescan color and monochrome cameras. For greater versatility, the X64-CLFull board can also interface with camera pixel

depths and tap configurations not covered by the Camera Link standard. For example, the X64-CL-Full can support 10-taps or higher with 8-bit per

tap.

The X64-CL Full has been built within DALSA’s Trigger-to-Image Reliability technology framework. Trigger-to-Image Reliability leverages DALSA’s

hardware and software innovations to control, monitor and correct the image acquisition process from the time that an external trigger event occurs to the moment the

data is sent to the PCI bus. Trigger-to- Image Reliability enables more efficient and reliable machine vision inspections by securing the image acquisition process,

providing traceability when errors do occur and permitting recovery from those errors.

Successful industrial machine vision applications require consistent and predictable results in demanding operating environments. The X64-CLFull

Acquisition Control Engine (ACU), delivers an unprecedented level of acquisition functionality. The X64-CL-Full not only provides the industry’s most

flexible front-end for interfacing Camera Link cameras, it also incorporates a fault tolerant image synchronization design, allowing it to automatically detect report

and recover from a lost camera signal ensuring a greater level of reliability within the imaging sequences.

The X64-CL Full gives machine vision application developers the ability to combine color and monochrome acquisition on a single board. Developers can

perform critical pixel transformations during the acquisition process saving valuable preprocessing time.

Embedded timing logic within the ACU identifies each acquired image with a time code, allowing image data to be readily correlated with physical objects on the

production line.

Capable of acquiring images at rates up to 255MB/s per channel (510MB total), the X64-CLFull makes image acquisition from the new generation of CMOS

and multi-tap CCD camras more efficient and cost effective. The board supports fixed and variable size frames ranging up to 256KB horizontal pixels per line and up to

16 million vertical lines per frame for area scan cameras. Precise timing controls allow frame size adjustments in steps of 8 pixels/step for horizontal lines and in

steps of one line/step vertically.
In conjuction with an onboard quadrature shaft-encoder input, the ACU acquires images from a linescan camera at a rate that is locked to the speed of the web. The X64

-CL shaft-encoder feature now supports cascaded divide and multiply to further increase the step resolution. More accurate step resolution results in a higher quality

image that makes processing algorithms more accurate and tolerant to motion artifacts. One feature of particuliar interest to OEMs developing webscanning applications

is the X64-CL’s ability to support infinite length frames from a linescan camera, which enables 100 percent line capture as well as repeatable accuracy and faster

execution times.

Delivering fast and secure data transfer with zero CPU usage, the X64-CL-Full’s Data Transfer Engine (DTE) features high speed memory interface,

multiple independent Direct Memory Access (DMA), and onboard tap descriptors, the DTE’s powerful architecture delivers robust performance for critical machine vision

tasks.

The DMAs allow the DTE to transfer images from the acquisition control unit to local frame buffer memory, or transfer the same image to multiple addresses in the host

memory. The ACU and DTE use the onboard memory to perform these operations concurrently, yet at different rates, yielding optimal utilization of system bandwidth.

Moreover, the X64-CL Full now supports up to 2GB of onboard memory for higher speed frame rate cameras.

Designed to simplify machine vision tasks, the DTE is also responsible for on-the-fly input tap adjustments for directions, pixel overlap and under lap. This enables

the DTE to deliver images that are ready for processing while freeing up the host CPU for other image analysis tasks.

Conventional PCI bus transfers utilizing scatter-gather techniques rely on the CPU to load the host frame buffer destination memory addresses during live acquisition,

which increases the load on the CPU and slows image-processing tasks. The DTE offloads this task by using a sophisticated control unit to automatically capture and

store the destination frame buffer addresses from the host memory. In addition, the control unit performs autonomous and robust image transfers to ensure data

integrity during continuous image acquisition in non-real-time operating systems, such as Windows®XP, Windows®2000 and Windows NT®.

The X64-CLFull is fully supported by DALSA’s Sapera™ LT software development libraries enabling applications to be developed under Windows NT®,

Windows®2000, and Windows®XP. Sapera LT allows users to develop applications with C language DLLs, C ® classes or Active X®controls for Microsoft®Visual C/C ®6.0 (or

higher) or Visual Basic® 6.0 (or higher) development platforms.

Sapera LT’s advanced image acquisition and control functions are an integral part of DALSA’s stringent Trigger-to-Image Reliability technology framework. Sapera LT

offers users a single API across DALSA’s current and future hardware platform, to deliver a comprehensive feature set including program portability, versatile camera

controls, flexible display functionality and management, and easy to use application development wizards

Sapera LT (ver. 5.0) comes bundled with DALSA’s advanced CamExpert, a proprietary camera configuration utility specifically designed to leverage the power of DALSA’s

image acquisition boards. This Windows-based utility provides an interactive environment within which to create a new, or modify an existing, configuration file for

area and linescan applications

For image processing and analysis DALSA offers Sapera Processing. Fully integrated with Sapera LT functionality, Sapera Processing is a dynamic Windows-based

comprehensive programming library. Hardware independent and designed to simplify vision application development, Sapera Processing is based on a set of high

performance C classes and uses MMX, SSE (streaming SIMD Extensions), and SSE2 to meet the challenging operational requirements of today’s imaging systems. Scalable

in design, Sapera Processing offers a comprehensive set of optimized tools, available as a suite or standalone, including image processing, search (pattern matching),

OCR, barcode decoding, and blob analysis. Sapera LT and Sapera Processing combine seamlessly to deliver a powerful and easy to use development resource for advanced

image acquisition, processing, and analysis.