Board brings image acquisition to mainstream PCs

National Instruments has developed the industry's first PCI Express-based image acquisition board for high-throughput vision applications.

National Instruments has developed the industry's first PCI Express-based image acquisition board for high-throughput vision applications.

With the NI PCIe-1429 image acquisition board, engineers and scientists now can acquire images at the highest speeds, resolutions and bit depths available for CameraLink cameras, allowing them to perform demanding imaging applications such as synchronised data and image acquisition, fault analysis and advanced motion tracking.

In the past, engineers and scientists performing high-speed imaging applications were confined to devices with banks of expensive onboard memory, which could only acquire images for short periods of time, or specialised buses such as the PCI 64/66 or PCI-X, which are not supported by standard PC chipsets.

With the introduction of PCI Express technology by Intel and the NI PCIe-1429 image acquisition board, these engineers and scientists now can acquire high-speed data indefinitely through a standard PC bus.

"With the NI PCIe-1429 image acquisition board, our customers can continually capture all of the data coming from our new, high-performance MegaPlus II cameras", said Jay Kelbley, Product Manager at Redlake MASD, a provider of high-resolution, high-speed digital cameras.

"In the coming years, we expect NI to continue to lead the way as PCI Express becomes the standard for PC-based vision applications".

Each NI PCIe-1429 image acquisition board includes one trigger line and two CameraLink connectors to support any base-, medium- or full-configuration CameraLink camera.

Additional I/O lines for advanced triggering, pulsetrain outputs and isolated digital I/O also are available.

With the board's four-lane PCI Express configuration, engineers and scientists can acquire at the full CameraLink bandwidth of 680Mbyte/s.

In addition, they can synchronise other data acquisition measurements with each acquired image to analyse activities frame by frame in data-intensive applications such as crash tests.

The NI PCIe-1429 image acquisition board is ideal for many industrial, life science and biomedical imaging applications.

For instance, engineers and scientists can use the board to perform fault analysis by setting up a stop trigger to record images before and after an event on the factory floor.

Also, they can use high-speed imaging to perform particle image velocimetry or track the movement intricacies in gait analysis.

In addition, scientists can use the new board to measure the stimulus response of eye corneas to light or analyse heart valve behaviour under pathologic cardiovascular conditions.

PCI Express is a high-performance, point-to-point serial interconnect that improves PCI by providing scalable bus bandwidth.

PCI Express features a layered model that offers backward compatibility with existing PCI applications at the operating system level.

In September, NI announced the NI PCIe-GPIB controller, the first GPIB controller for PCI Express.

The NI PCIe-1429 image acquisition board will be available in January 2005.

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