More flexibility for video transmission

Pleora Technologies has made key enhancements to its iPort Vision Connectivity Solution that allow designers to substantially improve the performance and flexibility of GigE-based imaging systems.

Pleora Technologies has made key enhancements to its iPort Vision Connectivity Solution that allow designers to substantially improve the performance and flexibility of GigE (Gigabit Ethernet)-based imaging systems.

"We've upgraded the iPort solution from end to end", said Rudi Rincker, Vice-President of Sales, Pleora Technologies.

"Our new features give designers richer sets of options for triggering, acquiring, transporting, storing, and interfacing to imaging data carried over standard GigE connections".

The improvements are implemented in Version 3.50 of the firmware for Pleora's growing family of iPort IP engines, in Release 2.1.3 of the iPort IP device driver, and in Release 2.1.3 of the iPort SDK (software development kit).

Pleora has equipped the control software for GPIO (general purpose input/output) ports on iPort IP engines with key new features - including an encoder input, a rescaler, and an event delayer - that improve the ability of designers to synchronise the triggering of cameras, strobe lights, and other vision system elements in real time.

The encoder input allows the GPIO controller to track changing speeds on conveyor belts or other moving system elements.

The rescaler allows the controller to scale encoder signals up or down so that camera acquisition rates are mapped correctly to the speed of the moving elements.

With the delayer, the controller can postpone the triggering of system events, such as camera acquisition starts and stops, until precisely the right moment.

To improve system reliability, particularly in vision applications with large data transfer requirements, Pleora has added a high memory driver to its iPort solution.

The driver significantly increases the PC memory available to vision applications based on iPort systems running under a Windows operating system.

Windows' standard memory addressing scheme gives applications access to up to 2Gbyte of user memory.

With Pleora's newest driver, image data can be stored in up to 64Gbyte of Windows kernel memory.

This ensures data integrity, even in the event of an application crash, which is important when reliability is paramount, such as in medical applications.

Some vision applications, such as those with very high-speed cameras or wireless and 10/100Mbit/s Ethernet networking links, acquire data faster than it can be sent to PCs.

To ensure data integrity in configurations like these, iPort IP engines now offer separate control of data acquisition and transmit functions.

In addition, for applications that use switched GigE architectures to send camera data simultaneously to multiple PCs - a capability known as multicasting - iPort now permits master PCs to control acquisitions without being part of the multicast group.

This allows designers to decouple image processing tasks from system control functions.

iPort's archiving capabilities have been enhanced so that users can export image data in a broad range of formats, including image sequences and movies, making it easier for designers to play back or save images to disk.

iPort now supports such popular formats as JPEG, BMP, AVI and MPEG.

iPort has also been equipped with a new buffer class that makes it easier to integrate iPort applications with legacy frame-grabber code.

With the new class, buffer functions that manage the flow of image data - such as read, write, and wait - can be controlled by third-party software via OS commands.

The new version of the iPort SDK runs under the SuSe distribution of the Linux OS, a version popular in Europe.

The SDK also runs under the Windows OS and the RedHat 9.0 distribution of Linux, giving designers a broad choice of operating environments.

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