Board brings image acquisition to mainstream PCs

National Instruments has developed the industry's first PCIExpress-based image acquisition board for high-throughput visionapplications.

With the NI PCIe-1429 image acquisition board,engineers and scientists now can acquire images at the highestspeeds, resolutions and bit depths available for CameraLinkcameras, allowing them to perform demanding imaging applicationssuch as synchronised data and image acquisition, fault analysisand advanced motion tracking.

In the past, engineers andscientists performing high-speed imaging applications wereconfined to devices with banks of expensive onboard memory, whichcould only acquire images for short periods of time, orspecialised buses such as the PCI 64/66 or PCI-X, which are notsupported by standard PC chipsets.

With the introduction of PCIExpress technology by Intel and the NI PCIe-1429 imageacquisition board, these engineers and scientists now can acquirehigh-speed data indefinitely through a standard PC bus."With the NI PCIe-1429 image acquisition board, ourcustomers can continually capture all of the data coming from ournew, high-performance MegaPlus II cameras", said JayKelbley, Product Manager at Redlake MASD, a provider ofhigh-resolution, high-speed digital cameras.

"In the comingyears, we expect NI to continue to lead the way as PCI Expressbecomes the standard for PC-based vision applications".

EachNI PCIe-1429 image acquisition board includes one trigger lineand two CameraLink connectors to support any base-, medium- orfull-configuration CameraLink camera.

Additional I/O lines foradvanced triggering, pulsetrain outputs and isolated digital I/Oalso are available.

With the board's four-lane PCI Expressconfiguration, engineers and scientists can acquire at the fullCameraLink bandwidth of 680Mbyte/s.

In addition, they cansynchronise other data acquisition measurements with eachacquired image to analyse activities frame by frame indata-intensive applications such as crash tests.

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

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

Also, they can usehigh-speed imaging to perform particle image velocimetry or trackthe movement intricacies in gait analysis.

In addition,scientists can use the new board to measure the stimulus responseof eye corneas to light or analyse heart valve behaviour underpathologic cardiovascular conditions.

PCI Express is ahigh-performance, point-to-point serial interconnect thatimproves PCI by providing scalable bus bandwidth.

PCI Expressfeatures a layered model that offers backward compatibility withexisting PCI applications at the operating system level.

InSeptember, NI announced the NI PCIe-GPIB controller, the firstGPIB controller for PCI Express.

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