Framegrabber NI PCIE-1429 for high speed camera

National Instruments announced 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 Camera Link cameras to perform demanding imaging applications such as synchronized 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 specialized 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.

Each NI PCIe-1429 image acquisition board includes one trigger line and two Camera Link connectors to support any Base-, Medium- or Full-configuration Camera Link video camera. Additional I/O lines or advanced triggering, pulse-train 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 Camera Link bandwidth of 680 MByte/sec. In addition, they can synchronize other data acquisition measurements with each acquired image to analyze 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 analyze heart valve behavior 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.