Epix, a US frame grabber manufacturer, has added a low cost frame grabber to its popular range of Camera Link frame grabbers for Notebook computers. The PIXCI ECB1-34 base Camera Link frame grabber, available from Alrad Imaging, plugs into an ExpressCard/34 or ExpressCard/54 slot in a notebook computer. With 200 megabyte per second sustained data transfer rates, and burst transfers up to 250 megabytes per second, almost all base Camera Link cameras are supported.
The board captures from line scan or area scan cameras operating in either free-run (continuous) or controlled (triggered) mode. It has software selectable bit packing to decrease the data rate to the ExpressCard bus and to conserve storage space when capturing 10- or 12-bit pixels.
The PIXCI ECB1-34 requires no hardware setup or adjustment. It offers dedicated camera control dialogues supporting many machine vision cameras. For cameras without dedicated software control, the generic configuration menu allows the user to create and save camera configuration parameters. The included XCAP-Lite imaging program provides camera control and image capture with no software development.
The optional XCAP-Ltd imaging program can capture a 3.5-Gigabyte sequence into 4 Gigabytes of installed memory on a notebook with 32-bit operating system. An 8-Gigabyte sequence can be captured into 10 Gigabytes of installed memory on a notebook with a 64-bit operating system. The optional XCAP-Std imaging program adds video-to-disk capture to the size and speed limits of the hard drive system, and can capture to the limit of available notebook memory. Image processing, measurement, and analysis operations are also provided.
