Industrial camera provider JAI has launched the latest version of its GigE Vision SDK and Control Tool software. The new version 1.3.0 software has been updated and improved in a number of areas.
The new software supports the GigE Vision 1.1 and GenICam 1.2 standards, including the GenICam Standard Feature Naming Convention (SFNC), which allows any SFNC-compliant camera, regardless of interface type, to be accessed and controlled using a common set of camera feature names. The software is available in 32-bit and 64-bit versions and is compatible with Windows 7, Windows XP and Windows Vista.
JAI recently also upgraded the firmware in all of the GigE Vision cameras in its C3 camera suite to take advantage of the GigE Vision 1.1 and GenICam 1.2 standards. Vision system designers can combine JAI cameras with the new 1.3.0 SDK or with any GigE Vision/GenICam-compliant third-party software package when integrating JAI cameras into vision applications.
As with previous versions of the JAI SDK, the software can also be used with non-JAI GigE cameras, making it ideal for multi-vendor evaluations, prototyping, and other activities.
One of the key new features in the SDK portion of version 1.3.0 is support for GigE Vision 'Action Command' broadcast telegrams. Applications incorporating this feature can transmit commands across the network and have multiple devices respond based on their 'group' designation and how they have been programmed to respond to certain broadcast commands. In this way, a single command can trigger multiple cameras, reset timestamps, or perform other actions with a minimum of latency and programming effort.
The SDK also incorporates support for firewall traversal. The software can automatically detect cameras that support this function (like JAI's latest C3 GigE Vision cameras), and open up the firewall for the stream channel and/or the message channel for these devices. With this capability, users do not have to disable their firewalls to get information from their GigE Vision devices.
Among the other new SDK features are complete lookup table functionality, built-in functions to flip and rotate images, histogram functions, Unicode support including multi-byte characters, dynamic loading/unloading of the .dll file, and new event handling support for mouse actions and window movement/resizing.
To make it easier for users to take advantage of all the capabilities in the SDK package, JAI has added a variety of new sample applications, including those for auto-exposure, lookup table operation (LUT), image transformation (flipping and rotating), and statistics gathering (missing frames and missing packets), among others.
