The Neon family has grown again. It started with the Neon-CLB, the world's first PoCL frame grabber that provided Base Camera Link acquisition on an OEM priced platform. Next came the Neon-CLD which supports two cameras on the same low cost x4 PCIe platform. The newest member, the Neon-CLQ, supports capture from four cameras simultaneously. All cameras can be run independently with different resolutions, frame rates, triggering modes, etc. Or all cameras can be perfectly synchronized. The Neon-CLQ is incredibly flexible and powerful, yet it can substantially lower your system cost. The Neon-CLQ on requires a single PCIe slot, you provides interfaces for four camera plus I/O. This means the the Neon-CLQ provides the highest density of cameras per slot of any frame grabber on the market, while bringing the cost per camera down to unprecedented lows. At this price per per camera, the Neon-CLQ can compete with main stream network cameras, while still providing all the robust industrial features expected when using a frame grabber.
Adding the Neon-CLQ to your application is simple with our SDK, which supports both 32-bit and 64-bit operating systems. Develop your application using our sophisticated buffer management APIs, or download our free drivers, available for most 3rd party machine vision packages. The Neon-CLQ is software compatible with the single camera Neon-CLB, thus making the number of cameras in a system a manufacturing time decision.
If you need the simplest, most reliable, and best performing quad Base Camera Link/PoCL frame grabber, call BitFlow today to get our Neon-CLQ, BitFlow's 4th generation of robust, industrial CL imaging products.
Features
Supports four Base CL cameras
Provides Power over Camera Link (PoCL) for all cameras
Support both PoCL and non-PoCL cameras
Provides Safe Power - full protection from all CL power line faults
All cameras can be independently synchronized
Separate I/O for each camera
Support simultaneous serial communications to all four camera
The Neon-CLQ appears to Windows as four separate frame grabbers
Fully backwards compatible with non-PoCL cameras and cables
Half-Size x4 PCI Express Board
Acquire up to 24 bits at 85 MHz
FlowThru technology means that no on-board memory is needed
Supports images up to 256K x 128K
No frame rate limit
Triggers and encoders for external control of acquisition
Programmable signal generator for camera control (independent for each camera)
Quadrature encoder support including sophisticated triggering schemes
Encoder divider/multiplier
Drivers, utilities and examples for Windows XP/2003/Vista/Windows 7
Supported on both 32-bit and 64-bit platforms
Drivers for most 3rd party processing environments
Acquire variable length frames with line scan cameras
Acquire image sequences well beyond the 4GB barrier
RoHS complian
Power over Camera
Link
Power over Camera Link (PoCL) is an extension of the Camera Link specification that allows for frame grabbers to provide power to small cameras over the Camera Link cable. PoCL provides many advantages to the OEM. First, the cabling is vastly simplified as only a single cable is required for data, power and control to the camera. This provides all the convenience of Firewire or USB cables schemes with the addition of industrial cabling and much higher data rates. Another advantage is that, because only a single cable is required, the camera footprint can be greatly reduced. For the first time, the so called "dice camera" format factor is supported by an industrial, digital interconnect.
PoCL
Safe Power
The baseline PoCL specification only outlines the basic requirement of the frame grabber providing power to the camera. However, with out some protection, there are many situations that can occur where the frame grabber can be damaged and/or the PC the board is installed in. To overcome these problems, and ancillary provision was added to the PoCL standard called "Safe Power". The Safe Power specification takes into account every possible situation that might occur on the CL power lines, and protects the frame grabber and the PC. Safe Power also provides a path for backwards compatiblity for non-PoCL cameras and non-PoCL cables. Because the risks are so great, it doesn't even make sense to buy a PoCL frame grabber unless it supports Safe Power
FlowThru Architecture
Since 1996 years,
BitFlow's camera interface products have been
built around our revolutionary FlowThru architecture.
Comprised of a user-programmable Video Pipeline,
a flexible Camera Control Unit, efficient
high-speed video FIFOs and a highly-optimized
scatter/gather DMA engine, the FlowThru architecture
allows theNeon-CLQ
to control, acquire, reformat
and transfer video data directly into the
user's application at camera speeds with zero
latency or CPU usage. Our FlowThru architecture
has been continuously optimized and enhanced
to support a wide variety of imaging applications
such as document/package processing, semiconductor,
continuous web inspection, sequence capture
and motion analysis and can easily be adapted
to the specific needs of your application.
Software Support
TheNeon-CLQ
is
supported by the BitFlow Software Development
Kit (SDK), which is available for both 32-bit
and 64-bit Windows platforms. The SDK is board
family generic, and will work with all of
BitFlow's frame grabbers (making future migration
to other families trivial). The kit provides
drivers, DLLs and configuration utilities
for people interested in using third party
software. For customers interested in developing
their own applications, the SDK provides header
files, libraries and huge amounts of example
code. The SDK provides a wide range of Application
Programming Interfaces (API), from low-level
direct hardware access, to high-level automatic
buffer management (ring or sequence). Every
line of code has been engineered for reliability
under the toughest industrial conditions.
At the same time, a priority has been put
on ease of use and short development times.
With the BitFlow SDK, you'll have theNeon-CLQ
integrated with your application in no time.
PCI Express
Interface
TheNeon-CLQ
uses
a x4 PCI Express bus interface. The PCI Express
bus offers huge increases in DMA performance
over the PCI bus. However, what is less well
known is that the PCI Express bus is always
peer to peer. This means the the Karbon-CL
does not share the bus with any other devices.
In most motherboard architectures, it will
talk directly to the PCI chipset that is on
the memory bus. This direct connection equates
to higher sustained DMA bandwidths regardless
of system load. Also, most motherboards support
concurrent full DMA speed on all of their
PCI Express slots. The board will work in
any slot that it fits in. This means not only
x16, x8 and x4 slots, but also, as is becoming
the trend, x1 slots that use x4 (or larger)
connectors. Performance will be degraded in
an x1 slot, but the board will work fine in
applications that don't require maximum data
rate.
Camera Control
and I/O
Supported
by a GUI camera file editing utility (CamEd),
the Neon can acquire fixed or variable size
images and features a programmable ROI (Region
Of Interest) sub-windowing capability. The
board provides a full set of camera control
signals (CC1, CC2, CC3, CC4) and sync inputs
(LVAL, FVAL, PCLK, trigger and encoder) for
total camera and acquisition control. These
signals are completely independent, although
there are provision for driving all cameras
from a signal set up encoder/trigger signals.
There is also a large number of programmable
general purpose outputs and inputs that are
not tied to the camera's timing. TheNeon-CLQ
board, as with our past interface products,
supports not only simple triggering modes
but also complicated, application-specific
triggering and control interactions with your
hardware environment.
