Imaging and video have always interested me. As a youth in the early 1960s I tinkered with a surplus photomultiplier tube (if I recall it was a 941A), rigging it up to an Amateur Radio video transmitter. My interest in video was piqued again in the 1980s when PCs debuted, and ISA bus frame grabber plug-ins came along.

This announcement from board-level instrument maker National Instruments (NI---Austin, Texas) indicates that although we've come a long ways since the days of my ham TV rig and 8080 machines, low-cost video progress continues unabated. What's more, this one can capture 1,000 frames a second! That's fast enough to capture a speeding bullet in flight as it hits, and passes through, an object.

In 2000, NI worked with leading camera and frame grabber manufacturers to simplify connectivity between digital cameras and PCs. A resulting Camera Link standard specified data rates up to 680-Mbytes/s.

Unfortunately, at the time no method was widely available for acquiring images at that speed. If you wanted high-speed image-acquisition you were forced to use specialized cameras, stream data to banks of expensive on-board memory, or rely on stopgap PC bus technologies such as PCI 66/64 or PXI-X.

A Changed Picture

Now, by leveraging the capabilities of PCI Express and NI's soon-to-be-released PCIe-1429 board, you will be able to acquire high-speed data indefinitely through a widely available PC bus. (This product comes on the heels of NI's PCIe-GPIB controller, which is arguably the first GPIB controller for PCI Express).

For its part, PCI Express is a 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.

NI says its NIPCIe-1429 image acquisition board will be available in January 2005. At that time, the PCIe-1429 board's pricing will start at less than $2,500 a pop. Right now the engineering datasheet is being hammered out and finalized at NI, so watch for more information on this product at eeProductCenter.

Powerful Image Grabbing

You'll be able to use the PCIe-1429 image acquisition board to acquire images at the highest speeds, resolutions, and bit depths available for Camera Link cameras. As such, these systems will be able to find a home in demanding imaging applications such as synchronized data-acquisition/image acquisition, fault analysis, and motion tracking.

The PCIe-1429 image acquisition board also includes a trigger line and two Camera Link connectors. Created for easy connectivity between the PC and the camera, Camera Link provides flexible cabling for high-resolution digital cameras. A Camera Link cable is a slender 26-pin cable with 24-bit data, clock, and enables, as well as control signals.

That hardware supports any base-, medium-, or full-configuration Camera Link camera. Additional I/O lines for advanced triggering, pulse-train outputs, and isolated digital I/O also are available. The additional I/O lines are available with NI's IMAQ 1000 expansion board.

Camera Link comes in three configurations: base, medium, and full. The base configuration uses three eight-bit taps, or input channels, to acquire up to 24 bits of data at a rate of 85 MHz (255 Mbytes/s). The full configuration supports eight taps and can acquire images up to 680 Mbytes/s.

Four-Lane PCI Express

Thanks to the board's four-lane PCI Express configuration, you can acquire at the full Camera Link bandwidth. In addition, you can sync other data acquisition measurements with each acquired image to analyze activities frame by frame in data-intensive applications (such as automotive crash tests).

Similarly, you could 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. Or you could use the board's high-speed imaging to perform particle image velocimetry, or track movement intricacies in gait analysis. Medical applications could measure the stimulus response of eye corneas to light, or analyze heart valve behavior under pathologic cardiovascular conditions.

The PCIe-1429 will be for platforms running Windows 2000, Windows NT, and Windows XP . NI supplies all required drivers, and recommends using the board with its popular LabVIEW programming software as well as its Vision Development Module.

For more details, contact National Instruments Corp., 11500 No. Mopac Expwy., Austin, Texas 78759-3504. Phone: (512) 683-0100. Fax: (512) 683-8411. E-mail: info@ni.com