New Time Stamp Feature on Viper-Quad Identifies Frame Events

Coreco Imaging's new Viper-Quad frame grabber allows accurate time stamping of external events to meet the demands of high-speed machine vision systems' developers.

Many of today's industrial imaging applications use multiple cameras, often four or five. No surprise then, that synchronization of image acquisition with external events is becoming a common requirement for many time critical applications. To meet these needs, Coreco Imaging's recently released Viper-Quad, a monochrome PCI frame grabber that connects to as many as four cameras, comes with a unique embedded feature that identifies frame events.

The new board includes an internal 32-bit counter which increments upon receiving an external event. This feature allows for the tagging of each acquired frame for subsequent processing and tracking. This could be a shaft encoder for example, that tracks the displacement of a conveyor belt and with each time stamped image acquired, it detects the position of an object on the belt.

This is particularly useful for applications that require determining the location or position of objects for measuring dimensions, gauging, inspecting objects, identifying flaws in manufactured parts, or determining whether parts meet quality standards. In addition, the Viper-Quad allows general I/Os to be used to trigger events based on this counter. This can be particularly useful if an object must be rejected after image analysis as an i/o can be triggered at a specific counter value. The introduction of such features on imaging devices are enabling PC-based industrial-imaging systems to control manufacturing processes in real-time. This real-time capability makes image-capture devices, such as the Viper-Quad board indispensable.

© 2000 Coreco Imaging.