News from Vision Show East

Boston, Mass. - Vision Show East, running October 29-November 1, features international experts presenting practical information on how to successfully apply machine vision and a trade show.

By Gary A. Mintchell, senior editor November 2, 2001

Boston, Mass. – Vision Show East, running October 29-November 1, features international experts presenting practical information on how to successfully apply machine vision and a trade show. The Automated Imaging Association, the North American trade group representing some 230 companies involved in machine vision, sponsors it.

Data Translation Inc. (Marlboro, Mass.) announced the release of Data Translation Information Exchange (DTiX). DTiX is a COM-based, peer-to-peer communication system that simplifies the complexity of integrating both vision and sensor-based measurements. DTiX allows users to share variable and image data between DT Vision Foundry, DT’s machine vision software, and DT Measure Foundry, DT’s test and measurement software. Users can now integrate data acquisition measurements with machine vision data and correlate the results under a single user interface.

DTiX also extends the capabilities of DT Vision Foundry and DT Measure Foundry with other COM-based applications. DTiX allows the sharing of variable and image data with Visual Basic, Delphi and Visual C++. DTiX comes with DT Vision Foundry.

This integration of test and measurement and vision software and hardware in one system allows a user to correlate the data to monitor the complete system or make adjustments as needed. These adjustments can range from controlling the speed of the motor to synchronize with the speed of the camera, to determining if the vibration of the motor is impacting the reliability of the camera. Since vision and data acquisition measurements are automated, testing can take place remotely without additional resources monitoring the process.

Data Translation Inc. also announced the release of the DT3162, a variable-scan monochrome frame grabber for the PCI bus. The DT3162’s features include high-speed acquisition rate of 40 MHz for newer, faster cameras; high resolution for precise measurements; and advanced software capabilities for programmable timing, resolution, camera set-up, and video format.

The DT3162 frame grabber’s analog front-end design uses a 10-bit A/D converter. Users can recalibrate on-site using an on-board video signal. Support for the Camera Interface Module or CIM (sold separately) lets users connect any camera, triggering device, or external clock signal into the DT3162 frame grabber via a DIN-rail mountable enclosure.

RVSI Acuity CiMatrix (Canton, Mass.) has introduced Visionscape 1744 vision accelerator board. This PCI-based board functions as an accelerated frame grabber, featuring an on-board vision ASIC that accelerates a broad range of low-level image processing and analysis algorithms. The 1744 interfaces to wide variety of industry standard machine vision cameras including support for up to 4 independent high resolution, double speed, progressive scanning, partial scanning, or shutter-controlled cameras. The product also has multi-resolution capabilities, supporting mixing and matching of cameras with different sized pixel arrays on separate camera channels. The low-cost, single-slot design of the 1744 makes it ideal for machine-vision systems with host PCs that can devote CPU time to image processing. The 1744 comes complete with Visionscape AppFactory software and can be run under Windows NT 4.0 or Windows 2000.


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