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Software/hardware platform eases sensor design

Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team May 12, 2008

The FireSync platform allows the development of a single unified design for building vision applications ranging from smart sensors to complex web scanning systems.

LMI Technologies has released a complete modular vision sensor platform of hardware and software components under its FireSync brand.

The system allows fast and easy integration of components into a scalable machine vision system along with microsecond synchronisation.

The FireSync platform allows the development of a single unified design for building vision applications ranging from smart sensors to complex web scanning systems, anywhere from specification to final assembly.

FireSync solves the classic problem of synchronisation between lighting, camera and processing components.

The FireSync platform consists of a number of tightly integrated OEM hardware and software components.

Components include sensor controllers, camera and embedded sensors, machine vision software, industrial computers, lighting and others.

Components can be configured in a number of different ways, depending on the need and application.

With high-performance image streaming, these components are combined with proportional/functional control of sub-components, the synchronisation of image collection to within microsecond accuracy, simple cabling and impressive stitching.

The FireSync platform includes a number of machine vision firsts.

The use of high-speed Serdes chipsets gives the sensor controller the ability to offer images of up to four CMOS-camera channels to stream data to the FireSync M200 sensor controller at speeds up to 320Mbyte/s.

The FireSync system also includes support for pre-processing, DSP algorithms and Gbit networking.

The sensor controller precisely controls the camera light and DSP functions.

Once de-serialised, image data is transferred directly to host memory, compressed through processing by the DSP and transferred to PC systems over Gigabit Ethernet for further distribution and reduction.

High-speed CMOS cameras have from VGA to Mpixel resolution, the pulsed laser and LED sources provide for maximum lumen output at low duty cycles for long life and the network routing control allows the flexible control of a large-scale and distributed topography.