Most secure camera connection

[infinitenothing]

I remember many years ago, we'd have a camera in an inspection system and it would disappear or something and a reboot would fix it. Is this a thing ever anymore? Is there any best practice on what the best interface is for reliability. I'm thinking GigE is the way to go because of the locking connector. Any thoughts?

[Antoine Chalons]

I avoid GigE like the plague, I know lots of people go this way (even my co-workers) but I simply don't trust it. I've never had had any issues with Camera Link so I stick to that. It does add extra cost for the frame grabber, but at least I'm confident I won't have disconnection issues.

 

USB3 seams to be the next thing for cheap application but I wouldn't jump on it too early.

CoaXPress seams to be the high speed successor for GigE but NI doesn't support it (yet??).

[hooovahh]

So I've had good experiences with GigE other than the fact that it is ethernet traffic (duh) and anti-virus / firewall software on the host PC can cause issues.  Just be aware to set exceptions on the physical port, or disable it all together.  At the time it was some of those AVT cameras.  I've used Camera Link before too, there was a couple from Imperex and another that I can't remember at the moment which converted Camera Link to GigE which was handy for the large number of cameras we needed to work with running into a gigabit switch.

 

I don't think USB3 is really all that new any more, but you'll likely find more options in other form factors.  One benefit is the increase power capability of USB3 means that you can usually power the camera and get data from a single USB port.

[Tim_S]

One thing to watch for on USB is the maximum passive cable length is 5m for USB2 and recommended length of 3m on USB3. Using wrong, low quality, etc., cables could cause connectivity issues.

 

Ran across this YouTube video on USB3 and cameras... it's a bit informative and a bit sales.

[viSci]

Just curious about the Gige interface.  I have a Bassler 2048 pixel Line scan camera running at 48kHz.  That's something like a 2048x4096 image @ 10Hz.  Is that doable with the PCIe framegrabber?

Do you guys have any other benchmarks?

[infinitenothing]

2048*48K= 983,040,000 pixels per second. Assuming 8 bit images You're at 7.9 Gb/s which is too fast for gige but in USB3.1 range.

Edited September 15, 2015 by infinitenothing

[Antoine Chalons]

2048*48K= 983,040,000 pixels per second. Assuming 8 bit images You're at 7.9 Gb/s which is too fast for gige but in USB3.1 range.

 

I don't think that's the way to calculate this... the 48kHz is the max line rate, if you want 10fps with 2048 lines and 4096 columns, I'd calculate like this : 2048*4096*10/(1024*1024)=80MBytes

 

According to this you're fine with GigE.

 

One advice if you go with GigE and NI avoid the PCIe 8231 and 8235 and prefer the PCIe 8236 and 8233.

We've have had a huge amount of problems with 8231 and 8235 and replacing them with 8236 or 8233 (even without using the PoE) was always a solution.

 

NI technical support could never explain nor solve the issue and I'm still pretty bitter about this.

Edited September 17, 2015 by Antoine Chalons

[viSci]

Thanks folks, it does look like Gige is workable.  The next issue is streaming to disk.  I have tested out the IMAQ AVI vi's and they work nicely but performance is highly dependent on the codec selected.  So far it looks like the FF Video Codec 1, a mpeg derivative, is working well.  It allows me to achieve a 30 fps rate with 640x480 B&W frames and has impressive compression.  I will have to do more testing at my target resolution of 1024 x 768 and may need to further optimize my codec or try out a straight binary file instead of avi.