Using a Thunderbolt expansion chassis with a NI frame grabber

[bmoyer]

Has anyone used a Thunderbolt expansion chassis with an NI frame grabber using Windows?

I'm looking to add the ability to use a NI PCIe-1433 Camera Link frame grabber to my laptop.  Any advice?

 

Thanks!

Bruce

Cross-posted at:  https://forums.ni.com/t5/Machine-Vision/Using-a-Thunderbolt-expansion-chassis-with-a-NI-frame-grabber/m-p/3978018

[Antoine Chalons]

I've never tried that, do you have a link to the thunderbolt extention specs?

I'd be curious to know if it works well.

I think camera-link is not the best option for new product design, my first advice would be to look into CoaXPress.

Plus NI-PCIe 1430 and 1433 almost went EOL about 18 month ago.

Edited October 11, 2019 by Antoine Chalons

[bmoyer]

Thanks for the reply.

I was looking at:

https://www.sonnetstore.com/products/echo-express-3d-thunderbolt3

There are other ones as well from Magma and other suppliers.

I have both Camera Link and CoaXPress (Bitflow) framegrabbers, hoping to use both with a laptop with Thunderbolt.  Why do you recommend CXP?  What CXP frame grabber do you use?  I still haven't found much support for it.

 

Thanks,

Bruce

[Antoine Chalons]

My advice is to "look into CXP", I never got round to trying the bitflow HW + driver which they claim is fully compatible with LabVIEW, CXP seems to be the future of industrial high res / high speed vision. So if you're looking to build a vision system for the next 10 years, I think you should test out bitflow's CXP option.

I'm a bit disappointed with NI's "wait n see" approach with CXP, last I asked the answer was "we don't think the ROI is big enough". Which is a fair point but leaves NI Vision with very limited options.

CXP open a lot of options in term of cameras.

Good luck to you, and - again - if you do test bitflow cxp framegrabber in LabVIEW i'd love to hear how it works.

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

14 hours ago, Antoine Chalons said:

My advice is to "look into CXP", I never got round to trying the bitflow HW + driver which they claim is fully compatible with LabVIEW, CXP seems to be the future of industrial high res / high speed vision. So if you're looking to build a vision system for the next 10 years, I think you should test out bitflow's CXP option.

I'm a bit disappointed with NI's "wait n see" approach with CXP, last I asked the answer was "we don't think the ROI is big enough". Which is a fair point but leaves NI Vision with very limited options.

The problem is that NI seems to get out of a lot of hardware in recent years. Most Vision hardware has been discontinued or at least abandoned (no new products released and technical support on the still sold products is definitely sub-par compared to what it used to be in the past). NI Motion is completely discontinued (which is a smaller loss as it had its problems and NI never was fully commited to compete against companies like MKS/Newport and similar in that area). NI DAQ hasn't the same focus it used to have.

NI clearly has set its targets on other areas and for some part moved on for some time already. That may be good news for their stock holders, but not so great news for their existing user base.