Well-executed design
Conard Holton’s editorial in the July 2006VisionSystems Design (“Only Improbable”) was nicely summed by no less than Pablo Picasso. He said, “I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.” No doubt he was fending off some critics at the time, taking him to task for the lack of well-polished craftsmanship in one of his groundbreaking works of art. As an engineer, I can appreciate the timeless beauty of a well-executed design. Consider the care that went into the layout and wiring of a German Model V53 tube amplifier from the 1950s. It had output power rating of 6 W, with perfectly linear transmission and with frequency response from 20 Hz to 20 kHz.
I also appreciate doing something no one else has ever done, no matter how ugly the implementation, and I depend on people to get both parts right, just not both at the same time. Thanks for noting the difference.
Bruce Normann
[email protected]
Comparing SDKs
In the April issue ofVision Systems Design, a benchmark comparison (CPU usage) for IEEE-1394 digital camera’s software-development kit (SDK) is a bit misleading because it does not differentiate between the CPU usage caused by the data acquisition itself and the CPU usage caused by the color conversion and image display. To bring more insight to this point, A&B Software and Basler have performed some additional benchmark tests shown in the table. The data clearly show the different focus of the listed products-while Basler’s BCAM driver is dedicated to high-performance raw-image acquisition, A&B Software’s ActiveDcam SDK is dedicated to providing a flexible interface to rapid application development tools and offers high-performance color conversion and image display.
It is important to note that only the CPU load caused by the data acquisition is specific to the IEEE-1394 bus interface. The CPU load caused by color conversion and image display would be the same for other camera interface technologies such as, for example, GigE Vision or Camera Link.
Boris Nalibotski
A&B Software LLC
New London, CT,
[email protected]
Friedrich Dierks
Basler AG
Ahrensburg, Germany
[email protected]