New Products

Photomultipliers feature speed The H7680/H7680-01 series of gated photomultiplier tubes offers a spectral response of 300 to 650 nm and a maximum wavelength response of 420 nm. Gate pulsewidths are 30 ns (H7680-1) and 100 ns (H7680), switching ratio is 107 (min), and repetition rate is 100 kHz. The series provides a 25-mm-diameter photocathode effective area and a gate 20-ns rise/falltime. Input current is 0.4 A max.; average output current is 100 µA. The tubes come with a high-voltage supply and operate from +15 V. Hamamatsu Corp.,Bridgewater, NJ; (908) 231-0960.

Processor board packs power The Mamba Pentium II-based embedded vision processor board off-loads compute-intensive tasks from the host to focus entirely on one imaging application. It provides clock speeds to 800 MHz, a 200-Mbyte board-to-board CAB communications bus, and single-node or master/slave pipeline or parallel processing. Other hardware features include 512 Mbytes of on-board memory, 48 Mbytes of on-board disk-on-chip, VGA controller, 100BaseT network controller, two IDE ports, one floppy-drive port, two serial ports, one parallel port, and 12 opto-isolated I/O lines. Software support covers Windows NT Embedded, Microsoft Visual Studio, and the company's MMX-driven FAST series of vision libraries. Pricing starts at $3000. Coreco Inc.,St-Laurent, QC, Canada; (514) 333-1301.

Vision sensor needs no programming The stand-alone F150-2 machine-vision sensor comprises a light source, 29 x 31 x 48-mm camera, hand-held keypad, 90 x 130 x 50-mm controller, preinstalled vision software, and cables. It needs no programming. Sensor setup and use are controlled via the keypad to run up to 16 setup scenes with as many as 16 inspection windows in each scene; up to 23 images can be stored in memory. Either gray-scale or binary image processing is selectable. Field of view of 2 x 2 in. is provided by model F150-SL50 and 0.8 x 0.8 in. by model F150-SL20, both with 512 x 484-pixel resolution. With 11 dc inputs and 21 NPN or PNP transistor outputs, the sensor can be connected to PLCs and PCs via an RS-232C link. Price is $4800. Omron Electronics Inc.,Schaumburg, IL 60173; (847) 843-7900.

Lenses offer high resolution The Apo-Rodagon-N series of apochromatically corrected enlarging lenses is available in 45-, 75-, and 90 mm. These lenses eliminate visible color fringes on high-contrast borders and offer neutral color reproduction. They suit scanners, inspection equipment, macrophotography, and high-frequency cameras. Rodenstock Precision OpticsInc.,Rockford, IL 61109; (815) 874-8300.

Vision software improved HexSight vision software, version 2.0, offers a 10X improvement in speed, position, and orientation. It locates large (100 pixels in diameter) randomly oriented parts in less than 200 ms without an accelerator board at a precision of 1/40 pixel in position and 0.01° in rotation. Parts can be located at 4-10 images/s using a 450-MHz Pentium II PC, a commercial camera and frame grabber, and Windows NT, Visual Basic, or Visual C++. Adding the company's VSX-4100 PCI accelerator board boosts speeds to 30 images/s. HexaVision Technologies,Sainte Foy, QC, Canada; (418) 657-5000.

CMOS camera chips rival CCD The OV7620 color and OVB7120 monochrome CMOS VGA camera chips offer an image array of 640 x 480 pixels in a 1/3-in. format or a subsampled QVGA-sized image of 320 x 240 pixels. Using square pixels, the chips are user-selectable for interlaced or progressive scan. Two on-chip 10-bit A/D converters provide YUV or raw RGB data in digital output data streams of 8- or 16-bit widths. Output formats are compliant with CCIR601 or 656 and include a ZV port and a RAM interface. In addition to six automatic camera-control functions, the chips contain color interpolation to the YUV color space. OmniVision Technologies Inc.,Sunnyvale, CA 94086; (408) 733-3030.

Frame grabber adds VGA The Image/ VGA 460 is a single-slot, frame grabber board and accelerated VGA display controller based on the S3 Savage 4D chip. Video images from RGB or monochrome sources are digitized by 10-bit A/D converters and displayed in real time on the computer's VGA monitor. Display resolutions range from 640 x 480 to 1280 x 1024 pixels at depths from 8 to 32 bits. Text and graphics can be written into VGA memory and using a color key overlaid nondestructively over live video. The board comes with 8 or 16 Mbytes of memory and a software utility. A software-developer kit is available for DOS and Windows 95/98/00/NT. MuTech Corp.,Billerica, MA 01862; (978) 663-2400.

Software works with most frame grabbers MVTools, a C/C++ software library of gray-scale machine-vision tools for Windows 95/NT, has been upgraded to work with a frame grabber that supports 8- or 16-bit data transfers to system memory. It features the company's SmART Search pattern-locating tool, as well as other tools such as gray-scale correlation search, blob, edge, histogram, image preprocessing, OCR and OCV, barcodes, and IC inspection, among others. It also allows custom-written Visual Basic or Visual C++ front ends to access machine-vision algorithms. Price is $1995. Imaging Technology Inc.,Bedford, MA 01730; (781) 275-2700.

CCD camera does double speeds The monochrome STC-1000 659 x 494-pixel 1/3-in. CCD camera incorporates a VGA sensor that facilitates image capture at 60 frames/s in progressive mode and 120 fields in EIA/2:1 interlace mode. Image quality is increased by means of a 56-dB signal-to-noise ratio, correlated double-sampling noise reduction, and a 100% fill factor. The camera measures 31 x 29 x 73 mm, weighs 85 g, and offers shutter speeds from 1/60 to 1/10,000s. Minimum illumination needed is 1 lux at f/1.4 normal speed. Audio Video Supply,San Diego, CA 92111; (619) 565-1101.

Bridge card blazes Fully compliant with VITA specifications, the OmniVME VMEbus-to-PCI bridge chip provides an interface for moving data over a 21-slot VME320 backplane at transfer rates to 1 Gbyte/s. It can handle 16-, 32-, and 64-bit VMEbus transfers; can act as a master or slave with one-slot system control; and can accommodate data transfers on both edges of each VMEbus clock pulse. On the PCI local bus side, the chip supports 32- and 64-bit PCI transfers at 33 MHz, or 266 Mbytes/s peak. A 32-word x 64-bit-wide prefetch FIFO enables the VME and PCI buses to operate independently at full speed. The device comes with driver support for Windows NT, VxWorks, and Linux. General Micro Systems,Rancho Cucamonga, CA 91729; (909) 980-4863.

CCD sensor serves high end The 3.2-Mpixel KAF-3200E full-frame CCD image sensor offers 2184 x 1510 resolution using 6.8-µm square pixels. Its low dark current of 10 pA/cm2 allows room-temperature operation. Quantum efficiencies are 40%, 52%, and 65% for wavelengths of 450, 550, and 650 nm, respectively. Readout data rates run to 15 MHz. Eastman Kodak Co.,Rochester, NY 14650; (716) 722-3466.