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BitFlow partners with Purdue University on SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition

BitFlow has announced that it will sponsor the Purdue University engineering team, which was selected to compete in the January 2017 SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition. 
Aug. 15, 2016
3 min read

BitFlowhas announced that it will sponsor the Purdue University engineering team, which was selected to compete in the January 2017 SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition.

For those who may not know, Hyperloop is an idea that was announced back in 2013 by Space Exploration Technologies Corporation (SpaceX), for the high-speed transportation of passengers and goods in tubes in which capsules are propelled by linear induction motors and air compressors. The competition is an open competition that is geared toward university students and independent engineering teams to design and build the best Hyperloop pod.

To support the competition, SpaceX will construct a one-mile test track adjacent to its Hawthorne, CA, USA headquarters. Teams will be able to test their human-scale pods during a competition weekend scheduled for January 27-29, 2017.

Purdue’s 18-member team was among more than 120 universities who submitted designed earlier in the year, and one of 29 teams invited to the next round. In the project, Purdue will deploy a BitFlow Axion-CL Camera Link frame grabber within its pod as part of a high-resolution video-based location finder. The frame grabber is a sixth generation Camera Link frame grabber that is Camera Link 2.0 compliant and supports up to two base, medium, full, or 10-tap cameras and CL clocks up to 85 MHz. It can acquire form up to two 80-bit/85 MHz cameras simultaneously. BitFlow’s frame grabber will appear in the multiple-camera setup as two completely independent frame grabbers, rather than a single unit. In dual-camera mode, as a result, two cameras do not need to be the same resolution, frame rate, trigger mode, or tap format.

"BitFlow is proud to work with the Purdue team as it develops the next generation of ultra high speed transportation, especially because they are relying on BitFlow frame grabbers and software development kits, along with technical support from our engineers," said Donal Waide, Director of Sales & Marketing for BitFlow. "This is a great opportunity for BitFlow to foster engineering students' interest in machine vision technology, and support to some of this country's brightest young minds."

Additional Purdue University sponsors include NVIDIA, Lockheed Martin, and Rockwell Collins, among others.

View more information onBitFlow.
View more information on theHyperloop competition.

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About the Author

James Carroll

Former VSD Editor James Carroll joined the team 2013.  Carroll covered machine vision and imaging from numerous angles, including application stories, industry news, market updates, and new products. In addition to writing and editing articles, Carroll managed the Innovators Awards program and webcasts.

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