At the Heart of the Image Acquisition Process

In high-end inspection systems, a frame grabber is responsible for image acquisition and synchronization with numerous external devices. These devices include motion or lighting controllers, not to mention the cameras itself. Debugging these systems is complex, especially as cameras become increasingly powerful. A non-intrusive event logging system now supports developers.

Debugging high-end inspection systems using vision often requires complex equipment, for example, oscilloscopes and logic analyzer, which are used along with software profilers. The situation is even more serious with the latest cameras available, which allow for very fast frame rates in excess of several hundred, even thousands of frames per second. Therefore, the Memento event logging system from Euresys has been designed to simplify that process.

During the operation of a Grablink or Coaxlink card for Camera Link or Coaxpress respectively, Memento records a very detailed log of events related to the camera, the frame grabber and its driver, as well as the host application. The tool also monitors the behavior of egrabber Gigelink , Euresys’ universal, hardware-independent library to access GigE Vision cameras.

Events such as driver function calls, call backs, triggers received by the frame grabber, strobe signals sent to the light controller or camera control signals are all recorded along with precise time stamps and detailed context information.

A Graphical Overview

The event viewer is then able to display a list of these events, along with their associated time stamp and useful context information down to the microsecond. Various levels of textual detail (verbosity) can be selected. Events listed can be filtered, highlighted, and searched. A graphical overview of the events, as a timeline, is available and provides a fast understanding of the various signal sequences.

Memento’s Advantages

During application development and debugging, Memento helps the developer understand the behavior of the machine, and pin down the cause of issues such as missed triggers or lost images. The logging system is also useful during the operation of the machine. It runs in the background and saves logs that can be saved and sent back to the support team in case of machine failure.

The tool relies on software resources implemented inside the driver of the Grablink or Coaxlink cards as well as hardware resources on the Grablink or Coaxlink cards themselves. It has been designed to be extremely efficient. It is non-intrusive as the required CPU load is low.