IDS: Multi-Camera System with Eight USB 3.0 Industrial Cameras

IDS presents a multi-camera system with eight USB 3.0 cameras. Each of the eight newly developed USB 3 uEye CP cameras equipped with a highly sensitive 1.3 Megapixel e2v sensor delivers 25 frames per second. This results in a total data rate of 250 MByte, which are transferred via one single USB 3.0 cable to the host PC. Despite this enormous data rate the CPU load is a mere 20%. Hence, it is rather easy to implement multi-camera systems with the new IDS USB 3.0 camera. The camera is not only perfect for common industrial applications, but especially for multi-camera and 3D systems. These could previously only be implemented using costly and expensive solutions with either Camera Link or Firewire.

lightwight and robust

The 29 x 29 x 29 mm camera housing is not only compact, but due to its magnesium casing also very lightweight and robust. The new USB 3 uEye CP offers trigger, flash and pulse width modulation as well as two GPIOs (General Purpose I/O). The GPIOs can be converted into a serial port (RS232), e.g. to trigger peripheral devices. Thanks to the lockable micro USB 3.0 and Hirose connectors the camera is also perfect for rough environments. With a power consumption of just 1 Watt, the camera can easily be integrated into embedded or mobile applications. Brightness corrections are realized by a comfortable 12-bit lookup table and hardware gamma. 12-bit color depth offers a by factor 16 increased level of detail compared to the usual 8 bit. Hardware based data preprocessing and color calculation saves additional PC resources.

Three different sensors

Initially the USB 3 uEye CP family will be offered with three different CMOS sensors. These include a highly sensitive 1.3 Megapixel e2v sensor, as well as a WVGA and a high resolution 5 Megapixel sensor from Aptina. More high resolution sensors will follow in 2012.