BitFlow today launched its Karbon-CXP line of frame grabbers, one of the world's first to incorporate the CoaXPress (CXP) standard for moving high-speed serial data from a camera to a frame grabber. The result is video acquisition at blazing speeds up to 6 Gigabits per second, as well as the ability to send control commands and triggers at 20 Megabits per second - all over a single piece of 75 Ohm coaxial cable up to 135 meters. Additionally up to 13W of power can be transmitted to camera along the cable.

"The CXP standard opens the door to applications where cable cost, routing requirements and long distances have prevented the move to high resolution, high speed digital cameras," explained Donal Waide, Director of Sales for BitFlow.  "In many cases, existing coaxial infrastructure can be repurposed for CXP with very low installation costs." According to Waide, CoaXPress solves many of the problems of previous machine vision standards. For one, it eliminates the cost and distance restrictions of Camera Link cables. In addition, it provides a significant increase in quality, resolution and speed over analog, while maintaining its simple and flexible cabling. GigE also  uses low cost and long distance capable cabling, but introduces trigger latency  and determinism issues that CXP does not have. In fact, CXP has been proven to perform 6x faster than GigE. The Karbon-CXP achieves these advantages on an industry proven platform. Three Karbon-CXP models are available: single, dual and quad channel. All of the BitFlow frame grabbers are manufactured in the North East region of the United States.

Application Software

Like all BitFlow frame grabbers, adding the new Karbon-CXP to an application is  simplified by an included SDK that supports both 32-bit and 64-bit operating systems. Applications can be developed using C/ C++/.NET and BitFlow's sophisticated buffer management APIs. In addition, free drivers can be downloaded from the BitFlow web site for most 3rd party machine vision packages. The Karbon models are software  compatible with each other, as well as with all the other current BitFlow frame  grabbers. This makes migrating applications from Camera Link or analog to CXP simple and quick.