Smart cameras serve as LabView targets

National Instruments’ monochrome VGA NI 1722 and NI 1742 smart cameras have 400-MHz and 533-MHz PowerPC processors, respectively. NI Vision product manager Matt Slaughter commented on NI’s entry into the smart-camera market in an exclusive interview.

A. We had a preannouncement at NIWeek last summer, where we showed off some of the features during a keynote demo, but the official announcement occurred at Vision 2007 in November.

Q. NI is reselling some third-party cameras—why not take that approach with the smart cameras?

A. We have GigE Vision and 1394 [FireWire] cameras from Basler that we are reselling, and there certainly are other smart camera vendors out there—some of whom ship their cameras with our software. But we wanted to make sure that our smart cameras represent a true LabView target that we had complete control over.

GigE Vision and 1394 cameras comply with set standards, so regardless of what third-party camera we are using, our back-end software can stay the same. That’s not the case with smart cameras, and we had to do a lot of driver development to get our smart cameras to work with all the software we have.

Q. Can you give an example of these cameras’ compatibility with NI software?

A. For NIWeek, we like to do run-throughs a month early to make sure everything goes smoothly, and I didn’t have a new smart camera available to use to develop the demonstration. So, I used a monochrome analog camera with the same 640x480-pixel resolution. I wrote my entire application in LabView using a standard driver, and I was able to directly port that application over to the smart camera with minimal changes.

Q. Your smart cameras have two Ethernet ports. Are they GigE Vision compliant?

A. No, we are emphasizing that they are not GigE Vision cameras. One port will be used for reporting results and maybe for reporting failed images back to your main host. The other port is typically going to be used for one of two things: The first is troubleshooting, in which you can walk up and plug in a laptop via crossover cable and do troubleshooting without ever pulling the camera off the line. The second thing that most people will probably do with this second port is communicate with other devices, like PLCs or our CompactRIO platform.

Q. Will you ever add GigE Vision?

A. That’s something that’s been brought up a few times. But the purpose of a GigE Vision camera is of course to return images as quickly as possible, and you typically would not go with a $2000 smart camera to do that. So, I don’t think we get much value added by turning this into a GigE Vision camera. But I’m not going to say it will never happen.

Q. This is NI’s first foray into the smart camera market—is it the last?

A. No, it’s not just these two cameras we are releasing; it’s going to be an entire family of cameras. You can expect to see an announcement about every quarter.