“Its ongoing innovation of FireWire-based vision products is one reason why National Instruments is one of the largest vision companies in the world,” said Hardy Mehl, Basler Vision Components director of marketing. “NI products, such as the new PCI-8254R and the NI Compact Vision System, integrate with Basler’s new A600 Series of FireWire cameras to provide a wide range of IEEE 1394-based machine vision solutions.”

Traditionally, engineers developing machine vision systems with FireWire were required to purchase extra hardware or build custom circuitry to synchronize their system components. With the new PCI-8254R board, engineers can access 29 digital I/O lines for synchronizing vision components such as cameras, triggers and lights. In addition, they can use quadrature encoder inputs, pulse generation lines and general-purpose digital I/O for communicating with actuators, PLCs and NI programmable automation controllers (PACs). To help integrate and troubleshoot signals, NI also offers an I/O terminal block and prototyping accessory that simulates inputs and displays outputs on LEDs.

Engineers can extend the functionality of the PCI-8254R board by taking advantage of NI reconfigurable I/O technology. Using the NI LabVIEW FPGA Module, engineers can customize the board’s 29 digital I/O lines to perform a wider variety of packaging inspection, assembly verification and robot control applications.

The PCI-8254R image acquisition board includes two IEEE 1394a ports and the NI-IMAQ for IEEE 1394 Cameras driver software to help engineers access, configure and acquire images from up to 16 cameras.

NI continues to create innovative vision hardware and software products for the IEEE 1394 (FireWire) standard. NI hardware and software products for FireWire cameras provide a simple, low-cost way to acquire images from more than 300 supported FireWire cameras, including infrared and linescan. Engineers can use FireWire cameras with the NI Compact Vision System, NI 8252 interfaces, the NI PCI-8254R image acquisition board or any other OHCI-compliant IEEE 1394 interface devices.