National Instruments PCI-1428 - Manual (Page 10)

Chapter 1 Introduction
IMAQ PCI-1428 User Manual 1-2 ni.com
between the PCI-1428 and up to four National Instruments DAQ or IMAQ
boards in your computer. The RTSI bus can even synchronize multiple
IMAQ hardware captures.
Detailed specifications of the PCI-1428 are in Appendix A, Specifications .
About Camera Link
Camera Link is an informal standard for a digital camera interface that
was created by a consortium of camera and frame grabber manufacturers.
The National Semiconductor Channel Link chipset, a general purpose
transmitter/receiver pair, is the basis for the standard. The Channel Link
driver takes 28 bits of parallel digital data and a clock and serializes the
stream to four LVDS data streams and an LVDS clock, providing high
speed data transmission across 10 wires over distances of up to 10 meters.
The Camera Link Base configuration places 24 data bits as well as Frame
Valid, Line Valid, and Data Valid signals on a single Channel Link part and
cable. The Base configuration also bundles wires for four digital camera
control lines and asynchronous serial transmission. For cameras generating
more than 24 bits of data, the standard allows the use of two or three
Channel Link parts; these are the Medium and Full configurations,
respectively.
Software Programming Choices
Using NI-IMAQ, the National Instruments image acquisition driver
software, you can program your IMAQ board to acquire and save images.
You can use NI-IMAQ with other National Instruments software for a
complete image acquisition and analysis solution, as shown in Figure 1-1.
NI-IMAQ works with LabVIEW and LabWindows/CVI, as well
as conventional programming languages. National Instruments
IMAQ Vision adds powerful image processing and analysis to these
programming environments. You can also use IMAQ Vision Builder to
quickly and easily prototype your IMAQ image analysis applications.