Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Next generation smart camera

Am I being a little slow in catching on to the new wave in smart cameras? Perhaps I am, because it’s taken Slovakian camera-maker Softhard to make me realize that smart cameras are now software-independent.

This revelation was prompted by news of their Currera range, built around the Intel Atom processor and running Windows XP. Unlike earlier generations of smart cameras (DVT, Banner, Cognex InSight, PPT and so on,) that were wedded to their makers own software, an XP base means I can load up any software I want.

This means, I think, that I could load Sherlock on one camera, VisionPro on a second and Halcon on a third. I realize I might not see a whole lot of speed out of these camera-PC hybrids, but not every application needs intensive processing capability.

I also realize that Softhard aren’t the first to market with this kind of software-independed smart camera. Sony have had a similar product out in the market for some time, and you might argue that Vision Components were there first, although theirs was not a “Wintel” approach.

The PC-smart camera; it’s a new paradigm in machine vision technology and I suspect it might be the future.

2 comments:

Domenico Pozzetti said...

Matrix Vision has a very good motorola based and linux powered smart camera.

completely open to developer SW.

Bye.

Anonymous said...

Siemens had 486 DOS based smart camera few years ago before they licensed DVT. you could have bought that with either Siemens software or without software.