Video display experience

You do not say if the cameras are analog (like PAL or NTSC cameras), or digital, like a USB webcam or a camera doing firewire (like a camcorder).

I was looing at something similar a while back for a project that is now deferred, but the choice of camera input seems to be crucial - What I wanted was a graphics controller that could also take a PAL input and merge the two, but I could not find any. I was trying to avoid the complexity of doing MPEG decoding in my software, as I would have to do for the digital camera solutions I was considering. Niall Murphy

=========================== See the User Interfaces for Embedded Systems Page at

Iain,

Have a look at Integral Technologies for a PCI frame grabber, and software. I was working for a company in Melbourne in 2001 that were using them for several major rail projects.

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Regards
David Milne

I think we're really looking for analog cameras at this stage (PAL in the UK).

Thanks

Iain

Seems like a lowcost PC motherboard could do this rather easily with a digitiser card or a few USB cameras.

As an added bonus you can record to harddisk etc.

Ralph

"Lewin A.R.W. Edwards" schreef in bericht news: snipped-for-privacy@posting.google.com...

Compressing one scanline to half it's length is indeed relative easy. But what about the second scanline? What about the pictures you want to place at the bottom? What about 3 camera's running asynchronous?

You still need to store the entire frame, scale it (just read and skip odd pixels and odd lines), copy it to the screenbuffer of your output device. No cheap analog escapes here, I'm afraid.

No, not easy to do, without a PC.

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Some years ago, a Scottish company called VLSI Vision Ltd, now aquired by Thomson, had a CMOS image sensor which had support for this. Normally the sensor would output one full frame of video. In the multi-sensor mode, four sensors could be connected by parallelling their video outputs, configuring one as master and the others as slave. A few sync signals connected completed the setup to produce a 4-quadrant image. No extra hardware needed. Oh, and I have some 40 lying around.... :-)

Meindert

There is a device from NEC that looks similar to your requirements, however it can only capture one video stream via an external video processor. Have a look into the product letter at

A datasheet is not yet available on the internet but if you need one, I can email it to you. Supply in Europe is established, but it may not be easily available elsewhere, so check locally before starting a design.

Michael

Yes this is exactly what I need to do but, as you say, the problem is that I have three asynchronous video cameras so I'd need to decode, store the image and then decode. This is fo an application where a PC solution would be too expensive and even a PC104 solution would probably be too large as well.

As an aside I've found one company that seems to do the right sort of thing at

- has anyone used these?

Thanks

Iain

Iain Tebbutt