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Enhance Your Input/Output with New Trigger
and Strobe Functionality
The Flea®, Scorpion®, Dragonfly2® and Dragonfly® Express single lens 1394(b) Imaging Products all provide users with access to a series of General Purpose IO pins that can be used to interface the camera with external hardware in a variety of different ways, including:
- Trigger input
- Strobe output
- Serial port input/output
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- Pulse Width Modulation output
- Parallel input/output
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The latest 1.1 Alpha versions of firmware for these products (existing users can access these via the downloads site) now include two additional pieces of functionality:
Trigger at Maximum Frame Rate
In external trigger mode, the maximum triggered frame rate has historically been limited by the fact that the camera was unable to overlap image transfer with the trigger input (refer to Knowledge Base Article 177). The fastest that a camera could be triggered was the sum of the image integration and transmission times. In the worst case, this could limit the frame rate to be half of what was available in free running mode. Newer versions of firmware overcome this limitation, providing the ability to overlap integration and transmission to achieve full frame rate triggering, even using a software trigger, and with minimal shutter speed limitations!
Programmable Strobe Output
The Flea™, Scorpion®, Dragonfly2® and Dragonfly® Express can broadcast a shutter-synchronized strobe pulse on an output pin, and control how this pulse behaves with respect to polarity, duration and delay. In addition to this functionality, the latest versions of firmware allow the user to program a binary pattern that dictates when the strobe should fire with respect to a series of image acquisitions, e.g. strobe on odd or even integrations only. For more information and examples, users should read Technical Application Note TAN2005003.
Questions on this topic? Contact Technical Support.
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