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National Instruments Corporation
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Introduction
This chapter describes the PCI-1409 and PXI-1409 devices and describes
your software programming choices.
About Your 1409 Device
The PCI-1409 and PXI-1409 devices are high-accuracy, monochrome,
IMAQ boards for PCI, PXI, or CompactPCI chassis that support RS-170,
CCIR, NTSC, and PAL video standards as well as some nonstandard
cameras from any of four input sources. The boards feature a 10-bit
analog-to-digital converter (ADC) that converts video signals to digital
formats. The PCI-1409 acquires images in real time and can store these
images in onboard frame memory or transfer these images directly to
system memory.
The 1409 device is simple to configure so that you can easily install the
board and begin your image acquisition. The 1409 device ships with
NI-IMAQ, the National Instruments complete image acquisition driver
software you can use to directly control your 1409 device. Using NI-IMAQ,
you can quickly and easily start your application without having to program
the board at the register level.
Featuring low cost and high accuracy, the 1409 device is ideal for
both industrial and scientific environments. As a standalone board, the
1409 device supports four general purpose control lines that you can
configure to generate precise timing signals for controlling camera
acquisition. The 1409 device also supports four video sources and four
external I/O lines that you can use as triggers or digital I/O lines. If you
require more advanced triggering or additional I/O lines (either digital or
analog), you can use the 1409 device and NI-IMAQ with the National
Instruments data acquisition (DAQ) product line.
A common problem with many image acquisition boards is that you cannot
easily synchronize several functions to a common trigger or timing event.
The 1409 device uses its Real-Time System Integration (RTSI) bus to solve
this problem. The RTSI bus consists of the National Instruments RTSI bus
