Data interfaces
37
User bits
Matrox Meteor-II /Standard supports four auxiliary user bits through the video
input connector: two input and two output. These are available for controlling
external events such as a strobe light. User bits are programmed using the MIL-Lite
command
MdigControl()
. For information on the user bits electrical
specifications, see the section
Specifications
in Appendix B.
❖
Note that auxiliary output signals are driven by open collector buffers with an
on-board pull-up resistor of 4.7 K
Ω
.
Using the auxiliary power supply
Matrox Meteor-II /Standard can supply power to your camera. Use the 4-pin
power cable provided with your board to connect to the power supply of your
computer. The operating voltage can be set to either 5 V or 12 V, but the current
drawn by all cameras is limited to 1.5 A. The circuit uses an auto-resettable fuse.
For further information on connecting to the auxiliary power supply connector,
see the section,
Connecting Matrox Meteor-II /Standard for PCI to the auxiliary
power supply input
in Chapter 2, and Appendix B. Note that this input is not
available on the CompactPCI and PC/104
-Plus
form factors.
Data interfaces
Video Interface ASIC
The Matrox Meteor-II /Standard board has a VIA (Video Interface ASIC), which
acts mainly as a video-to-PCI bridge. The VIA is capable of high-speed image
transfers to Host memory or other PCI devices across the PCI bus. It uses 4 Mbytes
of video transfer memory to store data until the PCI bus becomes available. On
the PCI form factor, the VIA also supports image transfers across the VMChannel
to one or more Matrox Imaging boards for accelerated image processing or display.
Simultaneous data
streams
Matrox VIA can manage up to two simultaneous data streams. For example, it
can grab into video transfer memory, and concurrently transfer data over the
VMChannel or PCI buses.
General features
The VIA is capable of separating an image into three planes (for example, RGB
packed to RGB planar).
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