Micro/sys enters vision arena with single-board computers
Boston, MA. Micro/sys Inc. made its debut as an exhibitor at AIA's The Vision show this week, where it is highlighting three camera/vision-ready industrial computer boards. The foray into the vision arena leverages the company's 40 years of experience in the embedded single-board-computer market. President Susan Wooley said she expects vision will be a part of most embedded applications in the near future, and the company is ready to address vision applications.
On display at the company's booth is the SBC4661, which incorporates Freescale's i.MX6 Cortex-A9 Quad Core system-on-chip (SoC) multimedia processor. The low-power SBC4661 also incorporates a Xilinx Kintex-7 FPGA to enhance the board's vision-processing capability. Users can configure the FPGA using cores from Xilinx's library, third-party libraries, Micro/sys's library, or their own proprietary algorithms.
Wooley said the board can serve security, transportation, industrial, and medical applications. I/O options include multiple USB3 channels, multiple serial channels, and dual CAN interfaces. Users have a choice of Linux and Android operating systems. Price starts at $1,295.
The company also exhibited its mid-range, low-power SBC1652 with enhanced camera/video upgrades. The board incorporates Freescale's i.MX515 CPU and a Spartan-6 FPGA, which offloads vision-processing algorithms, leaving the CPU free to service system routines and application programs. The board supports StackableUSB I/O expansion with USB 2.0, I2C, and SPI interfaces to make it easy to integrate data converters, GPS, mass storage, sensors, and other embedded I/O functions.
The SBC1652 starts at $795. Turnkey development kits for Linux and WindowsCE are available for $995.
Micro/sys also exhibited the USB3200 industrial controller based on an 80-MHz PIC32 microcontroller. Wooley described it as offering “cell-phone functionality” with 10- or 12-bit analog-to-digital conversion and up to 70 DIO lines as well as Ethernet, CAN, and USB interfaces. The board can handle single-shot photos or slow, low-resolution video in industrial-control environments.