Welcome to the March edition of Sarsen Technology’s News Bytes. It has been a busy month for the Sarsen team, with a successful week of customer visits with VersaLogic, a 50th birthday celebration and new opportunities for UEI and BittWare. This month we are featuring products from Tech Source, Conduant, Versalogic and Trenton Systems, and white papers from Altera and Extreme Engineering.

Tech Source Condor VC100x XMC video capture card

The Condor VC 100x XMC product is a video capture and compression card designed for use in surveillance, image detection, video recording, and unmanned vehicles (UAV) applications. It supports up to four video inputs, and depending on product version, IO is handled either through a front connector or through the rear Pn4 connector. Various input formats (NTSC/PAL/SECAM/HD/HD-SDI/3G-SDI) are selectable through an API. The card also does H.264 encoding in hardware, minimizing CPU usage, and supports transfer of the video stream via UDP or TCP/IP for remote display of captured data.

Newly released COM Express Mini CPU module from Versalogic

The VL-COMm-26 is an extremely rugged COMm board (55mm x 84mm), driven by an Intel Atom E6x0T processor. The VL-COMm-26 provides significant performance and lower power consumption (7W-8W typical) in a very compact package. The standard Type 10 pin-out provides system interfaces, including Gigabit Ethernet with network boot capability, seven USB ports, three x1 PCIe lanes, two serial interfaces, Intel High-Definition Audio (HDA), LPC, and SMBus to the carrier board. The integrated Intel GMA600 graphics core supports MPEG-4/H.264 and MPEG-2 encoding and decoding, and a standard LVDS output supports flat panel displays.

Trenton Systems expands CE compliant and UL recognised hardware options

Trenton Systems is now offering a new series of computing system configuration options that simplify the task of meeting UL and CE certification requirements in industrial computing and video wall controller applications. These new configurations feature Trenton’s long-life single board computers, PCI Express® backplanes, embedded motherboards and in the case of the video controllers, Matrox Mura MPX video controller boards.

There are currently four products that are UL recognized and CE compliant, with two more awaiting CE approval. One of the products with both CE approval and UL recognition is the TRC4011 – a 4U rackmount chassis featuring the Trenton BPG7087 14-slot backplane and either a dual or single-processor BXT7059, JXT6966 or TSB7053 single board computer.

UEISIM – Simulink/Simulink coder target cubes and racks from UEI

UEISIM turns a PowerDNx Ethernet data acquisition module into a target on which you can run Simulink models and read/write physical I/Os. The host software uses the Simulink add-on "real-time workshop" to convert your Simulink model to C code and then cross-compiles it into an executable that runs directly on the UEISIM hardware. Applications include simulation model verification, rapid prototyping, and hardware-in-the-loop testing.

The UEISIM is rugged, flexible and expandable, with over 30 I/O boards available including A/D, D/A, digital I/O, counter/timer, quadrature encoder, serial, CAN and ARINC 429 communications.