Oncilla Machine Vision Computer – CoaXPress over Fiber

The Oncilla Machine Vision Computer – CoaXPress over Fiber is a rugged and compact industrial PC designed specifically for capturing and transmitting high-quality images and video while leaving plenty of compute power for other processing tasks. Incorporating a FireBird Quad COF-12 Frame Grabber and preinstalled operating system plus Active Silicon software and software development kit produces a complete machine vision system.

The Oncilla computer features a 12th-generation Intel Core i7 Series processor, 2x PCIe expansion slots and 2x DDR5 SO-DIMM sockets. It supports 16GB of DDR4 memory with expansion up to 64GB of ECC/non-ECC type memory running up to 4800MHz. At the heart of the Oncilla Machine Vision Computer – CoaXPress over Fiber is the FireBird CoaXPress over Fiber 4xCOF-12 Frame Grabber. The QSFP+ compliant port allows data rates of up to 40 Gbps. An operating system is preinstalled along with software including a software development kit.  In short, this is a complete Machine Vision System.

CoaXPress over Fiber (or CXP over Fiber) is an extension of the CoaXPress Machine Vision standard. It allows the CoaXPress protocol to run over a fiber optic cable. The fiber optic cables and connectors needed for transmission use mainstream Ethernet technology (40 Gigabit Ethernet) and are cost-effective and readily available. Active Silicon offers cables and accessories tested and recommended with Oncilla and FireBird fiber optic products. The benefits of fiber optic cables are uncompromised performance in harsh electrical environments and support for extensive cable lengths. With the correct choice of optical transceiver module, cameras can be placed multiple kilometers from the frame grabber/PC.

The Oncilla system with integrated FireBird frame grabber is designed for ultimate performance using Active Silicon’s proprietary DMA Engine technology, “ActiveDMA”. This technical innovation applies RISC based processor techniques and guarantees high speed and low latency image data transfers and zero CPU intervention. Finally, full GenICam support is provided with the frame grabber drivers and this includes a GenTL Producer for data streaming as well as register accesses. Additional to functions that control the hardware, the libraries include general purpose functions for the manipulation and display of images.

Oncilla Systems are designed and thoroughly tested with Active Silicon’s latest software and firmware and are part of the continuing regression testing program for new firmware and software releases. The PC hardware has passed multiple international certifications including those for rail and military industries, ensuring stable and reliable performance in diverse harsh environments.  Built with longevity in mind, the system uses long-term available components and processor, with the same configuration available for a minimum of seven years.

Relying on a known good platform for building a vision system can save many hours of system integration and the included software enables fast application development. Oncilla Machine Vision Computers include a license for ActiveSDK Active Silicon’s Software Development Kit. This provides comprehensive example applications and optimized libraries. Together with the ActiveCapture tool for camera and frame grabber control, they allow rapid system development and integration (separate datasheets describe ActiveCapture and ActiveSDK in detail). Drivers for third-party applications, such as Cognex VisionPro, HALCON, Common Vision Blox, StreamPix, LabVIEW, Matlab etc. are available.

This PC is ideal for machine vision tasks for example in manufacturing, as well as for vehicle awareness, medical, UAV and AI applications.