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Unread 06-08-2010, 02:30
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Re: Is the crio powerful enough?

Quote:
Originally Posted by davidthefat View Post
Thank you for your response, always good posts. Do you have any recommendations on the processors dedicated to process images? So would the cRio would treat the processor as a digital input?
I have only dealt with one type of FPGA, the Xilinx Spartan 3e (250,000 gates).
It can go fast, the board that I have clocks it at 100mhz (and it can go faster).

Acquiring images will take up some resources on the FPGA, but if you are already making your own board (Most FPGAs are ball grid array ics) you could include an ARM (or something similar) processor to grab the image from the camera.

Programming FPGAs is different then a CPU. Everything is in parallel.
For example something simple that can provide weird results is:
Code:
    int a = 2, b = 3;
    a = b;
    b = a;
    print("A : " + a);
    print("B : " + b);
If this was executed on a CPU then the results would be as predicted:
"A : 3"
"B : 3"

However, if executed on an FPGA:
"A : 3"
"B : 2"

Since you are the one who is programming the FPGA, you could have it interface to the cRIO in any way that you want. The cRIO has ethernet, serial, SPI, I2C, analog in (this would require digital potentiometers and be slow), and digital IO.
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