Alvium Vision Embedded Cameras supports MIPI-CSI & USB 3

Allied Vision Technologies GmbH in November announced its Alvium 1500 and Alvium 1800 embedded and machine vision camera series. The Alvium 1500 supports MIPI-CSI-2 interfaces and the Alvium 1800 supports MIPI-CSI-2 and USB3 Vision. They both have On Semi sensors featuring up to 2592 × 1944 px resolution and V4L2 drivers that support Jetson and i.MX6/8 dev boards. The Alvium SoC is fitted on a 27 x 27mm module, and is available in bare board, open housing, or closed housing configurations, with both camera lines supporting C-Mount, CS-Mount, or S/M12-Mount standards.

The Alvium 1500 and 1800 supports 0.5 to 5-megapixel cameras, but the Alvium SoC supporst 0.3 to 21-megapixels. This enables future migration possible. The SoC also enables Sony sensors, and will likely be available in future models. The SoC exploits ASIC technology rather than the FPGAs used on many machine vision cameras. This makes it more power efficient, says Allied Vision. Its intelligent power management feature is claimed to further optimize power consumption.

Allied Vision says:

the Alvium 1500 family combines the advantages of classic machine vision cameras with the advantages of embedded sensor modules.

The Alvium 1500 includes four models with different ON Semiconductors sensors, and the highest end model is a 1500 C-500 SKU with an AR0521 sensor that enables 2592 × 1944 @ 60fps resolution.

The Alvium 1800 model also exploits the AR0521 sensor, and it has a more advanced feature set for image correction and optimization. According to Allied Vision, a single MIPI-CSI-2 driver is utilized for all Alvium models, making it easy to swap cameras or upgrade a system to another sensor. The cameras are set to ship with open source, Linux- core Video4Linux2 (V4L2) or GStreamer drivers. Applications that need more comprehensive camera controls can utilize Direct Register Access (DRA). The Alvium cameras can be plugged into Linux development boards due to the NXP i.MX6 SoC, and drivers for i.MX8 and i.MX8M being in place. The Alvium cameras also support Arm/Tegra based Nvidia Jetson TX2 modules.

The cameras will soon support the latest Jetson Xavier, due to the company’s partnership with Antmicro. The Alvium 1800 also supports GenICam for camera control. The Alvium 1500 and Alvium 1800 cameras are available now with pricing undisclosed.

More information may be found on Allied Vision’s Alvium product page.

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