Counter And Timer Control - Balluff MATRIX VISION mvBlueNAOS Technical Manual

1.13 GenICam and advanced features

1.13.5 Counter And Timer Control

The "Counter And Timer Control" is a powerful feature which MATRIX VISION customers already know under the
name Hardware Real-Time Controller (HRTC). MATRIX VISION cameras provide:
• 4 counters for counting events or external signals (compare number of triggers vs. number of frames; over-
trigger) and
• 2 timers.
Counter and Timers can be used, for example,
• for pulse width modulation (PWM) (p. 162) and
• to generate output signals of variable length, depending on conditions in camera.
This achieves complete HRTC functionality which supports following applications:
• frame rate by timer
• exposure time by timer
• pulse width at input
The "Counter And Timer Control" contains features like
Feature name (acc.
(p. 121))
CounterSelector
CounterEventSource[Counter
Selector]
CounterEventActivation[Counter
Selector]
etc.
TimerSelector
TimerDuration[TimerSelector]
TimerDelay[TimerSelector]
etc.
related to the usage of programmable counters and timers.
Because there are many ways to use this feature, the list of use cases is long and not finished yet:
• Processing triggers from an incremental encoder (p. 160)
• Creating different exposure times for consecutive images (p. 166)
• Creating synchronized acquisitions using timers (p. 204)
• Generating a pulse width modulation (PWM) (p. 162)
MATRIX VISION GmbH
to SFNC Property name (acc. to mvIMPACT
Acquire (p. 119))
counterSelector
counterEventSource
counterEventActivation
timerSelector
timerDuration
timerDelay
Description
Selects which counter to configure.
Selects the events that will be the
source to increment the counter.
Selects the activation mode event
source signal.
Selects which timer to configure.
Sets the duration (in microseconds)
of the timer pulse.
Sets the duration (in microseconds)
of the delay.
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