Expert wood inspection

End product: Expert wood inspection and grading systems by CTBA    Pole Productuique
TI DSP: TMS320C4x
Third-party product: Imaging hardware and software by Hunt    Engineering
Success achieved: ’C4x buffered communication ports allowing CTBA    to design a multiprocessor system with maximum I/O flexibility for use    in different manufacturing environments.

CTBA Pole Productuique, a French manufacturer of expert inspection and grading systems for the wood industry, needed to find a DSP-based system that could process images at a speed consistent with modern factories and could also be expanded or contracted to meet the needs of individual customers.

CTBA selected TI’s TMS320C4x as a suitable DSP because its communication ports allow connection of multiple processors and are also useful for I/O. With help and support from Hunt Engineering, CTBA designed its own camera interface subsystem, which interfaces to the buffered communication ports on Hunt’s products. The Hunt HEPC2E was selected, along with the HET40SD5-1-4 processing modules, to form the DSP part of the systems, many of which are in use now throughout the world.

The use of the communication ports as an I/O interface has enabled CTBA to reuse a common camera subsystem and apply as much DSP power as is required by each customer’s application.

New systems will be launched soon. This generation uses a camera interface subsystem, which has been redesigned by Hunt to provide higher performance and more flexibility. Features include the use of a small daughter card to perform the interface to the ’C4x communication ports, which can later be replaced by an interface to the "heart" architecture being developed by Hunt. These features will allow CTBA to develop future systems based on TI’s ’C6000 DSP family.