There will be two sensor ports on the 10373 board
After finishing the PCB layout of the 10373 board I noticed that it is very easy to add a second sensor board connector.
First of all – there is room for that connector – space wasted between the two tabs with mounting holes that we added at the request of our customer. And the connector nicely fits there.
Then – the bank 0 of the Spartan 6 FPGA has enough pins for 2 sensor ports (each port uses 22 I/O lines).
The 10373 board is expected to have 3-4 times higher processing speed than 10353 so using it with the current sensor boards would keep it under-loaded. For the newer (and faster) sensors I plan to use high speed serial transceivers of the Spartan chips as I wrote earlier, but the first revision will be compatible with the older sensors.
That second connector would cost just the price of the connector as I use free so far space on the board and unused pins on the FPGA. It can be used in multiple ways, such as:
1 – stereo cameras. It will be possible to incorporate code Oleg is working on now for automatic processing of the 3-d information – i.e. for autonomous vehicles. And having higher bandwidth of the system and network it will be possible to stream or record both of the stereo channels at the full resolution/frame rate sensor is capable of – it could be used for stereo cinema applications.
2 – panoramic applications with fewer number of complete camera modules, fewer network ports than needed currently when the 353 cameras are used.
3 – Day/night cameras with both color (with IR cutoff filter) and monochrome (without filter) sensors connected at the same time.
Andrey
Now it looks like this:
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