Sector Electronics - Electronic Product Design

Problem

A customer desired to use a PC based DICOM-compliant view station with a Kodak digital laser camera. The camera is used for printing high-resolution digital medical images. A standard parallel port could not be utilized because of the long line distance required (>500 ft) and the use of an external driver card was undesirable. An additional complication was the customer's desire that the interface allow the view station to operate as either a signal source for the camera or to emulate the camera as a signal destination. Other requirements were that the resultant interface would reside on a PCI card and be compatible with standard PCs and the Windows Operating System.

Solution



The camera itself was capable of being configured to receive RS-422 differential pair signals, however on research of the available PC cards for such purposes, it was found that no manufacturer made a multi-channel bi-directional RS-422 port interface device using the PCI bus format.

It became apparent that we would have to design the interface card ourselves.

After only 4 weeks, we had designed the circuitry, acquired all the necessary hardware components, and started building a prototype PCI card. Taking advantage of existing development kits available from chip manufacturers, and software driver development kits for Windows-compatible drivers, we were able to have an operating prototype within 6 weeks.

The resultant PCI interface card worked well for our customer and is still in use.