NTSC Arbitrary Sequence

[kevin.key]

Hey,

I'm curious if anyone has ever tried to create a simple NTSC signal of a solid color or grayscale image using only NI-FGEN? I would guess that it would use the Arbitrary Sequence Mode, but I don't have a lot of experience using NI-FGEN.

Thanks for any help,

Kevin

[kirsch]

Yeah, generating NTSC and other analog video signals is a pretty common use case for our line of Signal Generators. What board do you have? We even have a software toolkit for creating the analog NTSC signals suitable for downloading to your device. 

[kevin.key]

That link didn't work.

I'm thinking PXI-5412 if it can do it. Or PXI-5421 otherwise.

I've tried to look into the VideoMASTER stuff, but I was told that it doesn't support Labview RT.

[kirsch]

http://sine.ni.com/nips/cds/view/p/lang/en/nid/205449 

Looks like I pasted a few extraneous characters...

You can use our video toolkits to create the NTSC analog signal and then save it to a binary file in Windows. Then you can copy that to the LabVIEW RT system and load from file over there. The NTSC signal creation does not have to happen on the fly in the LabVIEW RT system if you already know what they have to be ahead of time.

I'm not sure if the analog specs on the 5412 are good enough for NTSC, you'd need to verify that.

[kevin.key]

OK, that is good to know. Generating them on the fly is not important, but switching the active one will be. So does NI-FGEN have the ability to load the binary file and control what is actively being displayed?

[kevin.key]

Also, any estimate on how big the files will be?

[kevin.key]

Oops, should've made one longer post.

Can I evaluate the VideoMaster Generator software? I installed from this link:

http://joule.ni.com/nidu/cds/view/p/id/2050/lang/en 

And the help shows a gui that I can't seem to find.

[kirsch]

I could be wrong, but if I remember right, a single frame of NTSC is 1/30 seconds long and you need about 40 MS/s to generate NTSC. At 2 bytes per sample each frame is roughly 2.6 MB.

[kevin.key]

Is it the .vbf file that gets loaded?

What is the binary file and what software is used to load it?

[kevin.key]

Also, could you point me to a tutorial for how to create a the binary file?