Buffer Interface Class Library

Overview

The Buffer Interface Class Library provides a C++ wrapper around the BitFlow's C based BufferAcquisition API for sequence and circular image acquisition. There are several advantages to using the Buffer Interface class library over the BufferAcquisition API. Some of the advantages are:

1. Fewer method/function calls to accomplish sequence or circular capture.
2. No need to call cleanup methods/functions.
3. Fewer method/function parameters.
4. Improved error handling by throwing exceptions.

This document provides class informatation on the sequence and circular acquistion classes, along with examples of how to use the classes to acquire from Bitflow's extensive line of framegrabbers.

BufferAcquisition

The primary component of Buffer Interface library is the BufferAcquisition::BufferInterface class, and its two child classes:

1. BufferAcquisition::SequenceInterface - An interface to acquire a fixed-length buffer sequences. Each buffer is acquired once, at which point acquisition automatically stops.
2. BufferAcquisition::CircularInterface - An interface to acquire images continuously in a circular buffer. Acquisition continues indefinitely, until explicitly stopped.

Control Interfaces

To facilitate control of cameras, two additional libraries are provided:

1. CLComm - An interface to the Camera Link serial port library. This wraps both the standard CLAllSerial.h interface, and the BFSerial.h library, which provides various useful extensions to the core library.
2. CXPReg - An interface to CoaXPress camera register space. The CXP registry may also be controled using the cxp* methods of the BufferAcquisition::BufferInterface class.
3. BFGTLUtilities - A simplified interface to Gen<i>Cam devices. The matching Gen<i>Cam reference implementation must be installed to use this library, which may be downloaded from emva.org.