Cypress FX3 SuperSpeed Explorer Kit-based 16bit LVDS USB 3.0 frame grabber

What is it?

The 16bit-LVDS-FX3-Framegrabber is a Cypress FX3 SuperSpeed Explorer Kit-based PCB, which can digitize a parallel 16bit digital video stream from a commercial image sensor. It exposes a USB 3.0 UVC (“webcam”) device to the operating system.

Video signal is accepted on a 50pin SCSI-II connector as parallel LVDS.
Required signals:

• DATA_VALID
• HSYNC
• VSYNC
• PIXCLK
• DATA0 through DATA15

The framegrabber follows the common industry standard pinout for 16bit digital LVDS video.

The current state of the firmware/GPIF II configuration is fixed to 1024x1024px, 16bit dynamic range.

Hardware

USB Video Class / “Webcam”-mode

Due to limitations in USB UVC descriptor/color format support, this firmware reports itself to the OS as a YUYV/YUV2 device, in other words a 16bit per pixel color video signal. This will create wrong color images when viewed on regular software (like VLC Media Player), the raw stream can be viewed & interpreted using Video4Linux, GStreamer, etc. though.

# v4l2-ctl -d 0 --list-formats-ext
ioctl: VIDIOC_ENUM_FMT
  Type: Video Capture

  [0]: 'YUYV' (YUYV 4:2:2)
    Size: Discrete 1024x1024
      Interval: Discrete 0.200s (5.000 fps)

GPIF II logic

Links

• Hardware: KiCAD design files
• Firmware: Cypress FX3 Eclipse & GPIF II designer project files