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Thermo-Iewy - USB 2.0 Thermo Camera for the Medical IndustryEstablished in 1980 in the south of Italy as a Tecnap Group subsidiary, Electronics Devices Power srl. (EDP) develops, designs and manufactures static medium to high power Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) products. EDP's UPS solutions are predominately targeted for emergency devices, elevators and innovative electro-medical products. For the electro-medical market, EDP has recently announced the Thermo-Iewy, an infrared camera used for medical purposes, in particular for the early detection of cancer.
Temperature is a sensible indicator of the human functional condition, due to the fact that every pathologic process in the living body affects it. In most cases, temperature changes are is first symptom of a disease. The Thermo-Iewy is a thermo-camera that includes dedicated software to visualize images on a PC monitor in real-time. EDP chose to implement a USB 2.0 interface in the Thermo-IEWY and selected Jungo's WinDriver USB for quick hardware access and driver development purposes. About Thermo-Iewy Thermo-Iewy is a thermo-camera attained by an amorphous silicon microbolometer with the resolution of 160x120 pixels, spectral response of 7-14 mm (filter bandwidth), thermal resolution less than 0.08 °C, and dedicated software that allows acquiring and elaborating thermal images. The Thermo-Iewy software allows:
Thermography is a non-invasive diagnostic technique that allows the examiner to visualize and quantify changes in skin surface temperature. An infrared scanning device is used to convert infrared radiation emitted from the skin surface into electrical impulses that are visualized in color on a PC monitor. This visual image graphically maps the body temperature. The spectrum of colors indicates an increase or decrease in the amount of infrared radiation being emitted from the body surface. Since there is a high degree of thermal symmetry in the normal body, subtle abnormal temperature asymmetries can be easily identified.
Why WinDriver USB?
The camera's resolution is 160x120 pixels; therefore there are 19,200 pixels to transmit to the PC for each image captured by the camera. The first project implementation achieved this by transferring the data via a serial port interface at 115 kBaud. It quickly became apparent that this technique was too slow and that a USB 2.0 interface would be more appropriate to provide real-time operation.
The company's initial intention was not to develop a driver themselves, having no previous experience of writing drivers for Windows. "For connecting our hardware to a USB port we have chosen the Cypress chip EZ-USB FX2." Said Dr. Emilio Ferraro, Engineering Division Manager at EDP. "Inside the Cypress package we have found Jungo's WinDriver driver development toolkit. We tried the free evaluation version and found it was very useful and very simple to use. For this chip, the generation of the necessary driver function calls and INF files has been a minor part of the development effort allowing us to concentrate our attention fully on other aspects of the application itself."
E.D.P. - Electronics Devices Power - S.r.l.
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