BitFlow celebrated the 20th anniversary of the launch of the BitFlow Roadrunner (R), the world's first PCI bus-mastering digital frame grabber. Powered by an early version of BitFlow's FlowThru architecture, which combines high-speed video FIFOs with a highly optimized scatter/gather DMA, the Road Runner served as a landmark innovation for the machine vision industry.
The Road Runner was been successfully designed into thousands of machine vision systems over the last two decades, and remains a favorite today of both professionals and amateur imaging enthusiasts.
‘What made the Road Runner such as a groundbreaking product was its flexibility,’ said Donal Waide, Director of Sales and Marketing for BitFlow. ‘It marked a new generation of frame grabbers that could be used in virtually any imaging application requiring a digital camera or data source, along with a desktop computer for processing. The launch's success gave us enormous confidence in our engineering abilities and has influenced succeeding generations of BitFlow frame grabbers, including our Karbon, Neon, Cyton and Axion product lines.’
BitFlow was founded in 1993 by a group of Boston engineers frustrated by the state of frame grabbers. The fledgling company's first effort, the Raptor(TM) frame grabber was an immediate success in the machine vision industry and led to the 1997 introduction of the Road Runner. This was followed in 2000 by the Road Runner CL, BitFlow's first Camera Link product, in support of the new interface standard. The R3-CL, the ‘unofficial’ third generation of the Road Runner, arrived soon afterward.
