BVS CA-SF devices are USB3 Vision™ compliant devices, using a GenICam XML-file describing the device capabilities. Within this XML-file it uses the names, units, data types etc. recommended by the SFNC to describe the devices features. Whenever custom features have been added to the BVS CA-SF firmware these can clearly be spotted by the leading 'mv' in the features name. The device can communicate with every third party software stack, that complies with the USB3 Vision™ standard.

Note: Given that the BVS CA-UB as well as the BVS CA-MLC, BVS CA-IGC, mvBlueFOX device family are not a GenICam compliant, they are not fully compatible with BVS CA-SF devices. So software written for these devices has to be adapted concerning the initialization of the device (minor changes necessary) and the changing of settings. However, the Impact Acquire interface can remain the same. The recommended way to write applications therefore would be to isolate the code that actually modifies device settings into a separate function, so that an application can easily support both GenICam™ compliant and non-compliant devices. This section explains how to do this: https://assets.balluff.com/documents/DRF_957352_AA_000/InterfaceLayouts.html

The following figure explains the required software stack for GenICam™ GenTL compliant devices built by Balluff/MATRIX VISION:

Figure 1: GenICam™ software stack

As shown in figure 1, for BVS CA-SF devices the Impact Acquire interface is built on top of a USB3 Vision and GenICam GenTL Producer layer. The Impact Acquire interface internally uses the GenICam runtime libraries, so that it can be considered as a GenICam GenTL Consumer.