Dev Kit Weekly: Analog Devices’ ADTF3175 Time of Flight Evaluation Kit
April 28, 2023
Video
Time of Flight (ToF) sensing technologies have applications across fields from healthcare and consumer to industrial automation and smart buildings. I mean, even us humans are taught from a very young age that being aware of our surroundings is a good strategy in staying safe. The same is true when prototyping devices that’ll be operating in medical and industrial environments. Luckily, Analog Devices has a time of flight module suited to these application areas and more, and it’s conveniently tucked into the ADTF3175 ToF evaluation kit.
The ADTF3175 time of flight evaluation kit includes the ADTF3175 ToF module itself — which houses a depth image signal processor — a camera interface board, and an i.MX8M Plus SOM.
The actual ADTF3175 ToF module is a 1 megapixel CMOS indirect ToF imager designed for high resolution 3D depth sensing and all manner of vision systems with a 1024x1024 resolution, 3.5 µm × 3.5 µm (micrometer) pixels, and a 75º x 75º field of view. The module also features an imager lens subassembly with a 940 nm band-pass filter and illumination subassembly that includes eye safety support. The module’s depth range spans from 0.4 to 4 meters and helps give the eval kit an accuracy range of ±3 mm. Additionally, the module provides a 4-lane MIPI CSI-2 transmitter interface and on-module Flash for the boot-up sequence, as well as 4-wire SPI and 2-wire I2C serial interfaces.
The ToF depth ISP is an Analog Devices ADSD3500, which, on its own, features full depth processing at 640x480 resolution and up to 90 FPS; and partial depth processing at a resolution of 1024x1024, up to 40 FPS. It runs on an Arm Cortex-M33 processor that helps control the flow of data and includes SRAM on-chip for frame manipulation and buffering. There’s also a 2-lane MIPI CSI-2 transmitter interface that runs at 2.5 Gbps alongside interface options like I2C and QSPI.
As I said earlier, the ADTF3175 also houses a SolidRun I.MX8M Plus system-on-module, which leverages up to four Arm Cortex-A53 processors and a Cortex-M7 available on its NXP i.MX 8M Plus SoC to achieve 2.3 TOPS of embedded AI/ML and edge inferencing performance on its integrated neural processing unit.
Now, the ADTF3175 eval kit has two modes of operation: megapixel, which provides 1024x1024 resolution; and quarter-megapixel, which provides a 512x512 resolution. This kit also gives us a 16GB flashed microSD card and comes with its very own tripod.
Megapixel mode
Quarter-megapixel mode
The kit also supports Ethernet via USB to PC connection for real-time visualization, capture, and post processing of depth data retrieved by the camera sensor.
If the action-packed hardware wasn’t enough to get you on board, the ADTF3175 evaluation kit utilizes host PC software for Windows, as well as an open-source, multi-platform software development kit to allow for custom application development. All the repositories are available on GitHub under the name space aditof. There’s also OS-specific release packages and Doxygen documentation available through GitHub, which includes diagrams and an API demonstrating how to retrieve a frame from a camera connected to the eval kit.
Additionally, there are links in the kit’s user guide, housed on ADI’s website, for an ADItoFGUI tool, data collect and depth compute tools, and other auxiliary tools to assist in your development process.
If you’re now itching to get your hands on one of these kits, they are available to order from Analog Devices for $762.38. But, if you’re in that gambling mood, you can also enter this week’s raffle, linked below, for a chance to win this kit for free. Good luck!
