Industrial USB cables for digital image processing

“Robustness and flexibility play the main role”

In digital camera technology, the USB interface has emerged as one of the leading standard interfaces. Responsible for transmitting large amounts of data without interference, it must stand up to mechanical stresses and the industry's high EMC requirements under all circumstances. For a clean signal transfer, one camera manufacturer recommends its customers use industrial-grade USB cables, which in the meantime can be used up to a length of 10 m.

Robust chainflex cables transmit data up to 10m. The camera manufacturer recommends the igus cables for industrial use.

"It's so easy!" is the corporate philosophy of IDS Imaging Development Systems GmbH, Obersulm. "Our compact cameras are based on the central customer benefit of simple installation and simple use in practice," explains Marketing Manager, Thomas Schmidgall. "We pay attention to the highest quality. It starts with the development and ends with the accessories!" For the cameras that are used in rough, industrial image processing, IDS offers its customers the USB cables specially developed by igus for high data transmission requirements as accessories. For dynamic movements in measurement and testing technology or for robot use, the industrial chainflex CFBUS.065 and CFBUS.066 are recommended. "The robustness and the signal quality convinced us right from the start," the Marketing Manager looks back. "Starting from a length of 5m, we only specify the industry-compatible bus cables from igus for perfect data transmission. Conventional cables cannot withstand the mechanical and electrical loads over the long term." "We have been looking for a long time for ways to implement a transmission length of 10m for industrial use, so that no other fault-prone components have to be used. We tested a large number of cables from a wide variety of suppliers before we came across the chainflex cables. None of them could withstand the requirements of interference-free signal transmission." The USB connection itself is not the problem, but the mechanical and electrical loads caused failures time and again.

On the search for the right cable

"The impetus to now also offer an industrial-grade USB cable came from the company IDS. Due to the fact that USB is establishing itself as a standard interface in the IT world, this technology is becoming increasingly important in automation technology. However, it poses particularly high mechanical and electrical demands on the cable. We accepted this challenge and now offer two USB cables for highly dynamic use." While the CFBUS.065 demonstrates its strength for signal transmission up to 5m, the CFBUS.066 is used up to 10m. In the first cable, the core cross sections of the bus elements are reduced to a minimum. This gives you an overall outer diameter small enough for a standard USB connector. If one wants to go beyond 5m, the cross sections of the bus elements must be enlarged and the structure of the shield varied due to the attenuation behaviour and the propagation time differences of the signals, with the disadvantage that the total diameter of the cable increases and thus does not fit into any housing of a standard USB connector. "We can remedy this with the IDS M8 connector," says Rainer Rössel.

Industrial USB cables, specially developed for the requirements of digital image processing

In the visualisation, the demands on the functioning transmission of the data volume are exceptionally high. "The signal quality of the USB cables used is very good. We carried out a large number of comparison tests in advance; after a long search, the igus cables proved to be the right solution; they convinced us in terms of quality," concludes Thomas Schmidgall.