What next?

You have now reached the point where you have to continue alone. Remember that the pylon SDK is an SDK for communicating with cameras; it is not an image processing tool. It is your job to set up your favourite vision development toolchain. Visiting the imaginghub may be a good next step. There you can find for instance sample projects and tutorials on how to make pylon and OpenCV work together.

 
Dart BCON for LVDS pylon 5
What pylon sees when it looks in the mirror.

Tight on disk space

Trying to install OpenCV on the kit by building it myself took me quite far but it failed when the system ran out of disk space. Ubuntu’s file manager showed that 97% of the 3.4 GB disk had been used. 3.4 GB? The SD card included in the kit is a 16 GB type, meaning that plenty of space should still be available. Running the disk partition tool ‘gparted’ on another machine allowed me to add almost 12 GB to the SD card's main partition.

Conclusion

The Basler Dart BCON for LVDS Development Kit is a carefully designed kit intended for embedded vision developers. The objective of the kit is not to provide image processing tools, but to provide an embeddable vision platform that works (almost) right out of the box.

The kit is ready to use in about five minutes thanks to a flawless Quick Install Guide. No errors or difficulties of any kind were encountered during its evaluation when following the instructions provided by the manufacturer. Image capture worked right away, and all sample code built without warnings & errors; tested samples worked fine too.

 
Dart BCON for LVDS captured image
This image was captured by the Dart BCON for LVDS development kit.
The object reflects the bright green LED mounted on the processor board.

The only (minor) issues that came up during testing were:
  1. A bright green LED close to the camera reflects in nearby objects;
  2. The file system on the SD card leaves about 75% of the total available disk space inaccessible.
I would highly recommend correcting the second issue with a disk partitioning tool like ‘gparted’ before doing anything else.