Elphel workshop in Bordeaux during RMLL 2010

About RMLL 

RMLL 2010 (Libre Software Meeting) is a free (as a beer and as a speech) and non commercial conferences, workshops and round table about Free Software and its applications. The LSM goal is to provide a platform for exchange among Free Software developers, users and stakeholders.

This year RMLL will take place in Bordeaux, France from 6th to 11th of July and is organised by a set of local Free Software user groups and organizations with the help of several public and private sponsors. The event will be hosted by ENSEIRB-MATMECA, U-Bordeaux 1, LaBRI & ENSCB.

About the workshop

The workshop will take place during RMLL 2010 and is organized by our Swiss partner Alsenet SA.

All our European customers, partners and friends of Elphel are invited to participate in the workshop. It will be a perfect occasion to meet other Elphel customers, users & developers, to test the hardware, software and to discuss project ideas and future developments. RMLL is also an ideal place to get a better understanding of the economical models of Free Software.

Some preparations on your end (e.g. pre-installing required packages) would allow us to focus on the main topics and cover any remaining questions. Any question prior or during the workshop should be discussed on Elphel’s IRC channel, wiki or public mailing list so we can have a public log that is potentially useful to other Elphel users as well.

Please sign up on the participant’s list, and please add your availability during RMLL so that we can find the optimal day & time for the workshop. All further information about this workshop will be available on this wiki page.

We are looking forward to seeing you at the workshop!

Dates, time and place

The workshop will take place on 7th July from 13:00 to 17:00 in the room TD14 of ENSEIRB.

For accomodation, map, and any other information please visit RMLL web site.

Overview of the camera building blocks

Elphel's goal is to provide high-quality, intelligent, network cameras based on open hardware and free software. Elphel hopes its modular camera design will attract software and FPGA engineers interested in exploring high-definition videography, among other innovative applications.

Both turnkey camera assemblies and OEM modules are available. All the documentation is published on this wiki and our mailing list under GNU FDL v1.3 license and all the source code including FPGA Verilog code, Linux drivers and software are available under GNU GPL v3 license.

boards

All the separate camera components are listed on this page.

Here are the most commonly used:

The 10338 & 10353 boards are the minimum requirements to assemble a camera:

• 10338 - Aptina MT9P031/MT9P001 5MPix (2592x1944) sensor front end to Elphel 353 series cameras.
• 10338 - processor board is the computer part of the Elphel 353 series cameras.

Those two are optional and very flexible extension boards:

• 10359 - multi-function board. It can be connected between the 10353 Processor board and a sensor one (up to three sensor boards can be connected)
• 10369 - IO extension board. SATA, CF, USB 1.1, GPIO, i2c, ... This board also have few adapters

On each of the board pages you will find links to circuit diagram, parts list, PCB layout & Gerber files. Some data-sheets and other necessary documentations are linked from.

assemblies

Our turnkey modules are listed here and are documented more in detail on Elphel camera parts.

price list

http://www3.elphel.com/price_list , last day of RMLL 2010 few cameras will be sold with a special 10% GPL contribution discount.

under development

Elphel is currently working on Eyesis high resolution panoramic camera - http://blogs.elphel.com/category/panoramic/

And soon we return to our next camera generation development - http://blogs.elphel.com/category/andrey/10373/

client software compatible with Elphel cameras

Browsers

Firefox 3.6

Automation

Http 1.1

wget, curl

Post-processing

JP46 post-processing workflow

There are currently 2 applications and a demo script for post processing JP46 quicktime movies: http://elphel.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/elphel/tools/

Movie2DNG is developed by Paulo Henrique Silva and can currently (May 2010) not to the full transition from *.mov to dng but uses ffmpeg to extract a jp46 sequence from the mov. This is the first step in the process.

Once there is a image sequence of JP46 (jpeg) files you can use the next application called "JP4toDNGconverter". This tool uses a modified libtiff to write DNG files that can then be opened the same way as RAW files from other cameras in UFRaw, RawStudio, or Adobe Aftereffects, etc.

The BatchProcess PHP script basically combines the above 2 applications and does a batch conversions of all quicktime movs found in a particular folder to a DNG sequence.

Interfacing with the camera, triggering, synchronization

Deep hardware / software integration with Elphel: example on likoboard and likomapper software

Cross-compiling the libs

liblikoboard depends on libhid, and libhid needs libusb legacy.

I did compile the latest libusb legacy (0.1.12) from sourceforge, and libhid-svn (rev. 364) from http://libhid.alioth.debian.org/

See here for the cross-compiling method

Porting the PHP extension

To port the PHP extension php_likoboard I had to:

• Build it for my native cpu,
• Source init_env from the elphel353/ folder.
• Copy the php_likoboard folder to elphel353/apps/php/ext/php_likoboard.
• Change to this folder and run ../../elphize.
• Run make and copy .libs/php_likoboard.so to /usr/local/crisv32/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20060613/.

Debugging

php_likoboard was not working on the camera. So I did write a test application sending debugging messages in console to see what was going wrong.

libusb-0.1.12 appears to be broken when running on the camera, so I did restart using libusb-0.1.11 and it worked.