[Motmot] Various announcements, including FView updates

[Andrew Straw]

Hi all,

I wanted to let you know about various updates to the motmot suite of
software. I'm going to be making an effort to send update notifications
to this email list. (I apologize for neglecting this in the past!)

= New webserver =
After an extended outage over the winter holiday period, I have moved
the website hosting to a more reliable server. I am now paying real
money for the server, so hopefully it'll be real reliable... For the
past month or two, I think it's been pretty good. Also, I only noticed
several weeks after the website switch that the email list was broken,
so if you sent and email during that period, it never made it through.
Please accept my apologies.

= New documentation =
In case you haven't done so already, take a look at
http://code.astraw.com/projects/motmot/ . I have been making an effort
to produce some better, and more up-to-date documentation. There's still
some ways to go, but I the documentation is already greatly improved --
there is some!

= New external trigger device with analog input =
I have released everything needed to trigger external cameras, various
other external devices, and to capture analog voltage input in an
inexpensive ($30) USB device. This is described here:
http://code.astraw.com/projects/motmot/camtrig/OVERVIEW.html

= Manuscript on the way =
I am in the final stages of writing a manuscript about the motmot suite
of software. If you're interested in giving it a read before I submit
it, I'd appreciate any feedback. Please email me for a copy, and I'll be
happy to send you the latest version.

= FView updates =
I added a "set view interval" menu option in the View menu. This will
allow updating the display only every Nth frame instead of every single
frame. I have found this to be useful when filming at high frame rates
(e.g. 1000 fps) to prevent the CPU from getting overloaded.

Also, I updated FView to incorporate the API change to libcamiface (see
below).

= libcamiface fixes and update =
I fixed a couple of bugs with the Prosilica gigabit ethernet camera
drivers in libcamiface over the last few weeks. Also, I have merged the
set_frame_offset() and set_frame_size() functions to set_frame_roi().
The same goes for the getter functions.

= Binary releases available for Ubuntu Hardy =
All these changes are currently available on my Ubuntu Hardy repository.
See the installation instructions at
http://code.astraw.com/projects/motmot/overview.html#ubuntu-packages for
more information about this. If you are already using my Hardy
repository, you can download and install these updates by simply
clicking the update button in your menu bar.

-Andrew

-- 
Andrew D. Straw, Ph.D.
California Institute of Technology
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~astraw/