[Motmot] Various announcements, including FView updates

[Andrew Straw]

Hi John,

I realized a couple days ago that I don't have the circuit connections
online yet, so it's in a high-priority state to write up. (Actually to
update some older docs.)

But, in a nutshell, you need AT90USBKEY J5 pin 4 (and thus Port C6,
OCR3A, of the AT90USB1287) to trigger the FView camera. (You'll need to
connect ground as well -- sorry no pin number offhand.)

As for triggering the other camera -- how do you want to trigger it?
With the same trigger pulses as for the FView camera (a 1 to 1 ratio of
frames acquired) or some other way? In the 1:1 ratio, you could
obviously just split the contact and send to both cameras.

-Andrew

John Schneider wrote:
> Hi Andrew,
> 
> As you may know, our lab is interested in coordinating two cameras.
> Well we finally got around to acquiring the USB board. Is there a
> detailed hardware installation guide anywhere? The software side of
> things went smoothly - so far I have the board reprogrammed and
> communicating with fview_ext_trig (I think - it can track analog
> input).
> I seem to be stuck on the hardware setup though. Playing around with
> the multimeter I'm guessing the input connects from ? into the
> J1/portF, but where do the output TTL(s) come from - and are they
> directly controlled with the fview_ext_trig?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Jon
> 
> 
> 
> On Thu, Mar 19, 2009 at 9:07 PM, Andrew Straw <astraw at caltech.edu> wrote:
>> 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/
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Motmot mailing list
>> Motmot at code.astraw.com
>> http://code.astraw.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/motmot
>>
> 


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