[Motmot] Various announcements, including FView updates

[John Schneider]

Hi Andrew,

I'm almost positive that 5-10msec (non-cumulative) is perfectly
acceptable, and the part about it being trivial seems like great news
in terms of getting this particular setup up and running.

Jon

On Fri, Apr 10, 2009 at 5:40 PM, Andrew Straw <astraw at caltech.edu> wrote:
> John Schneider wrote:
>> Hi Andrew,
>>
>> Well, we are still deciding on the sync/trigger. What we are working
>> with now is a 3s acquisition on one camera and 0.04 (~25f/s) for
>> fview. Is fview_ext_triger capable of letting the AT90USBKEY be used
>> to send two independent (but synced) pulses?
>
> If the precise inter-acquisition interval of the 2nd camera acquisition
> is not a critical parameter (i.e. if sometimes it's off by 5-10 msec,
> without cumulative error), then this could be done without modifying the
> CamTrig firmware, but just by sending external sync pulses from a
> trivial FView plugin (which I currently writing up a tutorial about how
> to do). Here's you'd want to wire the 2nd camera to AT90USBKEY J5 pin 9
> (and thus Port C1 of the AT90USB1287).
>
> Otherwise, (if the inter-frame interval of the 2nd camera is critical),
> there's no support in the CamTrig's current firmware, but it could be
> added without too much difficulty... I'm happy to advise on what could
> be done within the CamTrig firmware to facilitate this. I'm hesitant to
> commit myself to implementing it, as I'm already over-booked on various
> projects.
>
> I hope it's clear from the above, the inter-frame interval I'm referring
> to is the duration between frames. I presume the integration ("shutter")
> time of each frame would be controlled by the software of the 2nd
> camera, and that the Motmot CamTrig device would simply be triggering
> the onset of frame acquisition.
>
> -Andrew
>
> --
> Andrew D. Straw, Ph.D.
> California Institute of Technology
> http://www.its.caltech.edu/~astraw/
>