Home made camera designs?

[Wayne Morellini]

Go to the Viper thread the Sumix info is in, and it is all good (except for the initial single chip thing).

[Laurence Maher]

Say guys, I copied this from another thread:

Not sure if this will help or not but I found a codec for free that supports 16 bit per channel as well as an alpha channel making a 64 bit video codec. It works on mac and pc with just quicktime 5. Best of all it is free. They even have a lossless codec that can get 6:1 compression with no loss but that codec is $99.00. I know it isn't 12 bit per channel but it might be an easier way for people to manage files opposed to a series of stills. Besides right now the tiff files will need to be 16 bit anyways.

http://www.digitalanarchy.com/micro/micro_none16.html

[Wayne Morellini]

Have a look over at the Viper thread, I've summarised some new technologies, and potential camera configurations. Steve I also found some good fast cheap interface information and camera network compression idea that may help with your camera line. I also found reference to big tape backup, and low powered processing arrays that can be used for camera head compression, that canbe reprogrammed in C.

[Steve Nordhauser]

Wayne:
That was an interesting post. I forwarded a copy around to a few other people at SI for future discussion. We are watching 10Gbit right now, always tied to camera link and looking for others. We don't intend to be a sitting target on either the sensors used or interfaces.

[Wayne Morellini]

Agreed, that is what I thought, good business sense.

[Wayne Morellini]

I have an interesting idea, why not eliminate Cameralink, and send camera link commands and data over Ethernet. I think some of your customers would prefer a Ethernet interface to USB, Cameralink with Ethernet adaptor, or cameralink. Would that make a cheaper camera (certainly would help get rid of the capture card). Am I right that the throughput of 10GB Ethernet will be around 1GByte/s on it's own line?

Thanks

Wayne.

[Steve Nordhauser]

Right now, gigabit ethernet does about 250Mbps with the windows driver and about 800Mbps (100MB/sec) with custom drivers. Making a rash assumption or two, 10GigE should give about 1GB/sec of transfer rate, yes. 10GigE is not quite ready for the embedded mainstream but will be in a year or two. We are watching it.

The external GigE boxes we do right now are a temporary solution. We are in layout for an integrated GigE camera design.

[Steve Ipp]

Wayne, Les, Robs, Obin, people...
I've sent Steve the questions below, but taking into consideration the amount of time he has to spend responding to all of our posts, I don't really expect him to elaborate on the points. Could you possibly clear things up?

Software for the new SI proposed Altasens again.

1. According to EPIX (SI frame grabber supplier), they have a low grade version of XCAP shipped with every FG they sell. They also mention that every FG is intended for use with specific cameras. Does it mean that if I choose to buy a 64 bit FG from another manufacturer, it will not capture images from the cam?

2. If this is the case, could you possibly info me on the signal output from the camera head?

3. Another thing is camera's firmware. Is it TWAIN compatiable?

4. All the image capturing soft I dealt with before provided easy access to camera settings determined by the drivers. Let's say I have software like VirtualDub or a 3-d party package mentioned on EPIX website under imaging software (like Image-pro Plus, VisionGauge, etc.).
Suppose I use a camera link FG from another manufacturer.
Will this soft see your camera?

Really sorry for making you duplicate some info posted here previously.

[Rob Scott]

Steve Ipp wrote:
Does it mean that if I choose to buy a 64 bit FG from another manufacturer, it will not capture images from the cam?

Another card would be able to communicate electronically with the camera module, but since each card has its own software interface, the software would have to be modified to support the card.

VirtualDub ... Suppose I use a camera link FG from another manufacturer.
Will this soft see your camera?

No. Since CameraLink is not a standard used widely outside the industrial imaging market, standard software would not be able to capture from the card/camera without driver software (which, AFAIK, is not available).

Even if driver software was available, it's doubtful it would support the full capability of the camera -- nearly all video capture software supports only 8 bits per channel, so you'd be throwing away a great deal of the signal. Plus you'd still need Bayer filtering.

[Rob Lohman]

TWAIN is for pictures (like scanners and digital camera's). It does
not apply to things like video camera's. VirtualDUB and all other
capture applications will NOT see this camera as Rob S. explained.

[Steve Ipp]

Thank you, guys; a lot.

[Wayne Morellini]

<<<-- Originally posted by Steve Nordhauser : Right now, gigabit ethernet does about 250Mbps with the windows driver and about 800Mbps (100MB/sec) with custom drivers. Making a rash assumption or two, 10GigE should give about 1GB/sec of transfer rate, yes. 10GigE is not quite ready for the embedded mainstream but will be in a year or two. We are watching it.

The external GigE boxes we do right now are a temporary solution. We are in layout for an integrated GigE camera design. -->>>

Good. let us know when it is ready, as the extra price of a camera head is offsett in the shorterm by not having to buy a capture card.

Thanks

Wayne.

[Laurence Maher]

This may be silly to ask, but Wayne, did you just post what I think you did? Are we talking an HD camera being created here that will illiminate the need for a video capture card? Please give details if so. (Not sure how this works). What type of files would it create? How exactly does it work?

[Rob Lohman]

Laurence: well yes and no. Capture card is such a wrong term for
anything digital (including DV, Camera Link we are using now and
the GigE mentioned above).

It is all INTERFACES. Just different ones. For DV we are using
firewire. For webcams (and a low resolution camera) we are
using USB2.

Now Silicon Imaging is using Camera Link as their native connection
for their camera's. You will need a "capture card" or frame grabber
in your PC since a PC does not natively have a Camera Link
interface like most have USB2 and Firewire.

The problem is bandwidth. USB2 & Firewire are not fast enough
to handle the data coming of these camera's at full speed.

Now SI also has a Camera Link -> Gigibit Ethernet (GigE)
convertor. Which paired with a special driver allows any PC
(no Mac) equipped with a gigabit ethernet port (which is just
another INTERFACE) to capture from the camera with THE RIGHT
software!

Gigabit Ethernet ports are much more common and therefor
more easily used. However, this STILL does NOT support the
full bandwidth needed at 60 fps which is 105 MB/s. Gigabit
will probably bail out at around 80 MB/s or something which
gives you a max of 40 - 48 fps (at 1280 x 720, 10 - 16 bits)

Now the most interesting development is 10 GigE or 10 gigabit
Ethernet. This theoratically allows for 1 GB/s (which for now is
way way below that). Hopefully an integrated mainboard with
10 GigE and a special driver could easily do 105 MB/s and maybe
even 237 MB/s for a future 1920x1280 @ 60 fps. But that's a
long way for now.

So if Silicon Imagine could integrate 10 GigE on the camera head
that would definitely be very interesting since you will still need
specialized software, but no funky hardware. Just get a mainboard
with 10 GigE or a PCI-66 mainboard with any 10 GigE adaptor.

All of these solutions still require "custom" / specialized software
since there is no industry standard for normal PC's for such
kind of equipment.

[Laurence Maher]

Well what does Firewier 800 run at? It's is it 800 Mega bytes or Mega bits per second? If mega bytes, couldn't we just use firewire 800 or something?