Messages

181

Software Dev / Re: Software update V0.2

« on: July 25, 2017, 02:40:21 PM »

New update trigger issue...  I have a report that the new update will allow a trigger delay only for the on-camera trigger but not the BNC trigger input.  Can anyone verify, I am not with my camera.

I cannot duplicate, trigger and trigger delay works as expected on both V0.1 and V0.2, can anyone else check?

182

Chronos User Discussion / Re: Mechanical Drawing

« on: July 19, 2017, 12:08:54 PM »

Lets try it this way, attached is the drawing of a lens I'm considering getting for the Chronos 1.4.  The aft element of the lens extends 7.505 mm beyond the c-mount flange into the camera.  Does anyone know if this will work with the Chronos 1.4?  I am not going to be changing out different lenses with this camera.  It will be adjusted once and likely never removed.

That lens will fit just fine, as long as you are using the CS-C adapter

183

Chronos User Discussion / Re: external high speed trigg

« on: July 16, 2017, 08:05:17 PM »

This mode is now supported in V0.2, both triggered exposure, where a rising or falling edge triggers an exposure with the exposure duration controlled by the camera, and shutter gating, where the external signal controls both exposure start time and exposure duration.

To use triggered exposure mode, set your desired resolution in Record Settings, and set maximum frame rate for that resolution. Go into Trigger/IO Settings and select Exposure Trigger for IO1 (BNC), turn off the pullup and debounce options, and set Invert based on your signal. With Invert unchecked, it will start exposure on the rising edge of the input signal, and on the falling edge if checked. The shutter control will continue to control the exposure duration in this mode.

Setup for shutter gating is identical as for triggered exposure above, except the shutter is entirely controlled by the external signal, the exposure slider does nothing. When the external signal is active, the shutter is open, and is closed otherwise.

Note that you can't do a black cal unless the camera is receiving a proper repetitive exposure trigger, so you may need to set the IO 1 function in Trigger Settings to None before doing a black cal, then set it back to Exposure trigger afterwards.

The delay between the external input going active and start of exposure is very small, under 1us.

There's are a couple of bugs that need to be fixed with this new functionality. There's a horizontal line artifact depending on shutter speed, try to make the exposure close to minimum or maximum to avoid it being in the center of the image. There's also a larger black offset on the first frame following a large deadtime of no frame capture, it starts to get bad beyond about 100ms or so, so it's best to keep your trigger pulse repetition rate higher than 10Hz on average. Both of these are on the bugtracker to be fixed.

184

Software Dev / Software update V0.2

« on: July 12, 2017, 09:40:53 PM »

Here's the first software update!

Not a huge amount in this one, basically a few features requested by a few scientific users, and a bunch of low-hanging fruit . More major updates will probably have to wait until after the backlog of Kickstarter rewards and store preorders have shipped, since it's so busy leading up to production. Once we hire a software engineer, updates will be much more frequent and significant.

Features added and bugs fixed:

• Added Triggered Exposure and Shutter Gating modes
• Fixed bug where video can be saved to the mount point if no storage device is present
• Fixed minimum exposure time (now 1uS instead of an impossible 10ns)
• Added "About" tab to Util window, showing software version, serial number, and camera info
• Added missing backer Jared Reabow in backers list
• Added support for LUX1310 image sensor silicon revision 2
• Fixed incorrect bitrate computation in save settings window
• Disabled H264 profile and level controls (certain lower levels caused encoder to crash)
• Fixed incorrect shutter slider and exposure text after changing resolution
• Fixed incorrect updating of ROI indicator in Record Settings
• Fixed allowable range of window offset to proper multiples (16, 2). Record settings would not be applied if offset was set other than proper multiple
• Moved close button on keyboard to bottom right
• Changed arrows on keyboard from text eg. "Up" to unicode arrow characters

Known bugs in added features:

• Horizontal line issue is present in Triggered Exposure and Shutter Gating modes, to be fixed

Installation instructions:

• Unzip the Zip file into the root directory of a FAT32 formatted USB stick
• This should result in a camUpdate folder in the root directory of the stick
• Boot up the camera and insert the USB stick
• Backup your calibration data. Tap "Backup calibration data" and wait for this to complete (about 5 seconds). The cal data is now backed up on the USB drive as cal_[serial number].tar
• To install the update, tap Apply Software Update
• A message box should pop up indicating the software update was found. Tap Yes to install the update.
• The screen will go blank for a few seconds, then the updated application will start.
• Done! No need to restart the camera.

What if something goes wrong?
Don't worry, it's impossible to brick the camera. If the update fails for some reason and the camera won't boot, you can reflash the OS SD card yourself to recover the camera. If you need the image file to do this, let us know. It's just like flashing the OS card for a Raspberry Pi. You will need to restore the backed up calibration data after reflashing the card. If you don't have a backup, we have a copy of the original factory cal, available on request.

Next updates in the pipeline:

• Proper trigger delay setting (Timeline/slider, pretrigger percentage, and setting by time rather than frames)
• Remembering settings across reboots
• Indication of dropped frames on save
• Proper boot splash screen

185

General high-speed discussion / Re: Trip down memory lane. (Old Hackaday article about the camera.)

« on: July 09, 2017, 12:09:18 PM »

Going WAYYYY back, here's a thread on the 4hv.org forums that I made about the camera in early 2008. This was back when it was a VGA 250fps sensor on a Spartan 3A FPGA dev board, with 64MB of RAM

http://4hv.org/e107_plugins/forum/forum_viewtopic.php?38831.0#post_40797

186

Chronos User Discussion / Re: Can't Play Files

« on: July 07, 2017, 05:27:26 PM »

I've added this to the bugtracker so we can fix this bug.

For others who may have this problem, two of the three files were able to be recovered with recover_mp4 from the above link, so give that a try if you're having problems.

187

Chronos User Discussion / Re: List of good (and bad) SD cards

« on: July 07, 2017, 04:28:45 PM »

I've only used the 32GB size from that link. The others would likely be fine but that's the one I've tested.

188

Chronos User Discussion / Re: Can't Play Files

« on: July 06, 2017, 07:20:26 PM »

Any chance you can upload the failed files somewhere? I'd like to investigate.

I had one report of failed files if you ejected the card too soon after a save completed, did you do anything like that?

Edit: One more question, any idea how long (how many frames) the clip was? ie. how far between mark in and mark out?

You can try recovering the files with the utility recover_mp4. This is a somewhat complex command line utility however. If you sent the files I can try running it on them.

189

Chronos User Discussion / Re: SDXC Card

« on: July 06, 2017, 07:10:13 PM »

It does support SDXC, I've used cards up to 128GB.

You probably have it formatted in some filesystem other than FAT32, most large SD cards come formatted exFAT which isn't yet supported. Windows (very annoyingly) won't let you format cards larger than 32GB as FAT32, so you need to use a 3rd pary application such as FAT32 Formatter. Let me know if this doesn't solve the problem

190

Chronos User Discussion / User Manual draft - Comments/suggestions/revew requested

« on: July 03, 2017, 04:20:05 PM »

Here's a draft of the Chronos 1.4 user manual. There are some sections that are not written yet, but it would be great to get some of you to review it. Any comments or suggestions are greatly appreciated.

If anyone wants to help writing any of the missing sections, that would also be great, and would get the full manual out faster.

191

Chronos User Discussion / List of good (and bad) SD cards

« on: July 01, 2017, 12:54:34 PM »

Let's make a list of known working and not working SD cards for Chronos, since some people seem to be having problems with video skipping on certain cards.

I have had very good luck with The following cards:

Lexar Professional 633x UHS-I

SanDisk Ultra 32GB microSDHC UHS-I (SDSQUNC-032G-GN6MA) (These were included with the promo cameras sent out before the Kickstarter)

192

Chronos User Discussion / Re: Problems with exporting video to SD card

« on: July 01, 2017, 12:40:55 PM »

What brands of cards have you used? I've had basically no problems with Lexar Class 10 (UHS class 1) cards.

If you turn the bitrate down in save settings, does the problem still occur?

193

Software Dev / Re: GPL Source Code

« on: July 01, 2017, 12:36:37 PM »

Still working on that. The current dev environment VM has some TI packages installed that are under NDA, so we need to rebuild the entire dev environment from scratch on a new VM. None of the NDA code is actually used in the camera, but I'd installed it during development to check it out. We've all been so busy getting ready for production, there's been no time to build a releasable VM yet. Sorry for taking so long. Check back after all the cameras have shipped to backers.

194

Chronos User Discussion / Re: How Long Does Black Calibration Take?

« on: July 01, 2017, 01:31:39 AM »

I am getting the occasional black single frame or skipped frames 1-4frames in certain clips. Funny thing is it happens sometimes and mostly don't so it is unpredictable. It may be a ram flush problem or transfer from RAM to SD card. I Tried 3 cards all Sandisk, all skip at some point. Not all clips are affected.  I'll keep testing to see if battery voltage remaining could be part of the problem as in AC Adapter and Battery difference.

BTW How do I choose in 720p, for example, lower frame rates than 1502fps?  I plug in the lower frame rate and try to lower the exposure time and resets back to the preset.

Try a different brand, all the Sandisk cards may have the same internal firmware/controller

To reduce the frame rate, just tap on the frame rate box and enter a new value. You need to tap once to bring up the keyboard, and then again to put the cursor there so you can type (annoying bug, on the list to fix).

195

Chronos User Discussion / Re: HDMI port - has anyone hooked up an external monitor?

« on: June 30, 2017, 10:28:47 AM »

Matthew is making some decent progress on the software side towards getting HDMI working, so that update shouldn't be all that far off.