Software Roadmap - 0.3.1, 0.4.x, etc.

[DDR]

What is happening with the Chronos' software? What is in the works, and when will it be available?

Keeping in mind "The best laid plans of mice and men will often go awry", here's what we have planned:

• 0.3.1 (expected late August)
  
  • Improved image demosaic for .mp4 (less colour-fringing around high contrast areas)
  • Overlay frame number on video.
  • Save .dng for raw video.
  • HDMI port supports video out.
  • Basic remote video control. (play, pause, seek)
  • Save more than 45 videos.
  • Possible raw video save speed increase.
  • Additional minor bugfixes and tweaks.
• 0.3.x (expected mid-September)
  
  • Power controls (turn on when connected to power, turn off when not)
  • Basic overlay controls. Maybe.
• 0.4.0 (expected late October)
  
  • Debian replaces Arago as the camera operating system.
  • Python is available to script the camera.
  • External HTTP API available for custom scripting. (may be delayed)
  • Internal D-Bus API available for custom scripting. (may be delayed)
  • UI is ported to Python, prettied up, and made to use the D-Bus API.
• 0.4.1
  
  • Bugfix release for 0.4.0.
  • APIs, if delayed.
• 0.5.0
  
  • Remote control app, using the HTTP API.

Behind the scenes, the main delay is that we've discovered that it's impractical to continue development using our current operating system, Arago Linux. It lacks some basics such a C compiler, a scripting language, and several basic Linux debugging utilities. Arago's video subsystem also crashes after saving 45 videos.

For example, developing the back-of-camera user interface using Arago entails a ~5-minute delay between making a change and seeing the change in the UI. Using Debian, changes made to the UI are live in seconds.

We've been working on getting Debian running, on and off, for the past year. However, a few months ago a combination of near-success and issues with Arago's video system meant we decided to officially devote engineering time to the problem. This, naturally, delayed the progress we were making on the internal D-Bus API for 0.4.0, because now we were working on something else.

Currently, from my user-interface-centric perspective, here is how our progress is looking for version 0.4.0. The new UI and APIs will be debuted when this is complete.


tap for full resolution

Green means "completed", yellow is "in progress". Arrows show what depends on what. For example, the final implementation on the right depends on the D-Bus API, which has had the video control component made, and the D-Bus API Mock, which is currently being developed. Implementation is done by adding behaviour to a laid-out UI (labelled "Shell & Nav"), which I sketch up in Designer as a separate step. Each screen can be done more or less independently.

I hope this helps clear things up. I'll try to keep this thread updated as things progress. One of the big reasons we don't like to announce things is that they frequently turn out to simply be untrue. For example, we thought we'd fixed raw save speed, but then it turned out we hadn't a few times. We really don't want to promise something we won't deliver on, so we keep to ourselves quite frequently. What are your thoughts on this?

 

[Nikon1]

Thanks a lot for publishing the Roadmap for the Software.
Only Question left for me is:
Is the HDR-Mode still planed to be added to the Chronos?
Can?t find it on the List.

 

[DDR]

It is a thing that we would like to play with in the future, after 0.5. There's a handful of stuff like that we'd like to do at some point.

 

[nik282000]

You guys are awesome for your continuing development work and I am super excited to hear that you picked Debian as your next os (completely unbiased Debian user here). I continue to flog the Chronos every chance I get to potential buyers.

 

[NiNeff]

Awesome!
Now whe have even more to look forward too. It's also very nice to have a rough idea what you guys are working on istead of having to pry every little bit of info out of you
If I hadn't already, I would go and throw some piles of money at you... 

 

[john delonghi]

Thanks for the road map, very useful. When it comes to the "basic remote control", will that be via Ethernet and an app you will provide?

Will the initial implementation of that effectively allow us to use the Chronos 'tethered', so we can effectively start, stop, save, play clips and see the camera's live output remotely on a laptop?

 

[JamesB]

That is an excellent run-down of upcoming releases.  The De-mosaic improvement in H.264 and HDMI out are things that will make the camera workflow improve greatly. 

One feature I would love to see implemented is having shutter speed (EXPOSURE) in 1/60 1/100 1/500 1/1000 1/XXX  instead of it being in Micro Seconds (us) as an option.  For camera operators, it would be a big deal to be able to match shutter speeds with other cameras without doing time-consuming conversions.    :-X 

 

[DDR]

When it comes to the "basic remote control", will that be via Ethernet and an app you will provide?

Will the initial implementation of that effectively allow us to use the Chronos 'tethered', so we can effectively start, stop, save, play clips and see the camera's live output remotely on a laptop?

Yes. The initial version of the basic remote control will be via Ethernet. Visiting the camera's network address from a laptop or cellphone will bring up a basic web-based UI. It will support start/stop/save and live video display. It should support playback of saved files as well. You may make your own HTTP API calls as well if you want to write scripts to control the camera.

If we can find a wireless USB dongle for sale that is supported by Debian 7, then wireless remote control will work as well. We haven't found a compatible dongle yet, the ones which do work are no longer for sale. However, something may yet turn up.

One feature I would love to see implemented is having shutter speed (EXPOSURE) in 1/60 1/100 1/500 1/1000 1/XXX instead of it being in Micro Seconds (us) as an option.

? That is an excellent suggestion. I've added it to the mockup for the new UI, so it should make it into 0.4.0.

 

[DDR]

Small update - after about a month of work, we've got all our core requirements compiling for our hardware architecture. This vastly increases certainty that my last three months of work will actually... work.

Next step is to see if this can be copied to the camera and run. Will it pick up and use the Framebuffer?

 

[NiNeff]

If we can find a wireless USB dongle for sale that is supported by Debian 7, then wireless remote control will work as well. We haven't found a compatible dongle yet, the ones which do work are no longer for sale. However, something may yet turn up.

You might look into the "Netgear N150 Wireless Adapter (WNA1100)" This one is reccomendend for the LEGO Mindstorms EV3 Brick. It should run on any more or less modern Distro.
I have this dongle and am willing to test with debian 7 on a laptop for you.

 

[DDR]

ooo, if you could do that, that would be great. It would be great to have one known option, regardless of what happens.

 

[NiNeff]

ok I now did the following:
Nuked my beloved ARCH installation and got Debian 7.11 working, which was surprisingly difficult.
While installing I was browsing around and found some interesting sites:
here compatible adapters are still for sale:
https://www.thinkpenguin.com/catalog/wireless-networking-gnulinux
and here you'll find a link to a huge number of WLAN adapters and their compatibility
http://linux-wless.passys.nl/query_alles.php

I then managed to get the USB dongle to work, which required the "Non-free" Debian repos to be enabled and the installation of the "firmware-realtek" package. This had me confused for a while because the aforementioned website lists the chipset as Atheros and I was fooling around with the "firmware-atheros" package for way too long.

Also my laptop has an interal WiFi adapter, which I disabled using a hardware switch so I'm pretty sure I'm using the USB dongle instead.

TL,DR: The Netgear one works with some non-free packages.

 

[DDR]

This looks like a gold mine! We'll have to see what's available in quantity, but it all looks very promising.

Thank you, NiNeff!

 

[DDR]

Oh -- if anyone's curious about the gritty details, the UI is open-source. There's a commit log up at https://github.com/krontech/chronos-gui-2/commits/master, for example.

 

[JamesB]

? That is an excellent suggestion. I've added it to the mockup for the new UI, so it should make it into 0.4.0.

Thank you DDR, that is a big deal in my case!

 

[DDR]

Work on the shell and nav section continues; work on the main screen continues.

 

[NiNeff]

great to see it coming along!

 

[patrickrebstock]

very exited to see the HDMI out coming, this really will change the camera for me, i can see!!!!
also the dng raw saving and improve debayer sounds great, now just need to find a working flash drive to update the patch

 

[SamL]

I'm very interested in this UI project. Any instruction to compile and deploy the application?

Any news for software 0.3.1?

thx

Oh -- if anyone's curious about the gritty details, the UI is open-source. There's a commit log up at https://github.com/krontech/chronos-gui-2/commits/master, for example.

 

[DDR]

Hi Sam!

Instructions for compiling the UI on the camera are up at https://github.com/krontech/chronos-gui-2/blob/master/util/chronos%20debian%20setup%20instructions.txt. However, they assume you have a camera running Debian 7. Only our development cameras run Debian 7 at the moment, since we haven't done little things like got the camera image sensor working yet. (The 0.3.1 release is based on Arago Linux instead of Debian for this reason.) However, you can - and I am - running the new UI in a Debian 7 VM. I do have instructions for setting up the VM using VirtualBox, but they're really not very nice and I think you're much better off following the nicer camera instructions linked at the top.

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As for the software, I have just finished the first real implementation of one of the screens. It's wired into the mock API for now, until we develop the real one. (I haven't implemented the real API yet, because there are several people here who could reasonably implement it, and I'm the only UI person we have, and I'm really hoping to fob it off on one of them. The drivers are *almost* ready for it though! We're so close!)

As an update to the previous progress chart:

While it may be removed, a tentative motion trigger screen has been planned. This is not an official acknowledgement that such a thing will ever be made, of course - the UI plan I have will probably grow a number of things which will never be, but which I should at least leave some space for in case they do get added. The act of UI design is overly optimistic in that sense.

The Record Settings shell has been wired into the API. This is a fairly complex page, so it's been a good testing ground for the wiring process. It appears to be a verbose and somewhat error-prone process, without particularly good control over the flow of data. However, it works, and optimistically it appears each page will take about 2-3 days to put together at this point. Perhaps the whole thing will be wired into the real API by the end of October. :-\

I also made the About & Kickstarter page reflect actual camera data, rather than just my placeholders. So that's good, and it counts as done as well although it's not particularly newsworthy.

I've attached the full roadmap picture below as well.