Digital Cameras

[Hidetoshi Shimokawa]

At Thu, 1 Jul 2004 11:26:41 -0700 (PDT),
Buzz Slye wrote:
> 
>     We've been using firewire digital cameras for some time now for
> remote sensing and flying them on UAV's (with  a pc104 data system).
> We are using a Basler color camera (model A101fc), a Basler single
> band camera for hyperspectral imaging, and also an Omega thermal
> camera.  These cameras conform to spec 1.20 (spec id 0xa02d).  Check
> www.uav-applications.org (Aircraft and Payload) for some background
> info.
> 
>     The digital camera library and the 1394 raw library were converted
> from the available Linux libraries to FreeBSD.  We are still using the

That's great. Are you going to make them a port or some other forms
others can use it?

> firewire version of last April/May (2003).  When the July version came
> along, it didn't work any more, so we've been stuck with the old ver-
> sion.  I have been trying to upgrade to the latest version (March 28).
> 
>     Async read and write commands are used to read and set the camera
> registers for exposure, gain, shutter, and frame size etc.  Camera
> images are downloaded with iso stream transfer.  I don't need to
> support iso xmit, but only to iso receive from the camera.  Normal
> operation is to acquire single frames every few seconds for over-
> lapping images of the ground.
> 
>     The latest current of fwdev.c (2004/05/23) works for me now for
> async read and write.  Also, my fix with uiomove for fw_read, per my
> mail of 6/24 appears to work OK.  A remaining problem is because I

You need the uiomove patch to catch response from the camera, right?
FireWire binding from userland is not usable state now, some
other people who is interested in AV/C support have similar problem.
We need some more work on this area.

> only acquire single frames, but not continuously, I would like a way
> to stop listening (or divert the output) while I go back to the camera
> to tell it to stop xmitting.
> 
> Buzz Slye
> NASA / Ames

I have a copy of digital camera spec. but I've not read it yet.
Are frames sent with iso packets? Is it hard to close the device
to stop listening?
We may add a new ioctl that calls fc->irx_disable(), but we carefully
handle buffer allocation/deallocation.

I'm glad to hear that you are developing a serious FireWire application
on FreeBSD.

/\ Hidetoshi Shimokawa
\/  simokawa at sat.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp
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