Today I created a tiny bit of OpenLayers code for the Eyesis display page. It is basically a demo what you can do by playing points of interest on a map. Displaying the panorama and a smaller map. Currently I did not add a panorama player yet. But since it is only a matter of changing [...]

Tonight I was thinking about what the possibilities are for the driver to actually see what he is shooting and at the same time facilitate appliances such as traveling salesman routing for the fastest shooting experience. I have some other ideas for the ‘main’ screen such as a 2D map with trails where the car [...]

The Submersible Capable of under-Ice Navigation and Imaging (SCINI) is an underwater remotely operated vehicle (ROV) designed to facilitate oceanographic science research in extreme polar environments.  The project was part of a three year grant, starting in 2007, from the National Science Foundation aiming to develop a cost-effective research tool that can be [...]

A short update from the stitching team. Jan Martin from diy-streetview.org gave his shot on the demo content in Hugin. This resulted in the following beautiful stitch. Bruno Postle also send us his attempt on the new footage. Wim Koornneef (dmmdh productions) created an online, interactive, panorama view.

There is ongoing interest on Elphel’s JP4 mode. JP4 color mode enables client demosaicing and near RAW quality with lower file size. There are a few JP4 modes available, but only a couple could be used directly using standard software, most modes needs specialized software. Currently, elphel_dng works for still images on JP4 and JP46 modes. Today, [...]

With the first Eyesis content available I started to prototype the panoramic workflow. We would like to have a reference design to be available in such way that a camera can be used without custom development. For practical reasons I have started with the relative low-quality JPEG output. Like for all current Elphel camera’s JPEG, [...]

On July 8,  we have the first panoramic camera completely assembled and ready for the test ride. The total height is 1300 mm [4' 3"]; it weighs  10 kg or about 22 lbs . The power consumption is 36W when camera is in operation, measured at the AC (110/220VAC) input. Camera head has eight  5 [...]

Designing for low parallax When we started working on Eyesis project our first goal was to make the panoramic head as compact as possible to reduce parallax between sensors. That not only reduces the stitching artifacts but also decreases the minimal distance to object without dead zones between the individual camera. The first practical step was [...]

RMLL 2010 (Libre Software Meeting) is a free (as a beer and as a speech) and non commercial conferences, workshops and round table about Free Software and its applications. The LSM goal is to provide a platform for exchange among Free Software developers, users and stakeholders. This year RMLL will take place in Bordeaux, France [...]

The first 3 Elphel-Eyesis prototypes are nearing completion. Even though there were delays from our suppliers we finally received the last remaining parts and can now finish the camera and data storage assembly. There were concerns that the pole and its attachments could have aerodynamic problems and that the system could be a whistle at [...]

Spring is here and all kinds of colourful plants and  flowers start to grow. This gave me a perfect opportunity to take my Elphel 353 to a garden and do some macro shots and explore the JP4 RAW to Adobe DNG workflow. The following photo was shot in JP46 colour mode at 100% JPEG compression and [...]

Andrey spent months of planning and designing these parts and yesterday we finally had the joy of assembling the first panoramic camera head prototype utilising 9 sensor boards. This new panoramic camera head is called Elphel Eyesis. A few metal parts are still missing but the heart of the system – the optical part – [...]

This article is to detail the typical workflow I use when I am adding a new application recipe to OpenEmbedded from scratch. In this case it will be the open source cloud computing application called eyeos. During this article reference to the OE wiki especially the styleguide for new recipes is highly recommended. Styleguide Commit Policy [...]

This article is to detail the workflow I personally use when I am doing kernel development for devices supported by OE. I find OE very useful for this as I can use it to build the toolchain and ultimately to control my patch tree until I am ready to send the patches upstream. So I select [...]

Rewrote some blocks of the code for the 10359’s fpga and at last found out what was the problem in the alternation mode with buffering – it was the delay between the frames that were sent to the 10353 – it was too small. I used a counter earlier for that but it had 16 [...]

Not much progress with the 10373 board in the last 3 weeks – just cleaned up debug wiring and prepared the board for the visit from SlimLogic Ltd. The software for the 373 camera is going to be based on OpenEmbedded and I would like to set up everything correctly before getting deep in the [...]

Introduction: The aim of this article is to describe how to use Elphel cameras with GStreamer from simple pipeline to a complex python software integration using OpenCV and other optimized video processing blocks. All the examples on this page are Free Software and are available as templates for your own application. Most of the described and linked software are available under GNU GPL, GNU LGPL and BSD-like licenses.

We did not do much this week as it was a really busy one. But one important milestone is passed – GigE is working! It was rather easy to see that 10373 pings other devices, it’s PHY “receive” LED blinked back in response, but a ping command from u-boot itself failed. It took a while to [...]

Finally U-Boot is running on the new board – it took two full days (and partially -nights) to make that happen. Initially I had no idea what exactly happened when control was passed to u-boot (I already knew that memory is OK and the u-boot image ion the board’s memory is the same as generated [...]