Elphel, inc. on trip to Geneva, Switzerland.
University of Geneva
Monday, April 14, 2014 – 18:15 at Uni-Mail, room MR070, University of Geneva.
Elphel, Inc. is giving a conference entitled “High Performance Open Hardware for Scientific Applications”. Following the conference, you will be invited to attend a round-table discussion to debate the subject with people from Elphel and Javier Serrano from CERN.
Javier studied Physics and Electronics Engineering. He is the head of the Hardware and Timing section in CERN’s Beams Control group, and the founder of the Open Hardware Repository. Javier has co-authored the CERN Open Hardware Licence. He and his colleagues have also recently started contributing improvements to KiCad, a free software tool for the design of Printed Circuit Boards
Elphel Inc. is invited by their partner specialized in stereophotogrammetry applications – the Swiss company Foxel SA, from April 14-21 in Geneva, Switzerland.
You can enjoy a virtual tour of the Geneva University by clicking on the links herein below:
(make sure to use the latest version of Firefox or Chromium to view the demos)
Foxel’s team would be delighted to have all of Elphel’s clients and followers to participate in the conference.
A chat can also be organized in the next few days. Please contact us at Foxel SA.
If you do not have the opportunity to visit us in Geneva, the conference will be streamed live and the recording will be available.
NC393 development progress – the initial software
The software used in the previous Elphel cameras was based on the GNU/Linux distribution supported By Axis Communications for their ETRAX processors. Of course it was heavily modified, we developed new code and ported many applications to run in the camera. Over the years we worked on making it easier to install, use and update, provided customized Live GNU/Linux distributions so those with zero experience with this operating system can still use the camera development software. Originally we used Knoppix-based CD, then DVD, then switched to Kubuntu when it became available and stable. And DVDs were eventually replaced by the USB flash drives.
Knoppix and Kubuntu are for the host computer, the cameras themselves used the same non-standard, mostly home-brewed distribution, that became more and more difficult to maintain especially when Axis abandoned their processors. So even during the first attempt to move to a new platform we really hoped to be able to use modern distribution for the embedded systems. And get rid of the nightmare of porting ourselves such applications as PHP and then doing mostly the same all over again when the new revisions became available. To be able to use the latest Linux kernel and not to spend time modifying the IDE driver myself to provide support for the large block hard drives when most manufacturers abandoned 512 byte ones – 2.6.19 kernel does not have it and there is not easy to use the later drivers.
Oleg is now working on adapting the OpenEmbedded distribution and the work flow for the new camera distribution, and while embracing the power of “bitbaking” we are trying to preserve the features we implemented in the NC353 camera software. And while the OpenEmbedded-based Yocto Project is for embedded system developers, we need the software for Elphel camera users – software that can be easily installed by a single script (at least on a particular GNU/Linux distribution) or come pre-installed on a flash media. It should work “out of the box” for the users with no prior GNU/Linux experience – most of the camera users have different OS on their computers. We would also like to keep what we believe has an important practical use – a feature behind our /*source is inside*/ logo on the cameras. Each camera keeps the source code of the modifications archived in the internal flash file system, so running the downloaded from the camera script by the user results in virtually identical binary image, even if some software in the camera was custom-modified from the official (supported through Elphel git repositories) distribution.
There is still a lot left in the OE that we do not fully understand, but we are trying to do it right from the very beginning, understanding how important it is from our experience of making some major re-organizing code for the previous products. And Oleg is doing a good progress, there is a wiki page and Git repositories: meta-elphel393, meta-ezynq that document our work on this.
I did not succumb to a temptation to start working on the FPGA code immediately – there are some new ideas we want to try as well as some left for a future major “revolution” when updating the existing cameras FPGA code for the new sensors and applications. Anyway – we are not under pressure to demonstrate images from the new camera and we are confident that this job will be done in the expected time and will have the NC393 operational by the second half of the 2014. And the time is working for us – there are many people working now with Xilinx Zynq, and the active development weeds out bugs at a high rate. Failing to upgrade to the latest version already took a whole week of development time – the bug in the Xilinx Ethernet driver turned out to be already fixed.
While Oleg was immersing himself into the OpenEmbedded I was looking into the kernel driver development, what changed since the 2.6.19 era I dealt with when working on the previous camera software. There turned out to be quite a few changes and I decided to learn the new features working on a simpler drivers that we needed for the new boards. First of all I was pleased to find out that of the 7 of the I²C chips used on the 10393+10389 boards 3 were supported by the available kernel drivers – had just to specify them in the Device Tree and the supercap-powered real time clock was immediately recognized by the system – so did the temperature sensor/EEPOM and GPIO ports. Of the remaining ones with no available drivers the most challenging turned out to be SI5338 (clock generator) and I tried to add support for this device, using sysfs to control it, Device Tree (DT) to initialize it, and dynamic debug to facilitate development – none of these interfaces were used in the previous cameras.
The SI5338 had all the needed documentation available on the manufacturer’s web site, ready for download. But the device itself turned out not to be to so easy to control, and the recommended procedure included generation of the register map with the ClockBuilder software (for MS Windows), then loading the data to the device registers and initializing it with rather simple code, for which Silicon Labs provides the source. That did not seem very convenient so I tried to implement the driver that can be controlled at run time directly, calculating the particular register values from the high-level data on the fly. Most features are now supported in the si5338.c driver, it is also possible to load the register data generated by the ClockBuilder software (it is possible to run it with Wine) after converting the file with the Python script. It took me more time than I expected to develop this driver to the usable state, but I hope this work will be useful for others too. SI5338 is an excellent device that deserves better support in the Linux kernel. And having the driver working – it eliminates the last remaining obstacle to start working on the FPGA code. Or one of the last remaining – there are still a few minor ones left.
Elphel next camera – sample configuration
With all three of the new boards for the NC393 series cameras assembled (but only partially tested) it is now possible to connect them with the existent components and show some possible configurations. Main applications of Elphel cameras are scientific research, system prototyping, proofs of concepts designs – areas that routinely require unique configurations, and this new cmaer series will continue tradition of high modularity.
The camera boards look nothing like Lego blocks, but nevertheless they can zip together in different ways allowing to make new systems with minimal additional hardware. Elphel new design values our prior work (hardware development is still expensive) and provides compatibility with the existent modules, simultaneously enabling new features that were not previously possible, The most obvious example – sensor interface. The 10393 board is designed to accommodate our existent sensor front ends, custom flex cables of different lengths and shapes. That will help us to reduce the transition period to the new camera so we can focus on the high performance system board and port portions of the software and FPGA code, code that is already proven to work.
The same camera sensor ports will allow us to use multi-lane serial sensor connections needed for the modern high speed and high resolution devices, but we will work on this only after the first part will be done and we will be able to replace our current systems with the new ones. Implementation of the serial sensor connection has some challenges for us because the used protocols are not open and we have to rely only on the pieces of the available information and some reverse-engineering and research. It is not the most fun work to do, but being an Open Hardware/ Free Software company we will not provide our users with semi-open documentation. Our users will always be able to rebuild all the binaries from the source code – same binaries from the same code we have access ourselves. The only NDA Elphel ever signed was with Kodak – that sensor NDA had clear expiration time, so at the moment we planned to start distributing our products (and so the source documentation) we were not be bound by it anymore.
Sample configuration illustrated below combines the new and existent modules, the later have links to the design documentation on Elphel wiki. It is not so for the new boards (10393, 10385, 10389) – no circuit diagrams, parts lists or PCB layouts are publicly available when this post is being written. Hardware errors are usually much more expensive to fix, and we do not want somebody to duplicate our hardware “bugs” until we consider our products (“binaries”) to be good enough to go to our users. So while we set up public Git repository when we start software development, we publish our hardware documentation simultaneously with the start of the product distribution – together with “binaries”, not ahead of them.
Sample configuration of the electronic modules of Elphel NC393 camera family
- 1 – 10393 Multisensor camera system board based on Xilinx Zynq 7030 SoC.
- 2 – 10385 Power supply board
- 3 – 10389 Interface board
- 4 – Inter-board power distribution: 6-pin (3 circuits) header on the 10385, receptacles on both 10393 and 10389
- 5 – Inter-board signal connector: 40 pins (USB, SATA, GPIO)
- 6 – mSATA SSD card
- 7 – Processor heat sink (temporary). Production cameras will have custom heat spreader to transfer CPU/FPGA generated heat to the camera aluminum body or other heat sinks in multicamera systems
- 8 – Ethernet (GigE) jack, РоЕ-compatible
- 9 – DC power input (9-36V or 18-72V depending on application)
- 10 – Memory card (can be used to boot the system for cold firmware update)
- 11 – Micro USB B connector for system serial console with GPIO signals to select boot mode and generate system reset. Mounted on the 10393 system board
- 12 – Micro USB A host connector for communication with external memory and I/O devices. Mounted on the 10389 interface board.
- 13 – USB A/eSATA combo connector. eSATA port will be used for interfacing external storage devices (HDD, SSD) and downloading data from the camera internal SSD to the host computer. USB portion of the connector can provide power to the external device through the same cable as SATA data.
- 14 – 2.5mm audio type connector for external synchronization input and output (opto-isolated and directly coupled)
- 15,16,17 – directly connected sensor front ends. Compatible with the current 5MPix 10338 (shown) and other parallel data output sensors, programmable interface voltage. With the controlled impedance cables same ports will allow using up to 9 differential lanes plus I2C and 2 extra control signals.
- 18,19,20 – sensor front ends connected through 21 – 10359 multiplexer that allows simultaneous acquisition of images from up to 3 sensors into on-board SDRAM and then transferring them to the system board. In the future we will develop a faster multiplexer supporting serial links to the sensors and/or the system.
- 22 – 103695 – IMU adapter board, or other "granddaughter" extension board connected to the 10389 interface (daughter) board. Two 10-pin connectors provide 3.3V and 5.0V power, USB and 4 GPIO connected to the FPGA pads through high speed voltage level shifters
- 23 – 103696 – Serial GPS adapter board with 1pps input, uses another "granddaughter" port.
- 24,25,26 – Inter-camera synchronization (daisy chain connection) for the systems with multiple camera boards located in the same enclosure, similar to the current Elphel Eyesis4pi cameras
The setup shown above is a sort of mockup – while all the components are real, we do not yet have software to run it, even to test it. So there is no sense in powering up such a system – nothing will happen. And there is a lot to be done before we will be able even to completely test the new hardware and prepare and release revision “A” of each of the prototyped boards. We plan to be ready by the middle of 2014.
NC393 development progress – testing the hardware
10393 board, memory side
We received the first prototype of the 10393 rev.’0″ – the new camera system board with all the BGA chips mounted. It took a little longer as our PCB assembly manufacturer had to order solder paste stencils as some chips (DC-DC converter module in LGA package and QFN chips with central thermal pads) required more than just applying tacky flux and running them through the reflow oven. The photo shows the 10393 system board together with the 10385 power supply board that I assembled earlier while waiting for the main one. This time the power supply is a separate module so we’ll not need different system board versions for different power supply options as we do with Elphel current NC353.
The shown prototype version has the full functionality, including РоЕ – feature that we will not offer in the production cameras to stay out of trouble with the patent trolls. As soon as the relevant patents will be ruled invalid we will be able to build such boards, but currently the cameras will be powered through the regular barrel-type DC jack or the 4-pin Molex connector in the multi-camera systems like Eyesis. 10385 also has a low-leakage (few microamps idle consumption) switch to use the battery-powered camera in remote locations, controlled by the system clock powered by a super-capacitor (not yet installed – there is an empty space with “+” sign on visible on the photo).
10393 with 10385 board, SoC side
I finalized the 10393 board assembly installing other components including couple hundred (bragging again) 0201 resistors and capacitors. Before starting I tested the resistance (lack of shorts) between the ground and power rails to make sure that I did not screw up pinouts during schematic/PCB design and so the board revision “0″ has a chance to be successfully tested. I repeated those tests while installing components as a power-to-ground shorts are rather difficult to locate as there are so many tiny capacitors between them.
With assembly done the board was ready for the first “smoke” test – power it up while controlling the power consumption (I used a regular test bench power supply instead of the 10385 to provide the primary 3.3V power). I was turning power on for just a few seconds controlling the secondary voltages (1.0V, 1.8V and 1.5V) with the oscilloscope. After fixing a bad soldering on the intermediate “power good” pullup resistor (secondary voltages are supposed to come up in a prescribed sequence) all 3 of these voltages were up, measured OK and the board consumed 320 mA with the system reset released but no firmware to run. There are several additional DC-DC converters on board (5V for USB and 2 independently software-regulated voltages for the external boards (sensor front ends in most applications), but these converters are turned on by the software and I did not have any at the moment.
10393 board, SoC side
Photos show the heat sink and a fan attached to aluminum angle, not directly to the Zynq chip. In production camera there will be a custom heat sink (no fan) between the 10393 and the optional 10389 interface/storage board, it will transfer processor heat to the camera aluminum body and the on-chip thermometer will be used to monitor the temperature and prevent overheating. Rather large temporary heat sink will be used during development (not to depend on the temperature monitoring software), thin angle part will allow to test the 10389 board that will nearly touch the other surface of the aluminum plate.
The next thing to test was to make the CPU (Xilinx Zynq XC7Z030-1FBG484C) run and test the DDR3 memory. If this core of the system is operational, we can test the peripherals one by one, and failures in some of them would not prevent testing of the others. If the core would fail – we’ll have to try to find out (or just guess) the problem and redesign the board, order new ones, have new stencils, assemble and try again. Of course we’ll need to re-spin the board before the production units manufacturing, but I hoped that just the next revision will be good enough to go to the users, that changes will be small. I wrote “guessed”, because if the problems would be related to the DDR3 memory operation the means to troubleshoot them would be limited – the data and address/command lines are completely buried between the chips – memory is placed directly opposite to the Zynq SoC. There are no resistor terminations on the address/command lines, the DQ lines are swapped in each byte group and the byte groups are also swapped. I relied on Xilinx documentation that they OR-ed the data lines during write leveling, so the DQ swapping will not harm this functionality.
Skipping the requirement for the address line termination allowed the overall design to be compact and the connections themselves to be really short (actually shorter than the lines inside the SoC chip itself). I used Micron documentation when considering such solution, but it still needed to be tested on the real board. Such component placement allowed me to make average length of the address/command traces 15.5mm, individual traces had to be shortened/extended to keep combined PCB delays and internal SoC pin delays the same for each address/command and for each member in the byte group for data. Internal DDR3 chip delays do not need to be considered as they are balanced inside the package. Data connections lengths (they are just peer-to-peer, no split for the two memory chips as for address/command lines) are even shorter – they average from 8.5mm to 14.5 mm for different byte groups.
Additional challenge for the initial breathing life in this new board was that we did not have the proven code to run on it, something we had for the Avnet MicroZed board while developing the free software bootloader to replace the Xilinx proprietary one. So that was a real test for our code and I decided to never even try the proprietary one on the new system.
The 10393 board has no LED (not to count 2 Ethernet jack ones, but they are controlled by the Ethernet PHY), so I temporary borrowed one GPIO signal from the MDIO bus (Ethernet PHY control) to be able to step through the boot process not relying on the serial console to be operational. I just put the LED there without any transistor, so the 1.8V-powered diode was really dim, but that was OK. And the serial output turned out to be alive immediately so there was no real need for that debug tool and I was able to remove those extra wires. The board got to U-Boot prompt immediately, but unfortunately – not every time. So I had to spend several days (one of them because of just the faulty micro-SD card that silently replaced one sector with garbage even when read back by the computer) figuring out the instability. I still do not understand exactly what is wrong (it happens when the relocated code switches the memory mapping and copies itself back to the low addresses), but just adding delay by copying that range twice resolved the issue, it turned out to be software-related one as it was present when running other (proven) boards also, not just with the 10393.
The core of the system is now verified, automatic write leveling and the two other hardware-implemented memory training functions produce reasonable results and the delay settings seem to be rather forgiving. That confirms the PCB design and makes it possible to move forward with testing of the other peripherals and starting the FPGA part of the design.
There are other urgent projects at Elphel I have to be involved now, so not yet working on the NC393 full time, but this makes really good news for us to pass the important test. Booting the new board with just the free software, no proprietary tools at all – it is also very encouraging. Xilinx just released the new version of the tools, the human-readable (html) part of the FSBL output looks even fancier than that of Ezynq, but I believe ours is still more convenient to work with – we made it for ourselves, and so for other developers (who are like us) too.
Flight-machine
This page gives brief overview of multirotor UAV platform called “Tau”, which is built specially for participating in flying robots contest which is established by Croc company. Our team name was “Autonomous aerospace”.
Doing contest machine we were not looking for easiest way of implementation. Some of the purposes are:further developing of our autopilot and getting experience of integrating machine vision functionality in real-time into control loop.
During contest preparation we dealed for a first time with multyrotor platform . There was only airplanes autopiloting experience before. Adopting autopilot for quadrotor was not so obvious as we expected, but we succeded. Now proudly can say, that we built first quadrotor which calculates all the navigation and control math under QNX real-time operating system . At least no one did any crazy stuff like this before
MissionMission is to take off from start marker, follow simple maze toward finish marker, touch down within its contour and than fly back. Then landing on start marker and cutoff engines. On path to target random barrier is set. It can be moved by organizators across the wall and gate might be aligned at left, at right or anywhere between walls.
Drone is allowed to touch walls, but not allowed to touch the ground.
On-board UAV control system ComputersCentral control unit is autopilot AP-05 (AP). It has embedded inertial navigational system (INS), air data system (ADS), global navigational satellite systems GLONASS/GPS (GNSS). Computer in AP-05 – is ARM9 family processor with 400MHz clock frequency and 64 megabytes of RAM. Operation of computer is conducted under QNX Neutrino real time operating system (RTOS) control. QNX is used under academic licence. Major point is implementation of navigational and control loop under QNX by separate processes: fnav for navigation, fcont for control. Loop frequency is 200 Hz.
Decicions for flight in contest maze is made in autopilot by setting input values for roll, pitch and yaw PID regulators.
Machine vision computer (MVC) is i.MX6Q SABRE lite board with 4 processors of Cortex-A9 archetecture. For the research of QNX technologies machine vision is also computed under QNX.
Connection between AP and MVC is made by Ethernet via native qnet protocol.
For the programmer is gives transparency and flexibility, all interprocess communication is unix-like locally or remotely by qnx messages. Local is conducted by kernel, remote by kernel+qnet.
Sensors
As a proximity sensors ultrasonic rangefinders SRF08 are used. They are mounded at bumper each for front, rear, left, right sides accordingly. Same sensor is used for altimetry. Sensors are connected to i.MX6Q SABRE lite (MVC) via I2C interface to the same bus with different adresses. Doing altitude and wall navigation control loop over such a long way looks weird. All because AP doesn’t have external I2C due to its noise vulnerability. Process which polls range finders reflects data to the system by /dev/fsrf resource manager. Autopilot reads this data over qnet stack like /net/mvc/dev/fsrf file. After reading by navigational process range data is filtered and after reflected as feedback for altitude control and wall avoidance algorithm.
When we were looking for camera main problem was making an software interface for OpenCV in QNX. Making port of webcam USB interface to QNX in a short time seemed impossible, because of lack of knowledge in that field.
Thats why search for camera was narrowed only on IP cameras. Finally Elphel NC353L was found. It has several software interfaces for image: MJPEG over RSTP; HTTP. Camera has opened sources, so it seemed guaranteed way to make own low level protocol and image pre-processing.
Also camera has multiply configurational parameters for optimizing real time picture. Additionally matrix has higher resolution, than other cameras in same price segment.
With understanding that camera is open sourced we estimated our chances to miss appropriate solution as very low and this estimation was correct =).
Calculation of machine vision algorithm is conducted by process called fmv, and its discrete results is represented at /dev/fmv resource manager.
Machine vision
Start finish markers search
Searching for start/finish points is done by comparison of current image colour histograms with histograms of reference images. Histograms for B,R,G channels was compated accordingly, and then integral weighted estimation of similarity was calculated. Similarity is calculated separately for start and finish markers.
Stereo vision
For the barrier gate entrance we initially decided to implement stereo vision algorithms to determine its position. At the beginning of contest preparations width between walls on final approach to finish marker supposed to be 20 meters. It seemed challenging to find gate with 3m width. Thats why we decided to integrate Elphel NC353L solution. This version has multiplexor board, which simultaniously gather both sensor data to single image. Stereo camera was generously provided us by Elphel company to participate in contest.
We had previously tested semi-global block matching algorithm (SGBM). Method gives disparity map from two images. Using SGBM method, requiers distortion remap and aligning preprocessing of input images. Using matrices of internal parameters of cameras we performed images rectification, so left image row coincides with rows of right image. Experimentally we tuned scene parameters and looked for optimal diversity map. Diversity map has same dimentions as input images, but consist of 16 bit depth values. Seeing on single row in the middle of image, selected by INS to fit horizon we recoverd distance to near objects and supposed to determine gate.
Multicopter UAV Tau frame design
Starting from the design…
For compact setting of all required devices we decided to make central frame with 3 levels. Each level is milled carbon fiber plate. Level plates are fitted together by aluminium spacers. Between first and second levels there are carbon beams that are tighten between aluminium clamps. At the end of each beam motor is mounted using aluminium brackets. Motors are working with 12″ x 4.5 propellers. For the protection of propellers and equipment special bumper was made. 4 parts form closed perimeter. Bumper part has U-like cut and made of carbon 3 layer composite sandwich. Mounding of bumper is made by Г-like bracket, which is fixed at bottom of motor mount. After design process production and assembly started. Fristly carbon fiber plates and beams were baked. Parallely all aluminium parts were milled. On preparated plates we milled them on CNC. Then molds for bumper and brackets were milled.After all assembly started!
In a five days we fit everything together and made wiring of all devices.
Design of airframe in STEP format is freely avaiable: with all equipment and as plain frame.
Flight testing
When everything were done on assembly 10 days before contest begin left. Actually we had flight test platform before, so we started not from scratch in a flight software.
Previous results were got on fiber glass strong frame before. Some explanations are made on russian in following videos:
After contest drone assembly we spend 5 days to make it flight properly: maintain attitude and regulate distance from the walls.
Next five days we spent to test all mission algorithm in a combination with machine vision and real markers. We’ve got some sucessful complete tests, but all system was very unstable. Most of the problems was about flying. A lot of time was eaten by i2c rangers problems: high current of motors and vibration were making contact and ground potential unstable, and it lead to bus stuck. When bus stuck, altimeter is also stucks, what was leading to engines turn off. Many thanks for our designers and all mechanical shop. In dozens of fallings we’ve once broke bumper braket, and one leg.
Algorithm for maze flying is classical, keep right, keep distance from the walls and pray . We do not making turns, UAV maintains yaw, which is set on initial alignment. And it is aligned by rear side toward right direction at start. So it begins to fly backwards, than left, then front. And on a flight back – in reverse.
Fly front means to hold distance from front wall. When wall is far, front ranger is saturated in its maximum value, so regulator moves drone forward, by tilting its pitch front.
Contest video
In a real contest (sizes were officially corrected) distance between final approach walls became 5 meters, so finding gate was not a such big problem anymore. So barier detection was made in autopilot by finite state machine. If front stereo camera (by one of its eye) have seen ellipse in front of it, that means we have passed the gate and must see marker soon by looking down camers. If no, we probably holding right now distance from the barrier wall and must move left.
First attemptIt was failed because of improper finite state machine criterion for barrier avoidance. Drone thought that it has reached barier and next cycle it thought it has reached front wall at marker, didn’t find any markers and turned back.
Second attempt
Here we have our machine vision algorithm failed. Camera didn’t recognized landing marker, so drone tryed to find on the way back and it was dead end of algorithm.
As always there were just a question of two days of debugging to make everything right
Conclusion
We have not completely succeeded, but we have not failed.
Our team dramatically improved existed software and developed new direction – machine vision.
That was great teamwork experience, that charged our team to handle further challenges.
FPGA is for Freedom
In this post I write about our current development, my first experience with Xilinx Zynq, and also try to summarize the 10+ years experience with Xilinx FPGA devices. It is a mixture of the admiration for their state of the art silicon devices and frustration caused by the software. Please excuse my sometimes harsh words and analogies – I really would like to see Xilinx prosper and acquire software vision that matches the freedom that Ross Freeman brought to developers of the electronic devices when he invented FPGA and started Xilinx.
We planned to update our current line of cameras for some time – Elphel current model NC353 is in production for almost 7 years. Thanks to the Xilinx FPGA, it is possible to upgrade it long after it was built. In 2009 we developed the new system board, built a first unit and started working with it. This board was designed around new (in 2009) Xilinx Spartan 6 and Texas Instruments DaVinci processor. Memory and the CPU performance were increased, the board could support two sensors simultaneously (instead of just one in the older models), but in the 10373 camera system board I was not satisfied with the bandwidth of the datapath between the FPGA and the processor – it was enough for current sensors but in my opinion it did not have enough margin for the future sensor upgrades and we decided to put this project on hold and look for the better match between the CPU and FPGA.
Later we heard the news about the coming Xilinx Zynq devices, but initial rumors indicated that it is very unlikely these chips will be supported by freeware development software. Luckily, that proved to be wrong and Xilinx announced that most of the devices (excluding only the largest XC7Z045) will be supported by the free for download WebPack. Zynq combines dual core ARM CPU (with a rich set of standard peripherals) and high performance FPGA on the same chip, so it should be an exact match for our purposes and intrinsically high bandwidth between CPU and FPGA – parameter that killed our NC373 camera before it was born.
Impressed by Zynq when working on the board designThe news was really exciting, and I was waiting impatiently for the new devices to become available and the free for download status of the required software to be confirmed – many of Elphel customers are developers and we can not force them to acquire software that would be more expensive than the hardware they purchase from us. By June 2013, when I was able to designate time for the full time work on the new project, both conditions were met and I started working on the circuit and PCB design. Zynq features looked very nice and documentation was quite sufficient to work on the design, it turned out to have some little but very convenient bonuses like decoupling capacitors embedded in the package – we use memory mounted on the opposite to the CPU side of the board so it is difficult to have short decoupling connections for both of them. High speed serializer/deserializer capability of virtually all of the I/O pins made it possible to have the dual-function sensor port connectors compatible with our current sensor front ends (SFE) with 12-16 bit parallel interface and capable of running serial links (such as multi-lane MIPI). Backward compatibility will reduce time before we’ll be able to start shipping NC393 cameras (and replace system boards in our Eyesis line of products), high-speed serial capability will allow cameras to keep up with new emerging high-performance sensors.
Initially, I planned to have only 3 sensor ports: one GTX to implement SATA interface, some GPIOs for inter-camera synchronization and interfacing daughter-boards (similar to what we had on our 10369 interface board for the NC353 camera) and dedicated DDR3 memory. Yes, Zynq has really nice access from the PL (programmable logic – FPGA part of the chip) to the system memory, but it is still beneficial to have memory that is not shared with the CPU and has a specialized controller fine-tuned for image processing applications. And I thought I’d need 676-ball package to fit all external devices. But by carefully going through the documentation, I realized that with the flexible I/O banking of Zynq it is possible to fit everything needed in a significantly smaller 484-ball package and to have four (instead of just three) sensor ports.
A small cloud on the horizonWhen working on the circuit design, I needed to make sure that the pins I designate for the DDR3 memory interface are valid – such interface implementation is rather challenging and there are multiple rules that have to be satisfied simultaneously. Even as we do not plan to use Xilinx stock memory controller in the camera, I thought that the software “wizard” that instantiates it in the design may be a good tool to verify the selected pinout – that’s all that I needed at this stage of the design. So I went ahead to install the software. During this process, I learned that to use freeware software (and I already explained why it is the only kind of the non-free software we can use for our products), I have to install mandatory component that transmits data from my computer to Xilinx. It is funny – being a free software/open hardware company, we post all our development files on Sourceforge, but they still prefer to dig in our “dirty laundry”. This was very unpleasant news, and the license agreement stated that, because of the nature of the Internet, they have no responsibility if any of the information they get from my computer will accidentally get to where it was not supposed to get to. OK, I decided, I’ll deal with it later when I’ll really need it to work on the FPGA design; for now, I just need to install it and try the memory controller generator, then after; uninstall the software (hopefully together with the spy agent).
Unfortunately, as it often happens, the “wizard” turned out not to be smart enough, and it told me that the 16-bit wide DDR3 interface I needed will not fit. I did verify the rules stated in the documentation again, searched online information on questions and answers about similar cases – all confirmed that the capable Zynq silicon could handle the job, but the software “wizard” prohibited it. It is quite understandable that software programs have their limitations, but when the software pretending to be “smart” is inflexible, when it (as most of the non-free code) does not allow user to comment out (to disable/bypass) specific checks, it causes frustration. So this software tried to make Zynq look less capable than it actually is, and also tried to convince me that instead of the 484-ball package, I should use larger 676-ball one, leaving less room for other components. Larger package would be more expensive for our customers too, of course.
So I just decided to move on with the circuit/PCB design regardless of my disagreement with the software – this development was described in the several previous blog posts.
By the early August, the PCB design of the Zynq-based camera system board (together with the two companion boards) was finished. I went through all the design again trying to weed out as many design errors as I could, and later that month we released the files into production. While waiting for all the components to come and the PCB to be manufactured, I started to look at the first steps in the software development I will need to be able to verify the board design. I was expecting to take the U-boot files developed for existent Zynq-based evaluation boards and tweak them to match our hardware – a rather straightforward process I did before when breathing in life in other systems. So first make U-boot work, then – proceed with the Linux kernel – both “Linux” and “U-boot” were mentioned in the documentation so I was sure I understand the overall process. I was wrong.
FSBL – a piece of proprietary code generated by the proprietary toolsOf course I understand that it may take another ten years before Xilinx will realize that the combination of the “blank tape” idea of the FPGA that they pioneered with the “totalitarian” style of development tools software is not very efficient – I’ll get to this topic later in the post. At the moment I was just looking for the Open Embedded – based distribution for existent boards that I can modify for our hardware. Internet search revealed that I still have to use proprietary tools to generate the first stage boot loader (FSBL) – piece of code responsible for the hardware initialization. This code is launched by the RBL – embedded in the chip ROM boot loader and in its turn the FSBL (starting from the Zynq OCM – internal on-chip memory) initializes external DRAM, loads and launches U-boot. Then it is the U-boot’s responsibility to take it from there and load and pass control to GNU/Linux (in the sequence that interests us). Starting with U-boot, all the code is Free Software (under mandatory for this software GNU GPL license), but not the FSBL. OK, I thought – I’ll use the tools to generate a binary blob and we’ll distribute it with our cameras. Elphel users will be able to use just the free software to re-build the camera flash image as they want. Binary blobs are nasty, and Richard Stallman would likely refuse to deal with our cameras, but we are living in the real world and so need something to start with – we can try to replace that piece of code later.
What I was not sure about was the legal status of such distribution, at least all the text files generated had Xilinx copyright and “all rights reserved” notices in the header. Funny thing is that they also have “this file is automatically generated” in the same header. To me “generated” sounds more like “created” than “copied” or “compiled” and I did not know that robots are already recognized as authors of the original works covered by the Copyright Law. So I asked this question on Xilinx forum but I was not able to get a clear answer to that question – can we redistribute FSBL custom-generated by Xilinx tools for our hardware?
We did try to generate FSBL with the tools – I failed to install the software on my computer – probably because it had too old of a version of Kubuntu and there was a conflict between the libc6 on my system and the licensing software (this funny make-pretend licensing of freebies). Oleg was luckier than me – he has a current Kubuntu version, but his operating system was still not perfect and did not completely match the development tools. When he tried to re-assign MIO pins in the tools GUI – nothing seemed to happen. Later he discovered that it actually did change; it just did not show the changes. So when he pressed “Save” and opened the same page again, there were the new (modified) values there. A little trick, but it made possible to proceed with the tools.
There are other things that I did not like in the recommended way of the FSBL generation. One is that though I usually prefer a nice GUI to the “black screen” of the command line interface, there are some definite limitations. I like GUI when it saves me from remembering a lot of commands and command options – it could be OK if I had to do my job in a relatively small area. But in a small company, we have to often switch from mechanical design to web development, Verilog code debugging, kernel drivers or image processing – all these activities have their specific tools. But GUI for new board configuration is not that useful according to my personal experience. A standard configuration file with many properly commented settings is more convenient. Configuring a new Zynq-based board for most developers is something they do not need to perform a dozen times a day – once a year is a more reasonable estimate. When you develop a new board you have to go through many manual steps: studying documentation, looking for the board components, and developing a circuit diagram and PCB layout. Going through a long list of settings, reading comments and optionally modifying some values is a very useful process for the new board, as it can help to avoid design errors that would be left unnoticed if you just clicked on several GUI buttons. Adding more configuration parameters to GUI is usually more expensive than just defining more configuration values, so more parameters are likely to be hard-coded in the software and so out of user control. Another problem of the GUI approach – I was concerned I would eventually hit a similar problem I already hit with the smart Memory Interface Generator I described above, the problem that was always a nightmare for me when I had to upgrade the FPGA development tools – new version often refused to compile the code that worked with the old version, changed the rules that are impossible to bypass. And as the code is closed, you do not have many options to tell the software that you are the boss, not it.
Configuring Zynq hardware for a commercial evaluation board with GUI – it may look cool, but the configuration is mostly already defined by the board design, so each board can come with the board-specific long and boring (but nicely commented) configuration file.
The Ezynq projectConsidering all these shortcomings of the use of the FSBL I decided to evaluate feasibility of bypassing this proprietary code completely. According to Xilinx documentation, it seemed possible, and we did not need all of the functionality of the FSBL and the FSBL generation software. We definitely do not need booting of the secret code (Zynq has elaborate hardware and software support for such feature); we also do not need to configure the FPGA portion (PL) until the system is running operating system (FSBL allows early configuration). Our plan was to add extra functionality (previously handled by FSBL) to U-boot itself so all the board configuration is done with #define CONFIG_* statements in the appropriate header files. To prevent conflict between the new parameters and already existent Zynq-related ones in U-boot name scope, we added ‘E’, starting all the parameters with “CONFIG_EZYNQ_” – this is where the project name came from. The project is available in Elphel Git repository at Sourceforge.
For this unexpected project, we purchased a nice small MicroZed evaluation board (it is the first evaluation board I ever used in my career) so we had an official software that boots and runs on this board. Even implementation of the subset of the FSBL functionality, with configuration files ready for only one board, having several known (and probably plenty of unknown) bugs, took me a whole month of programming. In that process I had to go through the documentation on many of the Zynq peripherals and their control registers, DDR3 memory interface – that will likely help me when developing the software for the actual camera. While working on the reimplementation, I was comparing the generated FSBL output against documetation and noticed several mismatches between the two, but none seem to be critical. Our code will need some cleanup – at the beginning I did not know the exact details of what will be needed, and this is my first program in Python, but the program proved to work and we’ll maintain it and use it with future Elphel camera software distributions. I also believe that there are other developers who share my view that the best FPGA silicon on the planet deserves different software, software made for the developers – not just for the cool looking presentations. And we would like other developers to try this code, creating configuration files for the Zynq-based boards they have. There are more technical details in the README file in the git repository and we are always willing to answer questions about this program.
Why I believe Xilinx will turn towards Free SoftwareWhen Ross Freeman, FPGA inventor and one of the Xilinx founders, compared the new device with a “blank tape,” he defined the future of the new class of the devices; devices where the user, and not the chip manufacturer, is in full control. It would be like it was with the magnetic tapes where people could record whatever they liked, and not just what the record companies did. It was especially important in the USSR, where I was born – the most famous and loved by the Soviet people Russian singer, Vladimir Vysotsky, “lived” mostly on the magnetic tapes recorded by people against the will of the Soviet government. Magnetic tapes were the medium that brought us the Beatles – we loved them and perceived them as a “Band of Freedom.”
Freedom is the intrinsic feature of the FPGA. I think it is better than “Field” for the first letter in the acronym. Unfortunately, the analogy with the “blank tape” does not go much farther – in the non-free country, we were free to use any brand of the tape recorder (domestic or brought from abroad) with the same tape. If the Soviet government had the same level of control over the recorders as the FPGA manufacturers have now over the required development tools, we would never be able to listen to Vysotsky or the Beatles.
Some ten years ago, Wim Roelandts, then CEO of Xilinx, had a presentation in Salt Lake City that I attended. When answering questions, he said that more than 98 percent of the company revenue comes from the FPGA (“blank tape”) sales, and less than two percent from the software. Maybe the numbers have changed by now, but I do not think the difference is radical.
I can only guess at what the rationale behind the idea of reducing the value of the main (98 percent) product for the questionable benefit of a two percent byproduct is. They probably can not believe that freedom may be monetized, it increases the value (and the lack of it – decreases) of the underlying product by more than those tiny two percent. They may think that it is irrelevant, and as they produce the best tape in the world, they should use it to the competitive advantage of their tape recorders.
There is the other side of this. Totalitarianism is not competitive in the long run. The USSR was strong in the middle of the 20th century and was able to win against Hitler in WWII. Just 10 years before its collapse, I could not believe that any change would happen in my lifetime – but there is no more USSR now. In the end of the last century (and the beginning of this one), Microsoft was considered the most successful software company, a model for others. And I see some similarity between the two – trying to keep everybody under control – be it with the help of the KGB or EULA. Soviet people did not have private property (only so called “personal property”) – virtually everything belonged to the State. Same with the users of proprietary software – you do not own what you paid money for, you are just granted a temporary right to use it. Microsoft is far from over, of course, but it has seen better times, and few are considering it as a powerful Empire now. Yes, they still dominate on the desktops, but the same approach failed in the modern areas of the web and mobile devices. In these days you have to give more control to the users – or risk becoming irrelevant. Initially Apple tried hard to prevent “jail-breaking” and not to let people to install their own software. Yes, they sure still have a lot of control, but even they had to yield some of it under the pressure of the users and competitors. It is even more valid for the faster growing Linux-based Android devices.
Xilinx itself is gradually migrating towards Free Software, at least for the code that runs on their devices. I believe this process is welcomed by Xilinx developers (who made a great job in coding Free software submitted to at least Linux kernel and U-boot) but is still not embraced completely by the management who (software-wise) got stuck in the 20th century, when the microsoviet type of the program was a model to follow. But this fight is an uphill battle, and they have to “surrender” more and more. Xilinx SDK is already based on Free Software Eclipse IDE and software components licensed under GNU GPL. I count on this trend and think that it will provide Xilinx with their own experience and prove to them that developing Free Software gives more value in return by expanding application areas and results in increased market share for the devices.
But this shift to Free Software does not yet apply to the main part of the software tools – tools for the FPGA or programmable logic (PL) in terms of Zynq development.
The Xilinx proprietary stronghold that still seems as stable as the USSR in early 1980-s is the FPGA development tools. They do not see much pressure to stop effectively crippling their hardware by the software because 1) Xilinx FPGAs are still the best and 2) Xilinx competitors cripple their products no less than Xilinx does itself. When I first started using reconfigurable FPGA in 2002, I was considering Altera too, but even their freebie software license had to be renewed each 3 months, so there was no guarantee that you’ll always be able to use the code you previously developed.
Competition on the FPGA market is increasing, and in addition to the traditional Xilinx+Altera duopoly, new players are emerging, such as Achronics and Tabula. It seems to me, however, that their bet to beat duopoly is based on the sheer technological advantage of the Intel 14nm process, not on the developer-friendly software that can really make a difference in this field.
Installation of the “spyware” as a mandatory component of the freeware FPGA development tools (in the paid-for versions this functionality may be disabled, but it is on by default) seems to be considered of high value – otherwise they would not risk alienating their loyal customers. Why do they do it? Probably in a desperate move to get more of the real life examples to improve their place and route and other related algorithms. I am not a specialist in these algorithms, but generally they are NP-hard and there are many approaches how to find good-enough solutions and improve them. And this involuntary feedback through the spyware is needed to train the algorithms being developed. Translated to USSR analogy, it would be as utopian as to assign 3 KGB agents to every citizen to find out what each of them wants and then decide in some centralized way how to make them all feel happy. Or Apple watching on the customer use of the phones to guess what they need and designing all the apps in-house that are currently available from the independent developers. Proprietary operating systems closed to developers and fully controlled by a single company already proved their inferiority on the mobile devices where they faced a real competition.
Xilinx has a unique opportunity to change this unfortunate state. They develop, produce and sell the Real Things, and Xilinx can become as recognized in FPGA development software, as it is recognized for the FPGA devices now. They are in a position not just to invest heavily in the Free Software infrastructure as IBM and other companies do, but to do much more: jump-start and lead the new class of the FPGA development tools – tools where users are partners, not just the subjects of the surveillance. Starting and maintaining a framework of the Free (not freeware, like WebPack) tools could make a real difference and create value, like independently designed apps create value for Apple or Android gadgets. Just look around – it is the second decade of the 21st century, not the late 20th. Let users (and Xilinx users are really smart developers) get to the controls – they will innovate, and some may find solutions that would never come to the mind of Xilinx staff engineers.
One may say that Xilinx already has an App Store equivalent, but the marketplace for IP cores (“vinyl records” that can be copied to the “magnetic tapes” under certain conditions) is not a substitute for the free and open FPGA development framework – users can exchange (under various free and non-free licenses, with or without compensation) their “tape records” themselves without any Xilinx involvement. In our current design, we too plan to use at least one Verilog module designed by others under GNU GPL license, and we will handle it between us and the developer directly. The other difference is that iPhone users are just phone users and the apps they download increase the functionality (and, in effect, the value) of the phone they purchase. When an FPGA developer uses a core designed by others – she just gets part of her job already done. But the increased functionality of the tools is still needed, and this functionality is usually related to much more elaborate activity than that of the casual phone app user, and FPGA developer is more likely to be able to contribute back. That does not mean, of course, that many developers will contribute new P/R algorithms, but evaluating different algorithms (including experimental ones), tweaking parameters of the goal functions – especially when the default setup can’t make it for the user - this is what many (myself included) can do. It is especially likely to happen if the users are provided with some meaningful comments on the nature of the algorithms and variable parameters.
Such development framework will make it possible for independent researchers to experiment with the new methods of (for example) timing closure, and Xilinx will have different ways to encourage (and in some cases sponsor) such development that will require less investments than when everything critical is done in-house and behind the closed doors.
When implemented, such an approach will provide multiple advantages:
- Effectively increase the value of Xilinx silicon devices: unleash more of their power and hand it to the users. Such cases as I described above (MIG pushing me to use larger than actually needed package) will be eliminated – in my case I would just troubleshoot the MIG code for my case and submit suggested changes (I’m sure I’m not the only one who needs to use x16 DDR3 with Zynq in 484-ball package). And until the needed changes will be included in the main branch, others who need it will just be able to use my modified version.
- Reduce the cost of the tools software development and increase its capability and quality by integrating Free Software tools (i.e. Icarus Verilog that we use ourselves for simulation of the products based on Xilinx FPGA) and user contributions. These contributions will be enabled by the open code of the software, and users will be more eager to get involved when they are treated as partners.
- Improve customer relations. I’m sure that it’s not just me who hates the spyware planted on their computers. And Xilinx surely knows this too, so I consider the current state as a desperate measure to bring in the data that customers are reluctant to provide voluntarily. Treating users as partners (and they really should be partners as improvements of the software tools benefit both parties) is a better way to get the needed feedback (and even contributions, as users can do part of the work themselves) than the current model of interaction. Linux kernel gets on average five patches per hour from thousands of developers (Xilinx included) freely.
Is there a risk that competitors will be able to benefit from this Free Software? Sure they will; as anybody else, they will be able to use it. But they will have to play by the same rules. Even if they will be able to copy all the software and adapt it to their products, keeping the code closed (only possible if the license will be weak enough to allow it), their non-free product will have lower value for the users even if the hardware alone has the same (or even higher) performance.
I am not sure if Xilinx has another decade to stay with the old software paradigm, because as the performance and complexity of the FPGA is increasing, the quality of development software gets more important, and “quality” means the real quality for developers, not only the nice-looking interface. So if there will be some new player on the FPGA filed that will be able to offer silicon lagging behind the front runners by some 3-4 years, but offering development environment based on Free Software – that company will definitely have a competitive advantage. If that will happen, I’ll go for the software, but I would definitely prefer to have the best of each – superior Xilinx FPGA devices supported by the developer-friendly, Free Software; the only software that matches the essense of the FPGA idea – its freedom.
NC393 development progress – 3
Just a small update – we received all the 3 boards ordered for the NC393 camera at Fastprint, China. We will have our contract manufacturer install the BGA chips, and then I’ll work again on the tiny 0201 components, like 4 years ago. I love to assemble such boards (but not too often) myself – going through all the components when they are real (not virtual) gives me a different perspective to think about the design.
10393 System board, top side
10389 Interface board, top side
10385 Power supply board, top side
10393 System board, bottom side
10389 Interface board, bottom side
10385 Power supply board, bottom side
NC393 development progress – 2
10385 – Power supply board layout
There is a small update to the previous post – circuit design and the PCB layout is done for the two companion boards. And it lead to some re-design on the system board. When working on the power supply board (it provides camera with the regulated 3.3V from the external source) I realized that it will have to hang on just two screws – not good for a rather heavy board with Traco DC/DC module (same size as the one currently used in Elphel NC353L camera). The 10393 system board and the 10389 Interface/SSD boards will be mounted on two sides of the aluminum heat sink plate (CNC-ed to match component heights) and the smaller 10385 will sit on top of the 10393, and all the 10385 mount screws have to go through the system board. So I had to add additional holes near the middle of the 10393. That in turn required to move the 40-pin inter-board connector that carries SATA, USB, synchronization and additional general purpose signals to the 10389. So I had to re-route part of the design, but it was a right time to do as none of the boards was released yet leaving the freedom for such modifications. These new holes will also improve the mounting of the heat sink to the Zynq chip (the large white square on the 10393 layout below).
10393 – updated system board layout
Now when the core PCBs are designed (later will come new sensor boards and the successor to the current 10359 based on Xilinx XC7K160T to allow a single system board run up to 16 individual sensors), there is a boring part to double check all the pinouts and footprints of the new components, try to weed out as many other design errors as possible. Some will probably remain and will require re-spin of the boards, same as it was with our current camera. The 10353 system board is now revision “E” (6-th version), sensor board is also “E”, 10359 is “B” and the 10369 is “A”. But it will be very nice if the first prototype will be operational from the first attempt and the remaining bugs will not “brick” it completely, and we will be able to get enough information for implementing the needed changes. It did work this way before so I hope it will happen again. But still that boring part is ahead.
10389 – Interface/SSD board layout. Large part of the board is empty – this is the place for the SSD board
NC393 development progress
Development of the NC393 is now started, at last – last 6 weeks I’m working on it full time. It is still a long way ahead before the new camera will replace our current model 353, but at least the very first step is completed – I just finished the PCB layout of the system board.
10393 System Board PCB layout
There were not so many changes to the specs/features that were planned and described in the October 2012 post, the camera will be powered by Xilinx Zynq SoC (XC7Z030-1FBG484C to be exact) that combines high performance FPGA with a dual ARM CPU and generous set of built-in peripherals. It will have 1GB of on-board system memory and 512MB of additional dedicated video/FPGA memory (the NC353 has 64MB each of them). Both types of memory consist of the same 256Mx16 DDR3 chips – 2 for the system (to use full available memory bus width of 32 bits) and one for the FPGA.
The main class of the camera applications remains to be a multi-sensor. Even more so – the smallest package of the Zynq 7030 device turned out to have sufficient number of I/Os to accommodate 4 sensor ports – originally I planned only 3 of them. These sensor ports are fully compatible with our current 5MPix sensor boards and with the existent 10359 sensor multiplexer boards – with such multiplexers it will be possible to control up to 12 sensors with a single 10393. Four of the connectors are placed in two pairs on both sides of the PCB, so they overlap on the layout image.
These 5MPix Aptina sensors have large (by the modern standards) pixels with the pitch of 2.2 microns and that, combined with good quality of the sensor electronics will keep them useful for many of the applications in the future. This backward compatibility will allow us to reduce the amount of hardware needed to be redesigned simultaneously, but of course we are planning to use newer sensors – both existent and those that might be released in the next few years. Thanks to FPGA flexibility, the same sensor board connectors will be able to run alternative types of signals having programmable voltage levels – this will allow us to keep the same camera core current for the years to come.
Alternative signals are designed to support serial links with differential signals common in the modern sensors. Each of the connectors can use up 8 lanes plus differential clock, plus I²C and an extra pair of control signals. These four connectors use two FPGA I/O banks (two per bank), each bank has run-time programmable supply voltage to accommodate variety of the sensor signal levels.
We plan to hold the 10353 files for about a month before releasing them into production of the prototype batch while I will develop the two companion boards. Not very likely, but the development of these additional boards may lead to some last-minute changes to the system board.
One of them – 10389 will have functionality similar to the current 19369 board – it will provide mass storage (using mSATA SSD), inter-camera synchronization (so we will be able to use these camera modules in Eyesis4π cameras) and back panel I/O connectors, including microUSB, eSATA/USB combo and synchronization in/out. The eSATA/USB combo connector will allow attaching the external storage devices powered by the camera. The same eSATA port will be reconfigurable into the slave mode, so the images/video recorded to the internal mSATA SSD will be transferred to the host computer significantly faster than the main GigE network port allows.
Another board to develop (10385) is the power supply – I decided to remove the primary DC-DC converter from the system board. Camera uses multiple DC-DC converters – even the processor alone needs several voltage rails, but internally it uses a single regulated 3.3V – all the other (secondary) converters use 3.3V as their input and provide all the other voltages needed. In the 10393 boards most secondary voltages are programmable making it possible to implement “margining” – testing the camera at lower and higher than nominal voltage and making sure it can reliably withstand such variations and is not operating on the very edge of the failure during the production testing. Primary power supply role is to provide a single regulated voltage starting form different sources such as power over the network, battery, wall adapter or some other source. It may need to be isolated or not, the input power quality may be different.
One reason to separate the primary power supply from the system board is that currently we have about half of the cameras made to be powered over the network, and another half – modified to use lower voltege from the batteries. Currently we order the 10353 boards without any DC-DC converter and later install one of the two types of the converters and make other small changes on the board. Some of our customers do not need any of the primary DC-DC converters – they embed the 10353 boards and provide regulated 3.3V to the modified 10353 board directly. Multi-camera systems can also share primary power supplies. This makes it more convenient to make a power supply as a plug-in module, so the system board itself can be finished in one run.
Another reason to remove the primary power from the system board is to remove the IEEE 802.3af (PoE) functionality. During the several last years we survived multiple attacks of the “patent trolls” (or NPE – non-practicing entities, how they like to call themselves), but we’ve spent thousands of dollars paid to the lawyers to deal with the trolls – some of the them tried to sell us the license for the already expired patents. One of the still active patents is related to “phantom power “- providing power through the signal lines, similar to how it is done for the microphones since 1919. To avoid the attacks of the trolls in the 10353 cameras we were able to use power over the spare pairs (Alternative B), but that is not possible with GigE which needs all 4 pairs in a cable. We do not believe that using this nearly century-old technology constitutes a genuine invention (maybe tomorrow somebody will “invent” powering SATA devices in the same way? Or already did?) but being a small company we do not have the power to fight in this field and invalidate those patents.
So the new NC393 made by Elphel will not have the PoE functionality, we will not make, manufacture, sell or market it (at least in GigE mode). But the camera will be PoE-ready, so as soon as the patent will become invalid, it will be possible to add the functionality by just replacing the plug-in module. And of course our cameras are open and hackable, so our users (in the countries where it is legal, of course – similar to installation of some of the software programs) will be able to build and add such module to their cameras without us.
Both of these companion boards are already partially designed so I plan that next month we will be able to release the files to production and start building the first prototype system. To test the basic functionality of the system board the two other ones are not needed – serial debug port (with the embedded USB-to-serial converter) is located on the system board, and 3.3V will be anyway originally provided by a controlled power supply. When everything will be put together the camera will get a well-known but still a nice feature for the autonomous battery-powered timelapse imaging: it will be able to wake itself up (using alarm signal from the internal clock/calendar that it has anyway), boot, capture some images and turn the power off virtually completely – until the next alarm.
Elphel new camera calibration facility
Sensor+Lens Tool
Heptaclops camera and the 393
Building and Calibrating Eyesis4π
The last chance to see us at SIGGRAPH’12
Elphel at SIGGRAPH 2012
Run ImageJ plugins from the command line in Ubuntu
HomeSide 720° – A helmet mounted panoramic camera
Introducing the River View Web Player & Other News from River Studies
Subpixel Registration and Distortion Measurement
Elphel new camera calibration facility
Fig.1. Elphel new calibration pattern
Elphel has moved to a new calibration facility in May 2013. The new office is designed with the calibration room being it’s most important space, expandable when needed to the size of the whole office with the use of wide garage door. Back wall in the new calibration room is covered with the large, 7m x 3m pattern, illuminated with bright fluorescent lights. The length of the room allows to position the calibration machine 7.5 meters away from the pattern. The long space and large pattern will allow to calibrate Eyesis4π positioned far enough from the pattern to be withing depth of field of its lenses focused for infinity, while still keeping wide angular size, preferred for accuracy of measurements.
We already hit the precision limits using the previous, smaller pattern 2.7m x 3.0m. While the software was designed to accommodate for the pattern where each of the nodes had to have individually corrected position (from the flat uniform grid), the process assumed that the 3d coordinates of the nodes do not change between measurements.
The main problem with the old pattern was that the material it was printed on was attached to the wall along the top edge but still had a freedom to slightly move perpendicular to the wall. We noticed that while combining measurements made at different time, as most of our cameras need to be calibrated at several “stations” – positions relative to the target (rotation around 2 axes is performed automatically). We ran calibration during night time to reduce variations caused by vibrations in the building, so next station measurements were performed at different dates. Modified software was able to deal with variations in Z (perpendicular to the surface) direction between station measurements (that actually did help in the overall adjustment of variables), but the shape of the target pattern could change if the temperature in the building was changing during measurements. The PVC material has high thermal expansion, and small expansion in the X,Y directions could cause much higher variations perpendicular when the target is attached to the wall with lower thermal coefficient in multiple points.
Fig. 2. Floor plan
Calibration RoomThe new space is designed to accommodate various camera calibration procedures.
- First of all we made the pattern as large as possible – it is 7,01m x 3.07m – we even raised the ceiling near the target.
- The target itself is now printed on the film attached to the wall as a wallpaper, so there is no movement relative to the wall, and thermal expansion is defined by a lower coefficient of the drywall. We also provided the air channels inside the wall to make it possible to implement thermal stabilization of the wall.
- The calibration room allows to move camera under test up to 7.5m away from the pattern, the room is separated from the rest of the facility with the wide “garage” door, so changing the lighting conditions outside of the room do not influence calibration.
- Other rooms are designed in such a way that the camera can be moved up to 24 meters from the target (with the garage door open) and have unobstructed view of virtually the full pattern – that may be needed for the long focal length lenses.
Fig. 3. Pattern wall during construction
Preparing the wall for the target patternDuring construction of the new facility we were carefully watching the progress as our temporary space was located just on the next floor and we were mostly concerned about the quality of the target wall. Yes, software can accommodate for the non-flatness of the wall but it is better to start with the good “hardware” – to achieve subpixel precision the software averages correlation over rather large areas of the image (currently 64×64 pixels) so sharp variations will produce different measurements from different distances or viewing angles. When we first measured the wall flatness, we noticed large steps between the gypsum board panels, so the construction people promised to make it level 5 finish and flatten the surface. They put “mud” all over the wall, sanded it and that removed all of the sharp discontinuities on the target surface, but still leaving some smooth ones up to ±3mm as we measured later with the camera.
When the wall was made flat it had to be prepared for application of the self-adhesive vinyl film, so the wall finish will not make it bubble later. Ideally we wanted it to be able to withstand peeling off the film if we’ll have to do that. When we searched Internet about vinyl film application to the painted wall we found that most fresh paint needs some 60(!) days to cure before the film can be applied. So we decided to go with two-component epoxy paint that requires only one week before the film can be applied. When we inspected that epoxy painted wall (the paint was applied with the regular rollers) – it did not look flat. Well, it was just a roller-painted wall, so it had those small bumps and we were concerned that the vinyl film will conform to these bumps, and if it will – the position “noise” will be higher than what cameras can resolve. So we’ve got more epoxy paint and started a long process of wet-sanding and application of the new paint coats. We have compressed air (used to blow during optical and mechanical assembly) so we thought we’ll just spray the paint instead of rolling it to avoid those bumps that were left even after professional work. Unfortunately, without the needed experience in spray-painting, we adjusted pressure too high, and probably as much as a half of our first coat ended somewhere else, but not on the sprayed wall – the paint droplets were too small. Next coat was better, and in several days we had a wall that seemed to be covered with hard plastic laminate, not just painted.
Installing the patternOur next concern was – how to install the vinyl film? We wanted to have very good match between the individual panels, as it is not possible to have the target printed on a single piece, maximal width of which is just over 1.5m. We hesitated to order professional installation because for regular applications (like vehicle wraps) such sub-millimeter precision is not required. For the really seamless (compared to the precision of the calibration) we needed better than 0.1mm match, but it is possible to just mask out the grid nodes around the seams and disregard them during calibration data processing, so we planned to get to about 0.5mm match.
Fig.4. Pattern Z-deviations (perpendicular to the target plane)
Fig. 5. Pattern deviations in X,Y plane
Fig. 6. Pattern deviation from the "ideal" grid (horizontal profile)
We knew people are doing that but still it seemed very difficult to apply 1.5m wide by 3m long “stickers” without wrinkles and bubbles. Web search provided multiple recommendations, but the main thing was to use “wet” method that none of us new before. It involves spraying the wall (and the film on the adhesive side) with “application fluid” (basically water with small addition of soap and alcohol). When the sticky film is applied to the wet surface, the adhesive is temporarily inhibited and it is possible to reposition (slide) the film to achieve required match. Then the water is squeezed away with the squeegee tools, and if done properly, there should be no bubbles left.
Geometric properties of the patternThe Z-deviations on Fig. 4 show the wall non-flatness, the gypsum panel borders are still visible (even with “level 5″ finish), the horizontal discontinuity near the top is where the wall was extended to accommodate increased ceiling height. Positive Z direction is away from the camera, so lighter areas are concave areas on the wall and darker are bumps extending out from the wall.
Fig.5. illustrates mismatch and stretching of the vinyl panels application. Red/green color difference corresponds to the horizontal shift, while blue/green – the vertical one.
Figure 6. contains a horizontal profile at the half-height and provides numerical values of the deviations. Diff. Error plot indicates areas around panel boundaries that should be avoided during reprojection errors minimization and measuring point spread functions (PSF) for aberration correction.
Illuminating the target patternWe use the same pattern for different parts of the camera calibration. Correction of aberrations and distortions does not impose strict requirements on the illumination of the pattern, but we use the same images to measure (and compensate) lens vignetting and color variations of the camera sensitivity caused among other reasons by the multilayer infrared cutoff filter and angular variations of the pixel color sensitivity. This method works for low-frequency part of the flat field correction and does not deal with the pixel fixed-pattern noise that, if present should be corrected by other means.
Fig. 7. pattern brightness for station 2 view 0 (top channels)
Fig. 8. pattern brightness for station 2 view 0 (top), specular component
Fig. 9. pattern brightness for station 2 view 1 (bottom channels)
Fig. 10. pattern brightness for station 2 view 1 (bottom channels), specular
Acquiring thousands of images made by different channels of the camera and capturing the same target, it is possible to perform simultaneous relative photometric calibration of the pattern and the sensors, provided that each element of the pattern preserves the same brightness for each image where it is captured. This may be true when the target is observed from the same point, but when we calibrate Eyesis4π camera with 2 sensors attached far from the other ones, and these sensors travel significantly when capturing the target, this assumption does not hold. The same pattern element has different brightness depending on the lens position when the image is acquired. This is because even matte pattern material is not perfectly diffusive, there is some specular (reflective) component.
In the earlier setup we used photographic lamps with large umbrellas, but these umbrellas were still small when placed at a distance that they were out of the camera view. Specular component was still visible when the diffusive part was subtracted. When designing the new calibration target we decided to use bright linear fluorescent lamps along the floor and the ceiling and keep them spatially compact without any diffusers or umbrellas, we only used mirrors behind the lamps to effectively double the output. Such light source was expected to produce specular reflections on the target, but these reflections occupy just a small portion of the target surface, the rest of it is close to be pure diffusive. That allowed us to locate positions of the specular reflections for each camera station/viewpoint by subtracting the average (between all stations/viewpoints) pattern brightness from each individual station/view of the pattern and then masking out this areas of the pattern during flat-field calculations.
Images on Fig. 7-10 were made for camera station 2 – 3.3m from the target and 1.55m to the right of the target center, that caused lamp reflections to be shifted to the left. View 0 (Fig. 7-8) correspond to the camera head, which is the center of rotations. View 1 (Fig. 9-10) is captured by the camera 2 bottom sensors mounted 820 mm below the camera head, so they were moving significantly between the images – that caused visible curvature on the top lamps reflection.
Virtual tour of Elphel calibration facilityYou may walk through our calibration facility using our WebGL viewer/editor. The images were captured with newly calibrated Eyesis4π camera, there is no 3-d parallax correction – these are just raw panoramas stitched for infinity and most close objects are out of depth-of-field of the lenses. Hope you’ll still enjoy this snapshot of the new facility were we plan to develop and precisely calibrate many new cameras.