[PD] Gem: Looking for suggestions for camera / capture setup

[Csaba Láng]

When I started this project Gem used the pylon 2 backend. The new cameras
of basler are based on pylon 5. Iohannes that time updated the backend in
Gem to 5. You have to install pylon 5  before compiling Gem showing the
path to pylon. And that’s it.
GigE is not a good solution as the data is more than GigE can handle. I use
usb3 hybrid cables up to 50m.
By the way I use this camera:

https://www.baslerweb.com/en/products/cameras/area-scan-cameras/ace/aca1440-220uc/



On Wed, 10 Mar 2021 at 10:05, Antoine Villeret <antoine.villeret at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Usually the USB3 industrial cameras use iIDC protocol which comes from
> legacy Firewire cameras.
> IIDC is also implemented on some USB2 cameras (like Point Grey Chameleon
> in its first version).
> And IIDC is supported in Gem through the libdc1394 plugin.
> Some vendors implement special features available only through their own
> SDK but I never need to go that route.
>
> Concerning the GigE protocol, there is an open source implementation with
> Aravis which is not directly integrated into Gem afaik.
> Put there is a Pylon plugin which is vendor specific and you might also
> access GigE camera with Gstreamer.
> So at least you should be able to write a pipeline to forward GigE frames
> to Gem via v4l2loopback on Linux.
> But I never did that and to be honest if I have to work with GigE camera
> in Gem, I'd probably write a new plugin if needed instead of trying to
> setup Gstreamer.
> The main advantage of GigE over IIDC is the cable length. With USB and
> Firewire it's hard to work with cable more than 10m long, especially if you
> target high framerate / resolution (which means high bandwidth).
> GigE pushes this limitation to hundreds meters (depending on the cable
> quality and RF environment).
>
> Concerning triggering the Gem render pipeline with the camera itself, I'm
> not sure it is possible out of the box. Most of the video plugin uses
> polling to get frames : a thread runs in the background to retrieve frames
> from the camera and then when the [pix_video] receives a gemstate from a
> gemhead it checks if there is a new frame and copy it to the Gem thread to
> use it.
> So if you want to trigger the gem render pipeline with a camera frame you
> probably need to write a custom external that waits for a new frame (and
> thus blocks the whole Pd instance).
> Another solution is to do the reverse : trigger the camera upon Gem's
> refresh. Most of industrial camera have a trigger input to release the
> (electronic) shutter.
> With some hardware hack you would be able to take an image with the camera
> when you need it.
> But then you might need to wait for the shutter to close and then for the
> image to be processed and sent by the camera. That's not tricky.
>
> Syncing the image processing pipeline on a camera frame is not that easy
> in any case. Even if you write all the code from scratch in C++ for example
> (which I did).
>
> Hope that helps
>
> Cheers
>
> Antoine
>
> Le mer. 10 mars 2021 à 00:07, Max <abonnements at revolwear.com> a écrit :
>
>> On 09.03.21 11:39, Csaba Láng wrote:
>> > Hi All,
>> >
>> > I have made an interactive squash system with Pd based on Basler's high
>> > speed cameras for machine vision. I use mainly above 200fps of 5 USB-3
>> > cameras each of them on a separate USB bus.
>> Very cool.
>>
>> Do you know which model?
>> https://www.baslerweb.com/en/products/cameras/area-scan-cameras/
>>
>> I see USB3 vision is the standard. That works out of the box with Gem?
>> What I read here sounds promising:
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB3_Vision
>>
>> I remember GigE which was terribly hampered and one could download an
>> SDK after signing an NDA, but even with that SDK I wasn't able to get it
>> into Gem.
>>
>> Would something like this work equally:
>>
>> https://www.alliedvision.com/en/products/embedded-vision-cameras/detail/Alvium%201800%20U/-240.html
>>
>> Also I think I have this frame grabber here in a different machine:
>>
>> https://www.baslerweb.com/de/produkte/framegrabber-portfolio/framegrabber/microenable-5-ironman-aq8-cxp6d/
>>
>> How big are my chances that I can get images from Gem with that card on
>> Linux?
>>
>> Max
>>
>>
>>
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