#apertus IRC Channel Logs

morning folks!

meeting time!

right, last meeting was quite some time ago

so I would suggest we give wider reaching updates of what happened recently to get everyone on the same page

vup maybe you can give a short report from CCC?

so we had a assembly at 36C3 like the last years and setup a 1-2 beta's and a micro

one beta was supposed to demo the sdi support / plugin module, but unfortunately there were some mechanical problems with different connections, meaning that it wasn't working most of the time

se6ast1an: yep

i guess that would be it; any questions?

great, any contacts worth following up? did you meet drew from oshpark?

okay, so standard live HDMI feed then

right, thanks

felix_: what are your plans regarding SDI for 2020?

it seems that i might have the rest of the week to continue working on photosdi

webgui/nctrl <- great!

right

thats a large question ;)

but since i am done with school, there might be quite some time for hacking after my exams :)

what are the plans for the axiom micro?

- changing some internal structures to allow handling things like large luts better

- replace / add a new API to the control daemon that for example allows clients to get notified when values change

After that I have no concrete plans, but possible things include

- continuing the work on a new approach to the gateware (using nmigen and python abstractions)

But until about mid febuary I am also probably quite limited in the time i have

se6ast1an: concrete things that need to be done before actual work on the micro rev 3 are imo:

- testing some ideas we had for the connection of a replacable image sensor

HDMI is planned via the HDMI plugin module?

Bertl: yes

so that should be easy to test with one of the HDMI examples, no?

(we used litehdmi)

well, would probably make sense to test with 'known working' code first

Bertl: what 'known working' code would you suggest?

(have to dig it out and probably update it to recent vivado)

anyway, we can discuss that later ... just remind me\

great, many thanks

i dont think so

ah also i think https://github.com/apertus-open-source-cinema/axiom-beta-firmware/pull/127 should be ready to merge now; but we can discuss that later aswell

Bertl?

basically during GSoC 2019 while Apurva was working on the USB3 Plugin Gearwork, we discovered, that the FTDI chip used in the hardware is a little problematic

nevertheless, we expected to get about 400MByte/s throughput in one direction (camera to PC)

and even there the best we reached so far was about 380MByte/s

did you try the different usb3 controller cards already for this ?

one very promising but rather long term plan is to use a 10G ethernet serdes to transfer up to 12Gbit/s of data between the AXIOM Beta and a PC

as I mentioned, this is rather long term, as we need a new plugin and a special PC card for this to work, but the first steps (prototype design) have been made and we will assemble a test setup in the next few weeks

to be honest, not completely sure there

i.e. 625MByte/s so with the 8/10 encoding and protocol overhead, that should leave about 480MByte/s throughput

one known issue with the FTDI is that it doesn't support isochronous transfers at all

a more short term solution to the problem is replacing the FTDI with a Cypress FX3 chip

but also requires more software to function

we already investigated this with the experimental 4K raw modes and it worked reasonably well, except for the unavoidable encoding on the recorders

the CamLink 4K made by Elgato a former German company now owned by Corsair

we also found a good deal before christmas on those so we ordered one to see how it does

opening up the device gave a bunch of pleasant surprises ...

somehow this information triggered a reverse engineering avalanche on the internet, and over a few weeks basically everything relevant was discovered

so it's basically down to writing FX3 firmware and ECP5 gateware to use it as HDMI to USB solution with the AXIOM Camera

that's basically the current state ... did I miss anything?

"FX3 firmware and ECP5 gateware" is what you are working on next right?

the designs have been submitted to oshpark and will probably arrive this or next week for a prototype assembly

I guess that's it from my side.

"allow for higher input voltage and battery operation as well as power control" <- that means we can power higher than 5V fans inside the CP enclosure

between 6V and 17V

well, the new Power Board still has the dual 5V inputs as well

ah!

so if you want to use those, they are still available, but the power control will be disabled for those

for 5V?

*operation

quick update from me then

I will be at FOSDEM at the end of the month and present the project/beta there

and I have been and am working right now on the AXIOM Remote c++ port

thats it from my side

no

Bertl: i am gonna grab something to eat, but after that i would be open to test the "known working" hdmi code, if you can find it ;)