#apertus IRC Channel Logs

hi se6astian!

as I just read via email Bertl_oO will only be here in 90 minutes

I saw that; I can hang around for a bit, but I don't know about Gedeon and Keyi.

right

hi here

hello

yep. it's 8 in the morning here

doesn't matter to me; I assume it's normally quiet enough?

good then lets stay here

no secrets here :)

right then many thanks for taking the time to come here, the original spark for making this meeting happen my and herberts the planned silicon valley visit mid october for the google summer of code mentor summit and so I contacted steven if he was still at stanford and if it would make sense to meet

sure. Steven do you want to briefly discuss your f4graph pipeline?

great, I fear now we would have really needed Bertl_oO :)

stevenbell: for your students are you looking for small software projects, or hardware?

if the focus is similar

so a basic goal/project can be much smaller/simpler

perfect

and the f4graph pipeline

that's generally smaller scope, and likely to be lower quality, but if there are "go investigate this and see what's possible" kind of projects, those might also be appropriate.

so one thing we have working fairly well is a system to build image processing pipelines from the Halide language.

We're typically able to develop code from scratch and have it running on the hardware within a couple days (rather than a few weeks), and the hardware result is competitive with hand-written HLS.

very interesting!

if bertl_oO or anyone else wants to give it a try, we'd be happy to help. It's research code, so there are definitely rough edges, but it mostly works. :-)

here's a link to the paper about it: https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.09405?

anything else that we could talk about now?

please do

I don't know how true this is for your current applications, but in a lot of computational photography apps, it's important to have flexible and precise control of when actions happen in the system.

Or, expose for 25ms and fire the flash for the first 3ms of the exposure.

all camera parameters can be controlled from the commandline

hmm, I wonder if it would be a good candidate for an implementation of FCam and/or f4graph?

BAndiT1983: perfect timing, he is working on the camera internal control daemon

One of their problems was that the hardware wasn't always able to do what the FCam API allowed; the result is that although Android basically implemented FCam, it had to be "dumbed down" to match what commodity hardware could realistically provide.

in a nutshell yes :)

stevenbell: You pretty much covered it

great

yeah, here's the repository: https://github.com/stevenbell/ultrazynqbuilder

if you don't mind me asking, what exactly does this camera daemon do?

so basically a driver to expose the camera's register space (configuration space)?

so these configs aren't accessed through an address space?

for image sensor it's done through memory mapped space, other stuff is planned to be accessed through IO pipes or whatever is present in linux

because of gsoc, the development stalled a bit, but should resume soon, when some other apertus tasks are reviewed and planned

settings should change instantly, this also depends on how camera internal electronics processes them, granularity is variable

se6astian, where are you at with production? I saw you're in a cool new facility. If I had students who wanted to experiment with a camera next summer, would it be possible to buy one?

we are producing devloper kits in small quantities currently

oh, cool! you just ssh in?

stevenbell: yes, you can even remotely turn lights on and off :)

)

I'd better sign off soon, and I imagine Gedeon needs to get to work. Anyone have other questions/comments?

I have some quick questions

it's the microzed, right?

xilinx zynq 7020

okay thanks. I'm working on fast placement on fpga and plan to interface vivado very soon

I think that if we were to somehow get f4graph and this camera system to properly work, we'll have a one-of-a-kind product

lets continue via email and schedule another chat if it makes sense

sure. thank you very much

thanks all for taking time to chat!

I am off too