[Elphel-support] 2x NC353L

[support-list]

Hello Daniel,

I'm sorry for the insufficient documentation on the camera. We are a small company and do not have sufficient resources to support all the development platforms. Additionally, our SDK is based on that of Axis Communication - the company that developed the processor used in the camera and the related software.
It is definitely possible to use camera with other OS such as MS Windows, but there is no Windows SDK for development. THis is why we provide "live" distribution of Kubuntu on a flash thumb drive that you can run without installation (but it will be much slower than normal installation, of course).

For many applications of the camera you do not need to compile/build native C/C++ applications to run in the camera, you may use PHP - as far as I know it is possible to develop PHP on Windows. Camera has PHP extension library (documented on our wiki - http://wiki.elphel.com/index.php?title=PHP_in_Elphel_cameras) that takes care of efficient low-level interaction with the camera-specific functionality and you can put the PHP code in the camera that will communicate with the code on your host (including Windows-based ) PC.

What kind of functionality are you looking for - video streaming or just individual images for processing? There is imgsrv (http://wiki.elphel.com/index.php?title=Imgsrv) server dedicated for efficient generation of the camera images, so generic application may combine code that controls the camera using http requests (to existing camera php scripts or your custom ones) and then gets the images through imgsrv.

FPGA programming is possible, but it requires rather old version of Xilinx ISE - we could not keep up with modifying the code for each new software release from Xilinx. The new camera code I'm working on now will be much easier to support/use as it will not depend on Xilinx proprietary IDE - the environment I'm using now is Free Software plugin for a standard Eclipse IDE, Xilinx tools are automatically launched as command-line tools and you can simultaneously use ISE and Vivado tools, including different releases. Here you may find some screenshots of this IDE - https://github.com/Elphel/vdt-docs/raw/master/VDT-UserManualAddendum.pdf ,  the software itself is also on GitHub - https://github.com/Elphel/vdt-plugin

When programming FPGA on the 353 camera I would recommend start with 10359 board (http://wiki.elphel.com/index.php?title=10359 ) that has the same memory and FPGA as the 10353 board. When non-operational bitstream is loaded into the FPGA on the main 10353 board, the camera will just silently hang as the FPGA is on the system bus and camera functionality heavily depends on it. 10359 is easier to use as you may just reset it and load a different bitstream without rebooting the system. And the code is much simpler and easier to simulate and P&R.

Andrey




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