Page 1 of 20 Operating Instructions FireView intek hard- & softwaretechnik www.intek-darmstadt.de adelungstr. 34 64283 darmstadt distributed by: AVT Allied Vision Technologies Taschenweg 2a 07646 Stadtroda www.alliedvisiontec.
Page 2 of 20 Contents CONTENTS ................................................................................................................ 2 1. INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................. 3 2. SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS ................................................................................ 4 3. INSTALLING THE SOFTWARE.......................................................................... 5 3.
Page 3 of 20 1. Introduction FireView is a demo program from the company intek (www.intek-darmstadt.de) and is designed to operate IEEE1394 DCAM-compatible cameras. It demonstrates the functionality and performance of the FIREPSTACK OHCI API (Application Programming Interface) which is offered at very low cost together with IEEE1394 cameras from your local distributor.
Page 4 of 20 2. System requirements • • • • • • WINDOWS™ NT4 SP5 or WINDOWS™2000 or XP PCI-Lynx compatible IEEE1394 Adapter- Card (SONY DFWA-400, ZENKUMAN PFW-41, IOI 1394TT) OHCI ™ compatible Adapter cards (IOI 1394TTO…) PCMCIA style OHCI Cards (IOI CB1394D) Built in IEEE1394 ports IEEE1394 cameras following DCAM- Standard e. g..
Page 5 of 20 3. Installing the software Copy the program FireView.exe and the two directories for the driver for NT and W2000/XP into a directory of your choice. The subsequent installation is dependant on the operating system. 3.1 Installation of the driver under WINDOWS ™ NT4 You must be a logged on as an ADMINISTRATOR in order to install drivers under WINDOWS™. Start FireView.exe. Press the button Utilities. Then click on Install Driver. The logging window reports the result of the installation.
Page 6 of 20 3.2. Installation under WINDOWS™ 2000 and XP™ First of all “Plug and Play” will find the IEEE1394 interface card and starts searching for appropriate drivers. Normally the standard Microsoft Windows driver for OHCI cards will be installed. After the installation is complete it is the users task to replace the standard Microsoft OHCI driver by the intek driver. The following steps show how to do this work.
Page 7 of 20 3.) In the following dialog disable the plug and play stuff and tell Windows that you will select the driver by yourself. 4.) In the dialog that appears select to find the driver on a storage medium (disk or anything else). 5.) Insert the path to where the firedrv.inf has been copied to.
Page 8 of 20 6.) Select the shown hardware with the name ‘OHIC/PCILYNX-1394-Hostcontroller’. 7.) Ignore all signature warnings and just continue until you reach the following dialog: 8.) Typing the finish button ends the installation process.
Page 9 of 20 4. The FireView program Double click starts the program. The card pull down menu in the control section shows you how many IEEE1394 adapter cards are found by the program. One instance of FireView belongs to one card. So if you have two cards start FireView twice. You can then operate these cards in parallel.
Page 10 of 20 4.1 Connecting FireView with an IEEE1394 adapter card Choose a card. Assuming that you have already connected cameras to that card you will see all cameras with their relevant model numbers and identities. In our case we have connected two VGA- type Color cameras SONY DFW-V500 to card 1. Up to three cameras of the same or different type can be connected per adapter and operated independently. Please be aware of certain IEEE1394 bandwidths limits which may apply due to settings of cameras.
Page 11 of 20 4.2 Connect a camera to the card Select a camera and press the Connect button. Tow more windows appear, one for the preferences or settings for that camera, the other is the camera display window itself.
Page 12 of 20 In preferences only Camera section is of main interest. • • • • • • • • Video- Format and Video-Mode are related to the DCAM specification settings. (See 4.5 for tables) X-Offset and Y-Offset are available if the camera supports partial scan and describe the upper left start-corner of the image X-Size and Y-Size adjust the size of the partial image. NOTE: The camera itself may change these values to the ones it supports.
Page 13 of 20 4.4 Menu items of the camera window Disk ->Save Bitmap saves images in .bmp Format. View-> Start Acquisition starts live image of the camera. Attention for Trigger mode (ext): Make shure that the camera gets negative edges of TTL level at the trigger input pins. View -> Set to xxx x yyy lets you scale the display window independently from the original camera display. You can image that it takes CPU- and Windows ™ resources to scale.
Page 14 of 20 Others -> Camera Control lets you adjust all relevant camera parameters. Different camera types have different adjustment possibilities. The card Lense is e.g.only available with the DFW-VL500; Color only for color cameras in general. Please refer to the handbooks of the camera about their possibilities. Edit Settings opens the Preferences windows as already explained in 4.2. It is accessible only after the live image was stopped by pressing Stop acquisition.
Page 15 of 20 Others -> Direct Control opens the bidirectional asynchronous communication channel of IEEE1394. Read (quadlet) and Write (quadlet) read and write camera data according to the DCAM specification. As this works in parallel to live display you may read and write whenever you want it.
Page 16 of 20 Others->Automatic Mode allows you to configure how many images you want to store on the harddisk and the time between the frames. Note that one second is the shortest time to be entered. The files will be automatically numbered and saved in the directory of your choice. With Telnet you can trigger a camera via network. The camera runs in continuous mode. takes one image next to the trigger event. Consult the manual for Telnet, if you need further information.
Page 17 of 20 4.5 Tables of formats and Modes: (Source: DCAM Spec V1.
Page 18 of 20 How to read the tables: The tables indicate how many data in pixels or quadlets (4bytes) are going to be transferred per cycle for certain formats and modes and framerates. Remember that everything in the IEEE1394 transfer is arranged in cycles, which last 125 µs. Example: Camera: XCD-SX900, B/W; 7,5 Frames/s 1280 x 960 Pixel: Please read: Format_2 Mode_2: One line of 1280 pixels giving 1280 bytes or 320 quadlets (q) needs to be transferred per 125 µs.
Page 19 of 20 4.6 Bandwidths and limits As a rule of thumb you can transmit with 400 Mb/s up to 1000q (4000 Bytes) isochronous data per cycle. In the example above this means that the bus is 32% loaded with this one camera in this setting. Vice versa it means that from the IEEE1394 bandwidth standpoint we should be able to connect up to three cameras with this node (which is true for now-a-days PC’s). With the color pendant DFW-SX900 (Format_2 Mode_0) we have a load of 64%.
Page 20 of 20 4.8 Error messages FIRPACKAGE was developed with focus on industrial vision. This implies highest robustness and transparent error messaging and handling. The logging window reports each and every error with date and time. Info gives you a written description about a selected error message. In practise (depending on heavy system load) you will probably be confronted with the following messages: 1.
