From: Milton Aupperle <milton@outcastsoft.com>
Date: August 23, 2010 9:25:38 AM MDT
To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [Astro_IIDC] basler vision technology
Dear Christophe;
On 23-Aug-10, at 8:08 AM, funemea wrote:
Hi,
Question to Milton actually.
Then why not ask me directly?
Will there be support for the Basler ACE camera series in the future.
No there won't be in Astro IIDC. As I said before on this list, I will not support other cameras within the Astro IIDC application unless they at a bare minimum support the IIDC protocol.
To support some other protocol or specification, It would have to be a new product and would be very expensive.
Right now there are two competing ethernet Camera protocols that costs in the $1000 range for information just to buy the spec before one can get started. And what I have seen does not impress and will have really horrible performance for controlling the camera . It's all packets of XML data, so to change the brightness from one value to another means writing about 1 to 4 kilobytes of XML data over ethernet to change the "profile", where as for both USB 2 and FireWire it's 4 bytes to control a register.
Gigabit ethernet is basically designed to be for Machine vision (locked down, solid, never changing) and not interactive.
They use fast/gigabit ethernet interfaces.
And Apple doesn't. Apple's Gigabit Ethernet doesn't even match what one can get with FW800 for throughput.
To gain the performance that is supposed to be there, I would have to write our own PCI Gigabit drivers to support Gigabit Ethernet hardware (not Apples), tuned for Cameras and Apple only has two expandable Macs to add PCI Express / PC34 cards too do it with. So it would only get "high" performance on two of Apples least selling and most expensive Mac models.
The nice thing of course is that they offer a competitive (lower price) alternative to the PRG offerings but still with similar ccd's.
I see. So I'm supposed to plunk down $50,000+ buying hardware and software and spend 18+ months development time to save you a few dollars?
I've read with proper tuning and ROI 200fps can be achieved on the smaller models.
You can get that already with FireWire 800 without any screwing around. I had a PixeLink CMOS FW400 camera here for testing a few weeks ago, I was recording to disk at 320x240 at 240 FPS without breaking a sweat.
So you'd have to convince me that this would make sense from an economic point of view, and I just don't see it. Apple's Mac market share is effectively stagnant compared to the total number of PCs being produced annually, so growth for me is basically non existent. The fact that Macs' were not even mentioned at the WWDC this year speaks volumes to the direction Steve / Apple is going with Macs.
HTH..
Milton J. Aupperle
President
ASC - Aupperle Services and Contracting
Mac Software (Drivers, Components and Application) Specialist
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