Elphel next camera – sample configuration
With all three of the new boards for the NC393 series cameras assembled (but only partially tested) it is now possible to connect them with the existent components and show some possible configurations. Main applications of Elphel cameras are scientific research, system prototyping, proofs of concepts designs – areas that routinely require unique configurations, and this new camera series will continue tradition of high modularity.
The camera boards look nothing like Lego blocks, but nevertheless they can zip together in different ways allowing to make new systems with minimal additional hardware. Elphel new design values our prior work (hardware development is still expensive) and provides compatibility with the existent modules, simultaneously enabling new features that were not previously possible, The most obvious example – sensor interface. The 10393 board is designed to accommodate our existent sensor front ends, custom flex cables of different lengths and shapes. That will help us to reduce the transition period to the new camera so we can focus on the high performance system board and port portions of the software and FPGA code, code that is already proven to work.
The same camera sensor ports will allow us to use multi-lane serial sensor connections needed for the modern high speed and high resolution devices, but we will work on this only after the first part will be done and we will be able to replace our current systems with the new ones. Implementation of the serial sensor connection has some challenges for us because the used protocols are not open and we have to rely only on the pieces of the available information and some reverse-engineering and research. It is not the most fun work to do, but being an Open Hardware/ Free Software company we will not provide our users with semi-open documentation. Our users will always be able to rebuild all the binaries from the source code – same binaries from the same code we have access ourselves. The only NDA Elphel ever signed was with Kodak – that sensor NDA had clear expiration time, so at the moment we planned to start distributing our products (and so the source documentation) we were not be bound by it anymore.
Sample configuration illustrated below combines the new and existent modules, the later have links to the design documentation on Elphel wiki. It is not so for the new boards (10393, 10385, 10389) – no circuit diagrams, parts lists or PCB layouts are publicly available when this post is being written. Hardware errors are usually much more expensive to fix, and we do not want somebody to duplicate our hardware “bugs” until we consider our products (“binaries”) to be good enough to go to our users. So while we set up public Git repository when we start software development, we publish our hardware documentation simultaneously with the start of the product distribution – together with “binaries”, not ahead of them.
Sample configuration of the electronic modules of Elphel NC393 camera family
