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The Elphel Development Blog is not meant to be a developer-only board. It was created to give a general overview about what’s happening behind the scenes in the Elphel labs.
The Blog also gives each individual developer a place to display his own progress, or talk about ideas and future plans.
Recently we started featuring people who use Elphel cameras in their projects and give them a space to talk about their experience and show what their project is about.
Model 373… after 3 years im thinking you have dropped this project.
Might be best to let the opensource camera project know this.
it seems unfair to keep people in a false sence of hope about a camera you no longer are interesting in moving foward.
or at least tell them they would have to wait 10 years, and they can move on to a better partner for this project..
cheers
Trilec
Trilec,
That is correct – we did put the 373 on hold. While the testing of the board was fine, and many new features proved to be operational,I’m not satisfied with the FPGA-to-memory bandwidth of the DaVinci chip. So while it is sufficient for the immediate requirements, it does not have large margin for the future sensor upgrades.
While we still have large stock of the Axis chips and the 10373 design is already tested (we can rather quickly start manufacturing it) I’m looking for the better alternatives for the processor. If we’ll find a good one before we are close to be forced to switch from the 353 design – I’ll just keep the overall 373 design and replace the CPU chip, if not – we’ll release the 373 as it is now. There are some interesting chips to be available soon that I hope to get hands on.
As you know we are not just waiting for the new chips – we are working on very interesting projects with Eyesis cameras, improving images, combining images with inertial data, making our cameras to be precisely calibrated measurement instruments. All these developments will be applicable to the cameras based on the next processor – will it be the current DaVinci chip or something else.
So in a summary – 373 project is in a frozen or “preserved” state – hardware is tested, some minor revision changes are implemented, basic software (bootloader, GNU/Linux ) is working. But before engaging in porting all of our current functionality (FPGA code, firmware) to the new platform we are looking for the CPU alternatives while we still have some time for it.
Did I answer your questions?
Andrey
Where can I get the schematics for the cameras?
dear andrey:
xilinx have release new platform. they call it zynq. this platform combine cortex a9 and fpga together. I think the flatform is fit your project well.
best regards
Dear china_fan, thank you – we are aware of the Zynq. Just waiting to see if it (FPGA part) will be supported by WebPack or other zero-cost software. If it will be not – we can not use it and make our customers pay thousands of dollars to be able to modify our code.
There are multiple places, the easiest is our wiki.elphel.com – each board has circuit diagram, parts list and Gerber files. The circuit diagrams are also included in the software distribution – both at Sourceforge and in each physical camera file system.
Andrey
I’m very impressed by your projects, achievements and so strong many-years support to open-source initiative in such complicated sphere as realtime HD video processing. I’m very well know how hard is to continue work, based primarily on the own initiative and faith in the good tomorrow, and I wish you to catch the real success in this world today.
На самом деле, я искал сведения о реализациях Теоры, и был поражен Вашей инициативой реализовать её компрессор на ПЛИСе (и это уже в далеком 2004 году), к тому же, увенчавшейся успехом.
Желаю вам успехов и удачи в вашем деле!