NickK

Thank you :)

Tomorrow is the last day of work and I already have tuesday mapped out to get things going on the job hunt.. will start applying immediately but for the first week I will take it a little slower.

I had some interest - although they themselves are effectively a small contracting consultancy.. Good guys but not quite the level of stability I'm looking for.

On the driver front - from past experience it's a crappy long list of applications coming up.. but you sometimes get periods where there's a gap so I can focus on doing some work at that point.

Good luck Nick. I hope it works out (and you can get back to your drivers ;-)

I seem to be having some interest.. but not counting chickens..

However… OSX 10.9 supports OpenCL on the Intel chips too.. so it'll work on the mac mini (although slower as it's using system ram).

More fun is the MBP 2011 GPU cooling is borderline.. because image processing is almost infinitely parallel.. the GPU gets toasty! This version of the MBP has an issue with insufficient cooling.. may have to have a "slow it down a bit" button to maintain a temperature that won't cause a GPU crash due to temperature.

Just a couple of things - the current isn't going to cause a problem. I've had a 100Ah car battery that normally outputs 800A for land rover starts. Current flows so it's the voltage that you need to work on.

It's a good camera, although USB 1.1 speeds. You'll need to find out what range of exposures will get you into the range. Putting a simple lens on it works well for that.

Ok I have fixed the capture crash bug and a legacy driver post processing issue.

Just a bit slow at the moment a I've not had any time for it.. (a) trip to poland on business with a tummy bug, (b) fatal traffic accident directly outside the office, then to top it off sorting out the HR support aspect of point b because few people in the office because of the tube strike then .. I had to walk 3 miles with luggage (no taxis).. and lastly I have work todo..

Grrr..

Found a bug in the titan precharging for long exposures. Now fixed will be appearing in 1.12 (yes I'm up to that!).

Also found the following ExampleApp bugs due to the new display mechanism - switching from capture to live view causes a crash which is down to when things get released.

Titan does 15fps into the GPU and displayed :) So that's keeping up with the Titan.

I can optimise some more but the Example app is only running at 120% (i.e. just one core) to run at this speed :D

I've also managed to finally get the right combination of parameters to remove the need to use the very slow CGContextDrawImage.

It's now dependant on the speed of main-memory - GPU upload over the PCI-Xpress bus. I'm getting about 3-4 fps for the upload on the 6750M with 17MB 383L images. So that's 51MBytes/sec transfer rate.. not stunning but the that's the slowest part of the process. It's 8x PCI-Express in the MBP so in theory that should be a bit faster..

Now the fun bit.. your main CPU - Memory bus is in the order of 13GBytes/sec transfer rate .. once the image into the GPU - it's processing can use the 120+GBytes/sec..

I do believe I've solved the display scaling issue :D

I am getting there with the rescaling bug..

It appears that if you allow OSX buffer your window.. then the size of the visible rectangle doesn't change.. until OSX decides to resize the buffer.. fast for static redraw but really messes up OpenGL ortho2d!

Busy over the next few days with work but I may have this working by the end of the week!

Here's one for the developers: if there's one thing to drive me nuts it's the following relationship - OpenGL glViewPort+Ortho2D+NSScrollView+convertRectToBacking.. now add scrolling, pinch zoom and window resizing.. more "boom it doesn't work".. All ExampleApp side rather than drivers luckily..

It works with the Titan flawlessly.. worked with the 383L.. but now it doesn't work with the 383L.. time for bed me thinks!

Actually I spotted a last minute bug fix in the legacy drivers -> R1.08 :)

http://stargazerslounge.com/topic/192900-atik-osx-drivers-r100-example-app/?p=2185695

I still have some stuff todo.. if I get a spare 30 minutes I'll work on:

* aspect ratio in the example app - the picture is displayed but the model to real world transform currently doesn't pay attention to it.. so things look a little squashed.

* doing a direct image copy rather than using the very slow CGImageDraw - a routine that alone that is the largest stop in execution time.. the upload to the GPU is the other slow part for large 4096x4096 images for example. 

* experimental - FFT and static stack needs rejigging to work.. should be simple enough

* addition of lightening and darkening

* connecting up the reticule enable/disable - this is working nicely when enabled in code..

* finalise the OpenCL processing -> OpenGL bridge

However for now.. I have used up my honour points with the mrs..

Just tested the 10.6.8 build with the 11000 as it goes back today! I found a small issue but that was corrected.

How slow is 10.6.8??!! It seemed fast at the time but now it's really showing it's age!

Testing complete - it seems funny when you have a 11000 returning a 50x50 subframe with 4x4 binning but it all works :)

Got royal mail delivery attempt .. I think it's arrived - will find out tomorrow :D

I think I worked out (whilst bored during the day at the SGL7 party) that it might just be possible to detect differences in Ha shift by using a 7nm and a 3nm Ha filter for some targets with high speed jets (m82?).

Hi Gustavo - I've compiled the modern drivers and I'm just working on the legacy. The problem supporting 10.6 on mac is that you need an old C2D machine todo it - I have the mini which is working nicely as I boot into 10.6 but it means I have to be sat infront of the mini todo it rather than the more convenient laptop!

Although I won't be creating the Example Application on 10.6, the drivers will be tested and then released. Craig has expressed a great interest so I'm expecting these to be picked up quickly.

OK I have the modern drivers compiled for 10.6 with 32/64bit. I forgotten how.. err nethandertal.. um bad the development tools where back then.

Just trying to get the legacy drivers compiled..

I've decided NOT to attempt to port the Example App. I really am not keen to really reinvent the wheel for 10.6. Instead I'll hand over the 10.6 drivers to someone that is currently working with 10.6 .. someone you all know and love - Craig Stark.

Right I think this is working :D as the 4000 skeleton I have is happily multiple taking exposures :)

So thats.. making things ready for the beta release :D

Going to be testing today :)

The 3xx,4xx and titan are fine.. the 4000/11000 driver has a issue that I'm actively chasing too.

So .. I have finished the code changes, however I want a couple of evenings in front of the cameras to perform a full set of tests then I'll release the Beta 2 :)

Sorry for the delay!

haha I get paid in beer sometimes too, creativity definitely goes up :) but so do bugs :(

Sounds really interesting I'd love to give it a try. Why are you building drivers, are you interfacing with something?

Hi Oz - yes, these are OSX drivers for ATIK cameras.

I've spent one evening doing DSO and imaging the end of the garden in HA as dog fooding - found another bug that I've created.

Interesting .. PI runs JS for the glue, however the portions that do each stage are C/C++ etc.

The main things are that people are looking for in AP:

* Explore

* Plane

* Capture (Execute)

* Process

* Publish

Now there's more people also interested in the non-beauty element which involves odd image processing so make it that one stage can feed into the next with a user's own processor between them.

Good luck, that's a considerable amount of work - it may be better to look at seeing if PI libraries could be used for open source..