Blinky Tools

This package contains a number of tools to work with Blinkies, small sound-to-light conversion sensors.

Install

pip install blinkytools

Use the GUI

The GUI can be used to record Blinky signals on live data by providing the identifier of the video stream

python -m blinkytools -v <video_stream>

or from a file by providing a file name

python -m blinkytools -v <video_filename>

When called without argument, the default video stream is used.

The GUI can also be used with a Shodensha DN3V-130BU industrial camera, but this requires to install the driver and python bindings for the driver from here.

python -m blinkytools -i

Preview the content of a file

The package can also be used to preview the content of a file recorded using the GUI.

python -m blinkytools.file_preview <filename>

Open file from within Python

The file format is MessagePack and can thus be read by any appropriate software package. The content is as follows:

• Software version
• File creation date
• Framerate of the signal
• A dictionary of extra metadata
• The Blinky signals stored as a binary data array

This is an example of script that opens a Blinky file.

from blinkytools import BlinkyFile

# open the file and load the content
filename = "myfile.blinky"
content = BlinkyFile.load(filename)

print("Software version used:", content.version)
print("Framerate:", content.fps)
print("File created on:", content.creation)
print("Dictionary of extra metadata:", content.metadata)

# The Blinky signal are in the data attribute
print("The data shape and type:", content.data.shape, content.data.dtype)

The dimension of the content.data array is as follows.

• For monochrome cameras, the array has 4 dimensions, with shape == (n_time, n_blinkies, h_patch, w_patch), where n_time and n_blinkies are the number of frames and Blinky sensors, respectively. The data is exctraced in small patches of h_patch x w_patch around the Blinky locations.
• For color cameras, the array has 5 dimensions, with shape == (n_time, n_blinkies, h_patch, w_patch, n_colors), where n_colors is the number of color channels.

Note on storage of Numpy arrays in MessagePack

When using the BlinkyFile class, the signals are automatically transformed into numpy.ndarray. The arrays are stored in MessagePack format as the following dictionary:

{
  "__nd__": True,  # indicates this is a numpy ndarray
  "shape": obj.shape,  # shape of the array
  "dtype": obj.dtype.str,  # numeric type of the data
  "data": obj.tobytes(),  # the data as a byte array
}

Note that this information is only needed if dealing with the content of the file directly.l When using blinkytools, the conversion is transparent.