labcams

A package for video acquisition and automation of experimens, uses separate processes to record and store data.

Usage

Open a terminal and type labcams -h for help.

The first time you run labcams it will create a folder in the user home directory where the default preference file is stored.

Configuration files:

Configuration files ensure you always use the same parameters during your experiments.

The configuration files are simple json files. There are 2 parts to the files.

A section were each camera is specified and a part with general parameters.

Available camera drivers:

• PCO - install pco.sdk
• AVT - install Vimba SDK and pymba
• QImaging
• pointgrey - FLIR cameras - install Spinnaker
• openCV - webcams and so on

Each camera has its own parameters, there are some parameters that are common to all:

• recorder - the type of recorder tiff ffmpeg opencv binary
• haccel - nvidia or intel for use with ffmpeg for compression.
• 'CamStimTrigger' - controls the arduino camera trigger, see the duino examples folder.

UDP and ZMQ:

labcams can listen for UDP or ZMQ commands.

To configure use the command "server":"udp" in the end of the config file.

The port can be configured with "server_port":9999

The UDP commands are:

• Set the experiment name - expname=EXPERIMENT_NAME
• Software trigger the cameras (this is software, multiple cameras are not in sync) - softtrigger=1
• Hardware trigger mode and save - trigger=1
• Start/stop saving - manualsave=1
• Add a message to the log - log=MESSAGE
• Quit - quit