This repository was converted to Mercurial and moved to Bitbucket.
qCamera is a unified camera interface meant to be used in experimental control systems such as qControl, a system developed at Aarhus University for running experiments with trapped ions. It is designed to have commands for cameras be as generic as possible to the user, that way swapping out physical cameras should require little more than changing a line of code or two to reflect the new hardware.
Not all SDK features of supported cameras are necessarily implemented. Currently, cameras supported by qCamera include:
- Andor cameras
- Development is focused on the iXon line, so there could be some issues with other Andor cameras.
- PCO Sensicam
- Thorlabs DCx-series CCD/CMOS cameras
- OpenCV generic camera interface (partial support)
This repository includes a sample PyQt-based application for testing
new camera interfaces in the viewer directory.
usage: viewer.py [-h] [-c <camera type> | -s]
qCamera Viewer
optional arguments:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
-c <camera type>, --camera-type <camera type>
Specify the camera type to use. If not given, default
to the last camera type used. Options include: opencv
sensicam andor thorlabs_dcx
-s, --camera-select Run the camera select dialog.
qCamera is mostly tested to work on Windows, but this depends on the implementation of specific cameras. In the case of cameras with a Linux SDK which shares function calls with its Windows counterpart, this should be easy to implement if not already done so in the existing code. Apart from having the shared libraries for the cameras being used installed in the proper location for ctypes to find it, the following Python packages are required:
Optional requirements which if not met will result in some slightly limited functionality:
- Matplotlib for running tests
- PyQt4 for using the viewer application.
- GUIQwt for image widgets in tests and the viewer application.
All of these are contained in the default installation of Python(x,y) for Windows. Please note that all of the above are required to run the qCamera Viewer application.
There is an issue with compression introduced in commit c1a5edf. It
is not yet confirmed, but this may be due to using version 3.0.0 of
PyTables, which ships with Python(x,y), versus the more recent 3.1.x
branch. The change will be reverted for the time being until a
solution can be worked out.
python setup.py install
The camera that appears in the qCamera viewer icon is the Gnome-dev-camera by David Vignoni and licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License via Wikimedia Commons. The original can also be found here.
