The Apertus AXIOM open source cinema camera has long been one of our favorite customer projects and we are excited to see their latest update:
AXIOM Team Talk 16.1 and 15.5 – Industrial Hardware Production Run, etc.
We always like seeing updates from the Apertus open source cinema camera project:
Google Summer of Code Wrap 2020
Google Summer of Code or short GSoC came to an end for this years season recently and here we want to showcase some of the cool projects students work on this year around the AXIOM camera.
AXIOM Remote: Bootloader improvement and extensions
“The task was split up in the following sub-tasks:
– Flashing of the PIC16 firmware using the PIC32 bootloader
– Self-programming of PIC32: In simple terms it basically means to flash the firmware-with-UI on the PIC32 microcontroller
– Establishing the communication between the bootloader and the firmware
– Power saving modes for PIC32, LED dimming etc.
I created a python script which runs on the host PC and it can take care of the first two sub-tasks. The user can select the connected USB-UART port, HEX file to flash and the operation to perform. The project proposal, code links and the phase-wise report are given here on the Project Wiki page.” – Priya Pandya (MetalDent)
Sebastian Pichelhofer of Apertus gave an exciting talk at FOSDEM earlier this year and the video is now on YouTube:
AXIOM – open source cinema camera Project Introduction and current state of development
The presentation will give a brief overview of the projects history & lessons learned during the course of developing a high tech camera device as community project. We also want to demo and explain the produced hardware, enclosures and sample footage then look at the challenges still ahead. Last 5 minutes reserved for Q&A
The Apertus AXIOM Open Source cinema camera projects is one of our favorites and we are excited to see that are making progress on the Beta Power Board:
The AXIOM Beta Power Board sits between the Beta Main Board and the MicroZed™ in the camera’s PCB stack. It generates all the different supply voltages for the chips and logic on the other PCB’s inside the camera. It also monitors currents so that it can estimate remaining power based on the recorded consumption. Version 1 of the Beta Power Board has the 8 different voltage rails calibrated at factory. In case of a future hardware upgrade that require any power rail to have a different reference voltage this calibration needs to be redone.
Apertus is designing an open source 4K cinema camera called AXIOM. We are excited to see the latest news from the project:
AXIOM Team Talk Volume 15.2 is out!
Max and Sebastian again dive into recent project developments like Google Summer of Code projects and the AXIOM Remote.
Once again apertus° participated in Google’s sponsored program for students working with open source projects like this one. Here is a brief insight into what was worked on this year for Summer of Code. Six student slots were filled with excellent applications and four students finished the program successfully.
Google Summer of Code student Fares Mehanna.
Their projects deal with USB3 connectivity of the AXIOM Beta, JPEG1992 lossless encoding inside the AXIOM Beta’s FPGA, improvements to AXIOM Remote and the camera’s internal central control daemon.
There has been good development progress in several areas with the camera control device, the AXIOM Remote. The device features a small display with graphical user interface, a central rotary encoder dial and physical buttons providing haptic feedback where a touchscreen (think smartphone app) simply couldn’t. There is an enclosure concept, electronics prototype and software running on the device prototype already.
From Sebastian of the Apertus Open Source Cinema Camera project:
Developer Kits have been shipping for some time now and we are aware that the most pressing question for many of you is “When will the AXIOM Beta evolve from a Developer Kit to being a production ready camera?” This article should help to answer that question, but keep in mind that the camera has been carefully designed to evolve constantly.
OSH Park 