Coaxpress High Speed Camera

Getting Started

First issue was installing the framegrabber in a PCIEx4 slot. It seemed to work but was complaining about not having x8 so I moved it. I'm not sure if cable order matters for the coax connections but I found an order that does and I'm sticking to it.

From here on I'm using the firmware pre-installed on the framegrabber and camera. The framegrabber indicates it needs a firmware update and I'll get to that at some point.

21:14:02.172 [WARNING] Device open with warnings: W: Firmware update required

This is the what the framegrabber reports for firmware:

And for the camera:

It looks like order of operations is very important in Vision Point. This camera comes up as 1608x400 pixels at 500fps:

If I stream data and then decrease the resolution to increase frame rate, the preview goes crazy and I just get a bunch of garbage:
This looks to me like desyncronization of the camera and framegrabber.

Similarly increasing resolution after streaming data causes mayhem as well:

If I instead change the resolution to 1696x1710 immediately after power cycle and starting Vision Point (before streaming any data) then I get full resolution at nearly 500fps.

For this screenshot I also set PixelCorrectSetMode = Raw. It looks like the black (and maybe white too) correction data is bad.

It is also interesting to note that there is a focus gradient vertically across the image. This makes sense since the sensor is physically slanted in the camera housing. I'm really not sure why they did this.

If I set resolution to 640x200 (which based on the label I think should give me 8000fps) as the very first thing after connecting, then I do see an increase in frame rate to 1000fps. This isn't the 8000 I expect but indicates that frame rate should adjust automatically with resolution.

I'm now updating the firmware on the framegrabber from 4.9 to 4.11. The changelog indicates that "the FPS indicator is stable" as a change in 4.11 so maybe some of the FPS numbers I've been seeing so far are wrong.