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New build

Hi everybody,
Here is something for the more adventurous – a new build that’s a pretty big departure, ready for you to try with absolutely no documentation. I’ve sent this out to a few users to get some feedback, so I thought I’d post it here to see if y’all are interested in giving it a try too. Documentation will follow on the wiki, but it’s pretty straightforward to play with, even easier to use than the previous firmware/pixymon.

The biggest improvements are in button teach (give it a try while running PixyMon to see some cool region-growing) and the general color filtering is significantly improved — less false positives. And there are sliders in the config dialog that are interactive, fairly self explanatory – but I’ll say that the the “range” sliders are sort of like little dials that adjust the inclusiveness of each signature on-the-fly, so no need to reteach.

Windows version:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9hNWd6bDWpiekxMODE2cmlndjg/view?usp=sharing

Mac version:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9hNWd6bDWpid1g2TUMtWnFLdTA/view?usp=sharing

For Linux we don’t have a binary, but you can build from github using the “prerelease” branch.

The firmware is in the build, so no need to download a separate file. Just run it — it should see that you have an old version and ask you if you want to upload new firmware, which you should.

Let us know what you think!

Hi Rich,
I try the new build to disable AEC but when I disable (un-check AEC) an error occurs as " error: There was a problem setting a parameter" in the pixyMon and the pixyMon window becomes black (cannot see any objects).
Could you check this function again
Thank you!

Here is new firmware that includes a re-design of this section. It’s much more intuitive. (Use the same PixyMon you installed above and install this firmware using the instructions here:
http://cmucam.org/projects/cmucam5/wiki/Uploading_New_Firmware)

Thank you so much, Rich

Hey Rich,

I’ve updated my host and pixy with 2.0.1 and 2.0.2, respectively.

It took me a good amount of time to get my Beaglebone Black setup and running the software. You can read my posts here:

http://www.cmucam.org/boards/9/topics/4977
http://www.cmucam.org/boards/9/topics/5006

but I finally got the host software working at least.

My issue is, when I try to run hello_pixy or the python counterpart I do get a response from the Pixy and it correctly reports my FW version, but it just hangs at “Detecting Blocks…”. Got any ideas on a fix?

Yeah… I broke libpixyusb when I did a merge recently. We’re fixing… sorry about that. We’re preparing for official release and didn’t stage things correctly.

should all be good by the weekend–

Awesome, thanks for the note! If you need anything tested before release, drop me a line, I’d be happy to help.

Allen,

Please download the latest commit (cad657532271b8b59cb9e8c21e4016612f032d45) and rebuild libpixyusb and hello_pixy. We’ve just fixed a bug in the library.

Thanks
John

Awesome John!

Deleted then re-cloned the repo, rebuilt libpixyusb and libpixyusb_swig and I’m getting blocks like a charm from both.

I see that Pixymon still has issues building though with the “QMAKE_CXXFLAGS += -mno-ms-bitfields” in ~/pixy/src/host/pixymon/pixymon.pro

I’ll continue to test and report back with any further issues. For reference, I’m still on 2.0.2 on the pixy.

Regarding -mno-ms-bitfields what OS are you using? and is it causing the build to fail?

This is needed for gcc ver >= 4.7.0 because of extra padding it adds to structs with the packed attribute. (it’s a new bug-feature of gcc)

It will break firmware upload if it isn’t there.

We haven’t found a gcc version-specific way to add this flag to the qt .pro file…

I’m using the BBB Debian Image from: http://beagleboard.org/latest-images/ *edit: gcc --version gives me: gcc (Debian 4.6.3-14) 4.6.3

Yes, it causes the build to fail. Here’s the full output without commenting out the “QMAKE_CXXFLAGS += -mno-ms-bitfields” in pixymon.pro

root@beaglebone:/home/debian/pixy/scripts# sudo ./build_pixymon_src.sh
mkdir: cannot create directory ../build': File exists mkdir: cannot create directory…/build/pixymon/’: File exists
mkdir: cannot create directory ../build/pixymon/src': File exists mkdir: cannot create directory…/build/pixymon/src/host’: File exists
Creating build folder…
Starting build…
Building for linux
Project MESSAGE: Warning: unknown QT: widgets
make: Entering directory /home/debian/pixy/build/pixymon/src/host/pixymon' make: Warning: Fileui_mainwindow.h’ has modification time 2.1e+07 s in the future
g++ -c -pipe -Wno-unused-parameter -mno-ms-bitfields -O2 -Wall -W -D_REENTRANT -DQT_WEBKIT -D__LINUX__ -DQT_NO_DEBUG -DQT_XML_LIB -DQT_GUI_LIB -DQT_CORE_LIB -DQT_SHARED -I/usr/share/qt4/mkspecs/linux-g++ -I. -I/usr/include/qt4/QtCore -I/usr/include/qt4/QtGui -I/usr/include/qt4/QtXml -I/usr/include/qt4 -I…/…/common -I/usr/include/libusb-1.0 -I. -I. -o main.o main.cpp
cc1plus: error: unrecognized command line option ‘-mno-ms-bitfields’
make: *** [main.o] Error 1
make: Leaving directory /home/debian/pixy/build/pixymon/src/host/pixymon' mkdir: cannot create directorybin’: File exists
cp: cannot stat `src/host/pixymon/PixyMon’: No such file or directory
strip: ‘bin/PixyMon’: No such file
root@beaglebone:/home/debian/pixy/scripts#

Thanks – John’s latest git commit (last night) fixes this.