The viewfinder hardware is a computer or embedded device connected to the camera over Ethernet. Using a router or switch there can be multiple cameras and/or viewfinders in the network. A wireless router can be used to free the connection from the wire and allow wireless communications/video transmission between the camera and viewfinder.

What devices can be used:

• any laptop
• any netbook
• any desktop PC as well of course
• embedded devices, PDAs, MIDs, Smartphones

Requirements:

• Ethernet Interface (or wifi)
• Software that can receive and display an rtsp video stream (VLC, Mplayer, Gstreamer or ElphelVision which works under Linux, Windows and OS X)
• Enough horsepower for the certain desired resolution/fps, Full HD@25fps will most likely NOT play back smoothly on a small cellphone (we tested: 720p@25fps works fine on a Netbook)

The official Apertus viewfinder (name still needs to be found)

We are creating a viewfinder device that works out of the box and has all the required features that professional filmmakers are looking for. The plans are still a little fuzzy but here is a rough overview of what will be in this device:

• ARM CPU based beagleboard with daugtherboard or clone (e.g. DevKit8000, IGEPv2) or Gumstix with HDMI/LCD and Ethernet expansion board, this wiki has a great list of beagleboard clones
• beagleboard features: HDMI/DVI, S-Video connectors, headphones jack
• custom (fast booting) Linux distro (that starts right into ElphelVision with live video feed from the camera)
• touchscreen LCD in the 10" region with a resolution of at least 1280x720 pixels
• sunshades
• arm to mount it on the camera

The device will run the touchscreen oriented viewfinder software ElphelVision.

Elphel 373 will introduce a second FPGA based video pipeline that provides real time video at a lower resolution. This allows the viewfinder to display a lower resolution video stream like (1280x720) while the camera is recording the full resolution video stream to HDD/SSD/etc.

Optical viewfinder:

Our first attempt to make a real optical viewfinder was based on parts used from a super8 camera, because it somewhat matches the size of the sensor. There is still interest in the development for an optical viewfinder, but it would greatly depend on the size of the new sensor.

The project includes:

• research and find all necessary optics.
• Design the enclosures and eyepiece (using as much existing/affordable  parts as possible)
• designing a modified Elphel front-end.

Task: Custom Viewfinder Linux Distribution

The Apertus Viewfinder (still looking for a name) will be a bagleboard like embedded device with a touchscreen LCD. We are looking for someone to create a custom Linux distribution (based on Ubuntu for example) for the ARM architecture to run on this viewfinder computer. This means we will need to remove a lot of what comes with Ubuntu by default that we do not need while new things like touchscreen oriented tools need to be added, etc. This task will most likely never be finished as the distribution will grow and evolve with the project. What we are primarily looking for now is someone who gets the stone rolling.

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Contacts

Please contact us when you decide to start working on this task so we can add a note to the task history about your goals.

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History

30th Dec. 2009: Task openend