Particle Collisions We had a couple of great days in Hamburg, heard talks about interesting topics and met a lot of inspirational people. And we were also given a grand tour of the particle accelerators that we were all so "physically attracted" to :) . DESY's primary task, since the research centre was founded in 1959, has been to investigate the smallest particles known at that time.. Over it's five decade operation history, DESY provided essential information and data for solving some of the...
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At the end of this week we will be traveling to Hamburg in order to attend the "Exceptional Hardware & Software Meeting" (EHSM) . It would appear that makers and hackers tend to be physically attracted to large particle collider installations, given that we had our first apertus° first apertus° community meeting in Geneva near the CERN Large Hadron Collider , and now EHSM is held at the DESY (Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron - German Electron Synchrotron) operating a particle accelerator...
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The rather unfortunate wiring of the HDMI encoder chip on the Zedboard of AXIOM Alpha makes it impossible to use any full (4:4:4) color mode, because there are just not enough data input lines to transfer a complete pixel. The only modes we can use are those where partial data for two pixels is transmitted and the missing parts are interpolated by the encoder (ADV7511). The mode we started with was the rather strange RGB 2:4:2 mode where pairs of red/green and green/blue are sent and both red...
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Let me start by saying we are very sorry in case we managed to scare you for a second (or maybe a bit longer) :) I hope we did not do any permanent damage to your opinion of us. We did not sell the company and we have no plans to do so. We were actually pretty sure our proposals were considered extreme enough that nobody would take them seriously. So let's summarize what we pulled off this year at the one time of the year when there are no rules (April 1st). On April 1st we posted the following...
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We have now resolved the issues we were facing with HDMI video recorders . It turns out that monitors are capable of synchronising to whatever frequency you are supplying them with, making them very tolerant and usable straight out of the box - even with non standard signals. Recorders on the other hand are a lot less flexible when it comes to the frequency of the supplied input signals. It appears that they will stubbornly refuse to do anything unless the supplied input frequency is perfect...
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Last Friday in Vienna marked the first public presentation of our functional Axiom Alpha prototype. (Ok, so we did actually showcase our prototype earlier at the Photoniks Congress in Berlin , but that was for a predominantly members-only audience). What better location could we have hoped to do so other than at Austria's first hacker/fablab, the Vienna Metalab . Our attempt to summarise our project - the theory surrounding the Axiom camera plans and the prototype - lasted roughly one hour,...
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A report by Oscar Spierenburg We arrived in Berlin the day before the Photonik Congress started, where apertus° proudly presented the biggest development of the AXIOM prototype at the "Make Light" exhibition. I had never visited Berlin. In fact, I'd never visited Germany before. My impressions were quite similar to the image that lots of people had enthusiastically described to me: a youthful, vivid and very dynamic city. Left: Berlin Altes Museum ("Old Museum") | Right: Berlins typical yellow...
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We have made a major development breakthrough enabling real-time Full HD video output via the AXIOM Alpha prototype’s HDMI port. (The final AXIOM camera is planned to have 3G-SDI instead of HDMI interfaces, but for now we are using what is available on the Zedboard development platform). Our current prototype allows us to output progressive 1080p video at up to 60 FPS downscaled from our 4K Super35 image sensor. This represents the completion of a major milestone on our path to the crowd-...
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What does "open" mean? There has been an ongoing community discussion around the level of openness to which apertus° will be willing/able to go with the Axiom. This discussion has lasted for several years up to now. On our website (See: “Why Open Source?” ), we have detailed the problems that openness can introduce with proprietary interfaces. In most cases, developers are forced to sign binding non-disclosure-agreements (NDA) before any technical documentation may be acquired. With this in...
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We have been invited to showcase the Axiom Alpha prototype at the Photonics Congress in Berlin on February the 20th, 2014 . The event itself does not seem to be open to the public but if anyone in that area is interested we can surely schedule a meet up time/place while we are in Berlin (from the 19th - 21st).
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and the AXIOM project is certified Open Hardware by
.
