We know a lot of people are waiting for news about hardware production and we are doing production and development in parallel. Our most recent article talked about progress with electronics manufacturing - in this article and Team Talk we want to share news about new ongoing developments though. AXIOM Beta Dual 6G SDI module in development When choosing between HDMI and SDI we have so far given HDMI priority as, for developers working with the AXIOM Beta, it meant a larger and more affordable...
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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. For a detailed itinerary of outstanding tasks and a statement on expected timeframes please see Mission Briefings on the project's Wiki. Metal Full...
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For this year’s Summer of Code, Google awarded apertus° three student slots. This is significant as new mentoring organizations are warned that they’re likely to receive a maximum of 1-2 slots in their first year. We set out to choose the best of the best from almost thirty project proposals - a difficult decision as all were of a very high standard. The chosen students have already started reading up on the required documentation and have been familiarising themselves with development tools as...
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Development History in Images These clips were shot over the course of around 18 months of development. Some of the periodic developments improved image quality eg. by reducing noise, but some tweaks didn't make the image noticeably better to any significant degree so please be aware that this collection of clips demonstrate technical snapshots relating to software and hardware development only. Nothing was shot to highlight specific aspects of the camera's development, rather, we wanted to...
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We are very proud to announce that apertus° has been accepted as a new mentoring organization for this year’s Google Summer of Code (GSoC) . As only a small number of new organizations are allowed to join each year and the majority already in the program have been participating for many years, this is especially exciting. For anyone not familiar, GSoC is a program where students are paid to contribute to selected open source projects between June and August. Project Overview apertus° GSoC...
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Small Hardware Changes/Upgrades here and there In this team talk, Sebastian gives a brief rundown of some recent hardware changes to the AXIOM Beta development kits. Changes include; different chips to reduce the Lattice FPGA programming time, a new connector to attach the main cooling fan (which is now held in place by noise reducing nylon screws), some schematic changes relating to the JTAG interface FTDI chips (to reduce power feedback), a new onboard sound buzzer. Also, to reduce mechanical...
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As you have probably read in our AXIOM Beta Manufacturing Report , we are still building all the early adopter AXIOM Beta developer kits completely manually. Obviously we need to increase our production speed to grow the project and to be able to deliver a reasonable amount of cameras any time soon. So in the last four months, we have put a considerable amount of time and resources into automating our production processes. The most time consuming aspect is picking and placing components onto...
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Socket based CMV12000 Image Sensor Frontend SFE CMV12000 THT V0.16 PCB Top SFE CMV12000 THT V0.16 PCB Bottom The current batch of AXIOM Beta development kits use a Zero Insertion Force (ZIF) Sensor Socket to connect the image sensor to the PCB. The socket type is the discontinued CPU Socket 604, which is only intended as a temporary solution to allow developers to easily swap out sensors. But it has some drawbacks as it covers a hole in the PCB, designed to accommodate a metal plate through to...
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New Team Talk Naming Scheme With the recent Team Talk releases, people have asked us if we really wore the same set of cloths for several weeks - as we looked the same in Team Talk 10 and 11 . The answer, shockingly, is no! We don't wear the same outfit all the time - we shot these two Team Talk episodes back to back on the same day! To make it easier to see which blocks belong together in the future, we’ve come up with a new naming scheme. From now on, Team Talks shot on the same day will be...
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As promised, Team Talk 11 is all about AXIOM Beta enclosures. It covers the manufacturing process of the Skeleton enclosure (see second video below). We share pictures and CAD files of the Simple Enclosure which is designed as a shell around the Skeleton enclosure and can be entirely 3D printed - so it can easily be adapted and modified by the community. You can also get the full CAD files of the Full Enclosure and review the current design - which combines laser cut, bent and CNC milled...
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