Spinnaker SDK

[Suman Kalyan Guha]

Hello!

This is Suman, I am a postdoc at McLean Hospital and am currently studying addiction-like behaviors. Super excited for this platform — this has the potential to turbocharge high-throughput behavior!

I was particularly excited about recording behavior using spinnaker SDK in v0.30 and would love to know more about its implementation. 

Thanks!

[Jonny Saunders]

Hello Suman!!

The interface with the Spinnaker SDK uses this object: https://docs.auto-pi-lot.com/en/latest/autopilot.hardware.cameras.html#autopilot.hardware.cameras.Camera_Spinnaker

and you can see an example of its use in the testing task we used to benchmark its use with DLC-Live: https://github.com/wehr-lab/autopilot/blob/4dce084bc279bbb4855374e2b37639f7b0dee206/autopilot/tasks/test.py#L24

It follows the (still flexible) API for cameras in Autopilot, a description for which can be found in the metaclass documentation: https://docs.auto-pi-lot.com/en/latest/autopilot.hardware.cameras.html#autopilot.hardware.cameras.Camera

in short, a few common camera parameters (like fps, exposure, etc.) are wrapped in properties that let them be set like "cam.fps = 30" but the rest of the GenICam properties can be accessed and edited with the "get" and "set" methods. you can see the list of properties and values with "readable_attributes" and "writable_attributes". you can see the options for a particular setting (eg. the available color modes for a camera) using the "list_options" method.

from there you can capture frames and use them either by streaming them, saving them locally, or by using a python Queue. (see the "stream", "write" and "queue" methods)

let me know what other questions you have :):) The Spinnaker class is new and surely can use some shaping from other contributors, so if you have ideas id love to work with you on them!