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Starting the EDT PDV driver

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Jacqueline Ryan edited this page Aug 20, 2019 · 3 revisions

Background

The EDT PDV driver is the enabling technology behind the CLCamera class, and provides a frame grabber to Camera Link output devices. The driver software is compatible with Linux and Windows only, so the CLCamera is disabled on MacOS systems. Installing the EDT driver requires building from source and linking against the Linux kernel source, so ensure that the Operating system is compatible with the target machine (As of August 2018, Ubuntu 18.04 or earlier, RedHat 7 or earlier: i.e., v2.6.18 through 4.15 kernels).

The first section of this tutorial will cover first-time installation of the EDT driver on a new machine. The second section will discuss initializing the driver on startup, which is currently a maintenance task needed to use the Camera Link driver.

  1. Installation

  2. Restarting the PDV driver

Installation

Requirements

  • A compatible Linux distribution with a kernel version between v2.6.18 and v4.15
  • A computer with a Camera Link frame grabber card installed in the PCI expansion slot
  • The EDT PDV package, available in .run and .rpm formats from the EDT website
  • A user account with root privileges

Procedure

  1. Check that the Linux kernel is compatible with the command below. The version should be greater than 2.6.18 but less than 4.15 (as of August 2018).
    uname -r
  1. Make sure to uninstall any previous version. PDV software is typically installed to /opt/EDTpdv/, so check the contents of that folder. If there are files there, run /opt/EDTpdv/uninstall.sh. If using an rpm installation, enter the command:
    rpm -q EDTpdv
    rpm -ev EDTpdv
  1. The EDT website contains links to download the latest version of the PDV software. There are two installation options available: a .run (bash shell script) file and a rpm package. For most systems, it is best to choose the .run file installer as it provides greater flexibility to the target installation directory.

4a. For the .run file installation: Once the previous version of PDV has been uninstalled, navigate to the location of the .run file downloaded from the PDV website, and run it:

    chmod +x EDTpdv_lnx_<version>.run
    sudo ./EDTpdv_lnx_<version>.run /opt/EDTpdv

where <version> is the version number of the downloaded .run file. Although /opt/EDTpdv is standard, the script argument can be changed to the desired installation directory.

4b. For the .rpm installation: Enter the superuser mode, and install the package normally:

    su
    rpm -ivh EDTpdv-<version>.noarch.rpm
  1. If setup is successful, navigate to the LiveView source repository directory and intialize the camera connection:
    /opt/EDTpdv/initcam -f NGIS.cfg
  1. Test that the installation is successful by attempting to grab a frame from the device:
    /opt/EDTpdv/take

If all goes well, take should run without crashing and report 0 timeouts and 0 overruns.

Restarting the PDV driver

After every restart or on a fresh login, the PDV driver must be restarted (TO DO: workaround for this?). Simply run the following two commands:

    sudo /opt/EDTpdv/setup.sh
    /opt/EDTpdv/initcam -f /path/to/LiveViewOpenSource/NGIS.cfg

Check that the driver has been mounted properly by running the take command:

    /opt/EDTpdv/take

If there are no errors, timeouts, or overruns, LiveView is ready to be used in CLCamera mode.

Sometimes, the camera config file is not the default. If the camera connected to the computer does not match the configuration file provided with LiveView, the image may "scroll" up or down across the screen, or the image may not look correct. Many more camera configuration files can be found here:

    $ cd /opgs/EDTpdv/camera_config
    $ initcam -f itb.cfg # for example

The specific configuration file will vary depending on the camera in use.

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