Unified Camera Access

libuca is a thin wrapper to make the different cameras (via CameraLink or PCIe) accessible in an easy way.

Specification

Properties of cameras are accessed in a vendor-neutral way by specifying the property names as defined in uca.h. The following list is the definite specification of basic properties that all devices must implement:

Property Name	Property String	Unit	Access	Meaning
UCA_PROP_NAME	name	null-terminated C string	r	Name of camera
UCA_PROP_WIDTH	width	pixels	r/w	Width of image to be taken
UCA_PROP_HEIGHT	height	pixels	r/w	Height of image to be taken
UCA_PROP_MAX_WIDTH	max-width	pixels	r	Maximum possible width
UCA_PROP_MAX_HEIGHT	max-height	pixels	r	Maximum possible height
UCA_PROP_BITDEPTH	bit-depth	number of bits	r	Bits per pixel
UCA_PROP_EXPOSURE	exposure	microseconds	r/w	Duration of image capture
UCA_PROP_FRAMERATE	frame-rate	frames per second	r	Current number of frames per second

Code

Followingly, we will build libpco (the hardware-dependent pco.edge "driver") and libuca. First of all, get the sources

cd some-empty-dir
bzr clone bzr+ssh://user@ufo.kit.edu/vogelgesang/pco-diag libpco
bzr clone bzr+ssh://user@ufo.kit.edu/vogelgesang/uca libuca

Make sure, that you have installed the Silicon Software ​Runtime Environment. Then build and install libpco using

mkdir build && cd build
cmake ../libpco
make && sudo make install

If everything went okay, you can try the diagnose program in the build directory. It tries to open the camera and frame grabber, prints out some information and stores one frame as out.raw.

Finally, you can build libuca

rm -rf *
cmake ../libuca
make

Using libuca

The following test program is supplied with libuca and demonstrates the general functionality of the library:

#include <stdio.h>
#include "uca.h"

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
    struct uca_t *uca = uca_init();
    if (uca == NULL) {
        printf("Couldn't find a camera\n");
        return 1;
    }

    uint32_t width = 800, height = 600;
    uca->cam_set_property(uca, UCA_PROP_WIDTH, &width);
    uca->cam_set_property(uca, UCA_PROP_HEIGHT, &height);

    char camera_name[256] = "foobar";
    uca->cam_get_property(uca, UCA_PROP_NAME, camera_name);

    printf("Camera name: %s\n", camera_name);

    uca_destroy(uca);
    return 0;
}