Tools¶

Several tools are available to ensure libuca works as expected. All of them are installed with make install.

uca-camera-control – simple graphical user interface¶

Records and shows frames. Moreover, you can change the camera properties in a side pane:

You can see all available options of uca-camera-control with:

$ uca-camera-control --help-all

uca-grab – grabbing frames¶

Grab frames with

$ uca-grab --num-frames=10 camera-model

store them on disk as frames.tif if libtiff is installed, otherwise as frame-00000.raw, frame-000001.raw. The raw format is a memory dump of the frames, so you might want to use ImageJ to view them. You can also specify the output filename or filename prefix with the -o/--output option:

$ uca-grab -n 10 --output=foobar.tif camera-model

Instead of reading exactly n frames, you can also specify a duration in fractions of seconds:

$ uca-grab --duration=0.25 camera-model

You can see all available options of uca-grab with:

$ uca-grab --help-all

uca-benchmark – check bandwidth¶

Measure the memory bandwidth by taking subsequent frames and averaging the grabbing time:

$ uca-benchmark option camera-model

You can specify the number of frames per run with the -n/--num-frames option, the number of runs with the -r/--num-runs option and test asynchronous mode with the async option:

$ uca-benchmark -n 100 -r 3 --async mock

# Type    Trigger Source   FPS        Bandwidth   Frames acquired/total
  sync    auto             17.57 Hz   4.39 MB/s   300/300 acquired (0.00% dropped)
  async   auto             19.98 Hz   4.99 MB/s   300/300 acquired (0.00% dropped)

# --- General information ---
# Camera: mock
# Sensor size: 4096x4096
# ROI size: 512x512
# Exposure time: 0.050000s

You can see all available options of uca-benchmark with:

$ uca-benchmark --help-all

uca-info – get properties information¶

Get information about camera properties with:

$ uca-info camera-model

For example:

$ uca-info mock
# RO | name                      | "mock camera"
# RO | sensor-width              | 4096
# RO | sensor-height             | 4096
# RO | sensor-pixel-width        | 0.000010
# RO | sensor-pixel-height       | 0.000010
# RO | sensor-bitdepth           | 8
...

uca-gen-doc – generate properties documentation¶

Generate HTML source code of property documentation of a camera with:

$ uca-gen-doc camera-model