Carnegie Mellon University Cameras



The current official release of the driver is 6.4.6, released on September 26, 2011 by Christopher R. Bakercbaker+iwan1394@cs.cmu.edu.

Carnegie Mellon University Cameras Acceptance

Carnegie Mellon University is a private institution that was founded in 1900. It has a total undergraduate enrollment of 7,022, its setting is urban, and the campus size is 155 acres. Founded in 1989 within the College of Fine Arts at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), the STUDIO serves as a locus for hybrid enterprises on the CMU campus, the Pittsburgh region, and internationally. Our current emphasis on new-media arts builds on more than two decades of experience hosting interdisciplinary artists in an environment enriched. Carnegie Mellon University. Structure (scene geometry) Motion (camera geometry) Measurements Pose Estimation known estimate 3D to 2D correspondences Triangulation estimate known 2D to 2D coorespondences Reconstruction estimate estimate 2D to 2D coorespondences.

Carnegie Mellon University Campus Map


After more than a year of wrestling with the nuances of Microsoft's 64-bit operating systems, and with no small quantity of assistance from a few brave testers (you know who you are!), I am proud to officially release this next version of the CMU 1394 Digital Camera Driver, which includes:
  • Support for all present 64-bit versions of Microsoft Windows XP, Vista and 7, allowing both native (64-bit) and emulated (32-bit) applications to access camera data via a single driver interface.
  • A completely new demo application, written from the ground up to support both 32-bit and 64-bit Windows.
  • A litany of bugfixes, many of which were contributed by individual users (for which I am grateful!), including:
    • Squashment of the nefarious BSOD on resume-from-suspend bug
    • A closer-to-correct implementation of the Serial I/O functionality described in the IIDC 1.31 standard (closer = still a little quirky, but the quirks may be in the camera I am testing with)
    • Verified Strobe and Parallel I/O functionality (Strobe controls are also now integrated into the same dialog as Gain, Zoom, Focus, etc.)
    • . and many others
  • New since the public beta:
    • Fully automated driver installation on 64-bit systems
    • Several minor bugfixes and documentation updates, but nothing that alters the API/ABI

Update: digital signatures for all kernel-mode software

All 64-bit versions of windows require a digital signature via an AuthentiCode certificate in order to run kernel-mode software. I would like to thank MathWorks for providing the funding for this certificate and allowing this driver set to continue to be published freely to the general public. MathWorks provides an adapter to the CMU 1394 Digital Camera driver as part of their Image Acquisition Toolkit to allow developers quick and easy access to images from firewire cameras within the MATLAB environment.

Known issues and limitations

Carnegie Mellon Basketball

  • Large-block asynchronous transfers. I have received several requests and offerance of patches that restore the ability to issue large asychronous I/O (i.e., larger than a single quadlet/register) requests to cameras. I am evaluating these and trying to fold them into the driver in a manner that supports 64-bit platforms.
  • Mysterious BSOD when using multiple 1394b cameras on the same bus under Windows 7. In experimenting with various configurations of cameras, 1394b host controllers, and driver settings, I have occasionally triggered inexplicable kernel panics while performing comparatively simple operations. Whether this is a quirk of the new Microsoft 1394 bus driver, of some particular host controller, of the 1394 camera driver's innards, or, most likely, of some combination thereof, remains to be seen. Using a single 1394b camera on a single bus is quite stable, however, and the circumstances where multiple cameras trigger this problem seem rare.
  • The usual assortment of bugs and quirks. Much of the frame-handling logic had to be altered to accommodate the curious limitations of DMA transfers on 64-bit systems. Although I have been unit-testing this code to the greatest extent possible, my experience is that no new code is completely bug-free. My thanks go out to the many beta testers who have helped me to this point, and further comments/questions/bug reports/etc. are especially welcome on this front.
November 23, 2020

Like any aspiring do-it-yourselfer, Sam Zeloof knew the idea in his head might not exactly match the finished product. But Zeloof is an aspiring engineer who's not afraid to try something new, and a quarantine is a fine time to try new things.

So he did.

'It started as a distraction project, something to keep me occupied when I was stuck at home this summer with my parents,' said Zeloof, a junior studyingelectrical engineeringat Carnegie Mellon University. 'I thought it would take a weekend. It took two weeks, but I did it.'

Carnegie Mellon University Cameras

Zeloof used modern technology to turn a Polaroid instant camera, a machine created decades before the 21-year-old was born, into a working digital camera. When he snaps the shutter button, the Polaroid slowly prints a black-and-white image on white thermal paper — the same kind used for store receipts.

The image is also stored twice on a memory card Zeloof embedded in the camera. The first pic is smartphone-quality. The second looks like a vintage Polaroid print with a date stamp added to the bottom right-hand corner. Now his pictures of today look like photos out of the 1980s, all without the need to touch them up in post-production. The digital images can be exported using a WiFi and Bluetooth chip Zeloof installed when he cut open the camera.

'I pretty much had to gut it. Very little of the original parts are still in there,' said Zeloof, who bought the 1985 Polaroid instant camera on eBay for $15. 'I installed electric switches behind the shutter button and an on/off knob to make the camera work. There’s also an entire computer inside, with a battery and a charging circuit.'
He added a printer and installed a brass rod to hold the thermal paper, which has enough room to print 150 pictures through a slot in the front of the machine. The camera stays charged for about eight hours. Amitech driver.

Zeloof rebuilt a Polaroid camera to take digital photos as well.

Where Is Carnegie Mellon University

Zeloof isn’t the first person to rebuild a Polaroid. That’s why he added the date stamp and Bluetooth/WiFi chip — to be different.
“It’s nice to have the capability to save the photos to my computer,” he said. “The printed pictures are on receipt paper, so they’ll fade and disappear in a few years.”
Zeloof admits he didn’t know anything about Polaroids or their mechanical structure when he thought up the idea back home this summer in New Jersey. When he’s not studying futuristic nanotechnology or serving as co-president of CMU’s Robotics Club, he’s fascinated with technology that was popular before he was born. For instance, he created a dark room to develop his own pictures when he was a kid.
Zeloof said his quarantine project is another example of Carnegie Mellon’s culture of encouraging students to tinker with and invent technology.
“I dove right into the camera and could have made some fatal mistakes. Fortunately, I didn’t. It took a bit longer than I thought, but it looks like a regular Polaroid. People love it, and so do I,” he said. “I’m very happy with the way it turned out.”