I missed that the fan is an exhaust, not an intake, a mistake I make constantly and intend to continue making. Just drives my point home: The chances of those pin sinks seeing _any_ airflow are miniscule, they need all the help they can get.
practically you could use that as a security system alert thing for the office or other related automation tasks... that said the power consumption would likely make it not worth it in the long run.
Your replacement RAM is PERFECT! The original stick looks like it had 16 chips with 16MB capacity total of 256MB 👀 (Samsung K4S28 128Mbit SDRAM, 8M x 4Bit x 4 banks synchronous DRAM LVTTL)
I love how big and small of a world RUclips can be, I guess we all exist in little niche content islands where Bringus and CRD happen watch each others videos
This reminds me of one of my favorite stories about quality control. There was a factory that made consumer toiletries. The product would ship in a typical paperboard box for display on retail shelves. But sometimes, something would happen and the product would not be inserted into the box properly. The box would be sealed, travel down the assembly line, packed in a larger box, shipped to a retail store, and arrive at its final destination ... empty. This, of course, raised complaints from retail outlets, so the company set to work troubleshooting the problem. Unfortunately, nobody could determine what was causing the machinery to produce empty product boxes, so they took a different approach -- try to eliminate the empty boxes, so at least the shipped product was complete. Since the individual product boxes were not heavy, the first step was to develop a precision scale that could quickly measure each box in-flight to determine whether it had anything in it. This turned out to be difficult and expensive, as the box alone weighed hardly anything, so there were tons of false-positives where the machine detected an empty box when in fact there was nothing on the scale. And likewise, it sometimes did not detect an empty box, which then passed right through and made it its way to the customer. In order to work around the issue, the thresholds were tweaked to err on the side of false detection, but this threw off the handling of empty boxes, so the fix was to ring an alarm and have a person evaluate whether there was indeed an empty box, or just a ghost in the machine. Meanwhile, the company began working with high-tech computer-vision vendors to begin developing a system to automate the process. More money was spent. But... mysteriously, after only a couple of days, the number of empty boxes detected dropped to zero. Nobody had made any changes to the production machinery, so this came as a surprise. What had changed? Did we still need the expensive automation software? They went to the assembly line to find out. They asked the line operator, "hey, we noticed the defective unit count has dropped to nothing -- do you know anything about this?" The operator nodded, "oh, yeah, that alarm kept going off, which was annoying, and stopped production for a moment to take the empty box off the line, so we fixed it." This puzzled management... "Fixed it how?" The operator led them to the line. "I put a box fan after the product chute. It just blows the empty boxes into that cart so they don't get to the part where they set off the alarm."
When I started to read the story I Immediately thought ohh god they are gonna over engineer it even though just a weak jet of air is just enough to fix this and apparently I was correct Cool story still
Y'know, I've heard this story all over the internet, applied to all sorts of products. A quick google finds it going back at least as far back as 2008, and it seems to be pretty uniformly about toothpaste boxes at that time, but the earliest examples going around in 2008 all mention copying it from emails they were sent. I can't find any records of emails. I doubt the story as written is about a real factory/real occurrence, but I wonder where the story came from and how old it is?
@@madgaming69420 Haha... yep. Well, you know, gotta have a solution that is suitably enterprise-y. To be perfectly honest, I actually don't know if this really ever happened. I heard this from a presenter once in a "work smarter not harder" thing. I choose to believe it's legit, but regardless, why let that get in the way of a good story.
@@nickwallette6201 Yep, it's one of those classics we kinda learn from heart in engineering, and never seen something _exactly_ like that, but been through several similar situations at work. KISS methodology is quite underappreciated often enough. What sucks is when the method is just TOO simple and doesn't solve it, but to fully solve it you need to go through hell.
"The machine you game on because Dad brought it home when they threw it out." Ah yes, the reason why I've had more experience gaming on Quadro video cards than usual ones.
Brings fond memories of playing with my dad's hernia inducing 486 laptop with colour screen. He would always hang around nervously while we played with dos games and windows 3.1 as I expect it was not a cheap machine. It had a trackball and 4 pcmcia slots. I'm sure it was a Compaq but can't remember the model. Good old days 🙂
Same, except my dad was self-employed, so I got to mooch off the scraps of his PC repair business after it shuttered. "Lovely" memories of playing games at sub-20fps framerates, not to mention having a bad stick of RAM that caused random crashes. Good times!
I remember when YOU... weren't. And I'm so glad that you're able to be you on videos these days because you are what we tune in for. You'd never used to do those off script monologues, jokes and quips - and they're great. Thanks for another little guy!!
Aah. The art of analyzing ancient software since your client has this thing they bought in 2003 that they have a long expired aupport contract on, or the company no longer exists. They expect me to figure out how to make it work since they're loosing thousands of dollars and I'm the IT guy. This is a computer... Right? Welcome to my world.
Haven't got through the video yet but repurposing VGA as TV out is actually really common on pro video gear. The typical pinout is that HSync becomes CSync, G becomes CVBS/Y, and R becomes C. You can almost be guaranteed that G will become Y or CVBS on any multi-format equipment because sync-on-green is fairly common, and YPbPr also uses G for Y. I'm sure there is equipment out there that puts C on B, but that equipment is wrong ... if you have a matrix switch with a bunch of BNCs, it would be more work for you if they put C on B because it's cramped and the further down you get the harder it is to get a connector hooked up. A plus side of keeping this arrangement is that multi-format VGA monitors tend to share jungle ICs with multi-format professional video monitors, so such a monitor will happily display RGBS at 15kHz just like it will display RGBHV (VGA) at 31kHz. The only change it effectively requires is that its sync input has to tolerate HSync being CSync and VSync being missing (though not all equipment that does this will actually leave out VSync - so you have CSync and VSync and since CSync is a superset of HSync, as long as the monitor can sync up to the line rate, those monitors will work perfectly fine without even caring that it's getting effectively RGBS)
Wow, that's fascinating, I don't think I've ever encountered this and that seems kind of surprising, I'd think I would have. I'll have to keep it in mind, thank you so much for the details!
Was going to say this. RGB on VGA is trivial, since you just reuse the R, G, and B analog outs from VGA, and either combine H and V sync on the HSync pin, or add it to G. :-) It's relatively common. Some CRT monitors support, essentially, 480p video this way. Most projectors do as well.
The multiple USB keyboard registries is usually how keyboard manufacturers emulate N-key rollover. The USB spec itself only allows for up to 6 standard keys to be pressed simultaneously.
ben eater made a video where he analyzed what an nkro usb keyboard was doing, and the way it works is completely different from that ruclips.net/video/2lPzTU-3ONI/видео.html maybe some manufacturers do it that way, but not all of them
@@iykuryAlmost all *did* do that, but later on they came up with a better solution. Some still do so, and it is more common for it to be only for the likes of RGB and media keys now, with the actual keyboard keys all on one device. Some cheaper keyboards still do the multiple devices trick though
As soon as you said "machine vision" and after i heard it again and my brain started functioning, I immediately pictured those how its made episodes before you mentioned them. I particularly think of the ones for like potatoes and tomatoes that have little hydraulic fingers that flick the bad vegetables (or fruit) into the trash. That stuff has always fascinated me, being able to recognize some parameters to an image and almost instantly actuate a finger with enough force to completely redirect something before it can get any further
Lol "The computer you game on because dad brought it home from work" were macs for me, since my dad owned a graphic design studio. They were most definitely not gaming machines, though I did play Halo CE and Spore on ours so y'know, I was happy.
its wild to think that one of the most ambitious simulators ever (even if it under-delivered), and the second most important shooter ever, were both available on a platform infamous for not supporting games. shit, iirc Halo was even a Mac EXCLUSIVE during early development.
As you said, Matrox was really popular in the multi-headed business machine market. Their "DVI-V" was found on cards that could output 2-4 heads on a single DVI connector, breaking them out to DVI-I - it was especially common on their low-profile cards.
Their standard cards were also super flexible for adding multiple displays; they had jumpers or switches to disable the VGA bios, letting them behave well with others at boot. At some time around 1999/2000 I had a Matrix, a Millennium l, and a Millennium II shoved into my computer running four monitors just to see if I could.
The cards that could output multiple displays on a single connector had a "DMS-59" connector, not a DVI port. It was kinda similar, but had a lot more pins and didn't have the funky separated analog section. DMS-59 was used on quite a few Matrox cards, and also some ATI/AMD and Nvidia cards. Most often seen in low profile cards for small form factor desktop workstations.
@@kepstin The Millennium G450 low profile cards we had at work had a "DVI-V" which could connect to a single head output as any DVI-I but Matrox also provided a DVI-V to 2x VGA cable for multi-headed use. It definitely wasn't DMS-59 like the iMacs around the same time, because I'm pretty sure that only appeared later when they were doing digital instead of VGA. I just searched and you can still buy the accessory cables, which I'm not too surprised about given Matrox were also good with after sales support. You can still find second hand low profile multi-head Millenium G450s with this DVI port configuration on eBay and Amazon.
58:47 Windows still has "it's now safe to turn off your computer" turns out there's a group policy setting called "Do not turn off system power after a Windows system shutdown has occurred" that brings this up. probably the same setting matrox has enabled if ACPI does exist.
I recently saw a Windows 10 BSOD that ended with "You can restart" and it had me confused but if there's a group policy setting then that makes a lot more sense than modern hardware lacking ACPI.
@@renakunisaki perhaps to stop it being shut down unintentionally, since the watchdog will presumably reboot it from that state if power isn't removed within a few seconds.
The one custom thing in the BIOS that I immediately clocked is the "AUX IO Interrupt Number" option. It seems you can trigger a system interrupt via a I/O pin.
28:12 isn't "Mtx4s2" just an abbreviated version of the machine's name? MaTroX 4Sight 2... Yes, I grew up parsing license plates as longer text, why do you ask?! 😅
Zebra buying a machine vision department actually does make sense. I work at the Orange Hardware Store and we recently switched to Zebra phones, and use them to take pictures of the shelves, I can absolutely see Zebra offering a all in one computer vision solution to use said pictures to see if products are actually where they're supposed to be.
My only experience is with zebra QR readers, and I was pleasantly surprised to find out they have (very basic) OCR. It would make sense that their newer products would be much more advanced
When you described a line scanner, all I had in mind is the photo finish cameras like they have at the 100m track races. Damn Olympics are still on my mind.
1:06:10 nope, Intel tried to force RDRAM onto late Pentium III machines too! It ended up severely biting them in the ass in not one, but two ways. The i820 chipset was going to be their next generation mid-range consumer chipset after the 440 series. Too bad that they screwed up the design on it, and it was unstable with more than two RDIMMs attached. Then to deal with the cost problem, they made the Memory Translator Hub (MTH) chip to let the i820 talk to SDRAM. The overhead was so high that the resulting systems were slower than an older i440BX machine, and also unstable! This ended up causing a mass recall. :) 28:08 Also "Mtx4s2" driver is almost certainly just the name of the device -- Matrox 4Sight 2 (II). Makes sense that the watchdog routine would be in a special driver.
Everyone I know who was building a new PC at that time looked at the price performance of RDRAM and decided to buy motherboards with VIA chipsets to use SDRAM, I know I did.
too hot to record content other than obscure small computers trying their best? I see this as an absolute win! Perfect long-form content to listen to while I repair my client's cameras
That orange one looks amazing for an early 2000s Stero Setup in an escalade or something it would match the Amplifiers and custom fiberglass sub enclosures.
OnLogic started out (under the name Logic Supply) making car computers in that same kind of orange and aluminum passively cooled case and I guess they kept the aesthetic.
Oh, I hope you're doing okay. I just went through my second time... still coughing and feeling like shit after 3 weeks. Still, better than the first time, when I spent some time in the ICU. Miserable bug like no other.
@@CathodeRayDude Also talking of current loops, those relays that click in your power supply probably aren't (just) for current limiting either. They switch between different voltage taps on the transformer to make the linear regulator more efficient as you (or it, automatically) changes the output voltage. When it starts current limiting due to something like a short circuit, the output voltage will be very low, so it has to switch to a low voltage tap to stop it wasting many watts of power in the linear reg. (The efficiency of a linear regulator btw is just Vout/Vin)
@@henryokeeffe5835 Ah, I'd never thought about that. It seemed like they kick in any time the LEDs go from CV to CC so I assumed it was actually switching between two supplies, but given that any time it switches to CC it's almost always dropping below a voltage threshold, that scans
its also "RS485 but full duplex". Like to use it you just take two RS485 transceivers and fix one in tx mode and one in rx. I ran into it at work and its obscure enough nobody knew where to find devices to test it with
Yeah. Their stuff always shows up in library and archive applications too and there’s a lot of use for this sort of thing in the automatic lending/sorting systems they use
Wasn't Gatorade part of Quaker Oats before they sold it to Pepsi? Edit: Technically it still is owned By Quaker Oats, but Pepsi bought them, lock stock and barrel in 2000. I'm technically correct, which as we know, is the best kind of correct.
Hey CRD, this was an interesting clash of information I never knew existed. I work with PC104 on a daily basis, but in the development of CubeSats, and never stopped to think where the PC came from. It’s great for our work as the PC104 board size is very similar to a single rack width for cube sats, so they’re great for modular design. I figured you might find this interesting! Great video
The trouble is that they're basically impenetrable unless you're a high level embedded systems expert. 99% of the devices I've looked at contained nothing but a single SoC, a black box containing all functionality, so there's no real circuitry to analyze, and the software is always completely monolithic. There's rarely a distinct 'operating system' like there is on a PC, or if there is, you can't get to it or it has no UI, so beyond the single task it's supposed to do, there's no way to dig in and see anything 'underneath'. It's not like a PC where (assuming the vendor even bothered to lock down the OS) you can just boot off an external drive and jailbreak it, or put your own software on it. If you don't like what's on an ARM device, changing the software involves spending weeks or months messing with JTAG and/or a logic analyzer, figuring out uboot (or some worse bootloader), working out where memory mapped devices are or some nonsense like that. It's just lightyears over my head.
The Floppy-over-LPT thing could be found on some older subcompact laptops. I don't know how "standard" it was but it was probably borrowed from that. And speaking of "standards" there's a more-or-less way standard way to route standard video signals over a DE-15. Each uses a subset of the RGBHV lines that VGA uses. You find it in Extron gear (sometimes they call it a universal analog input) and pretty much everyone follows the same convention. IIRC Composite comes in on green. SVideo uses Green and Red, RGB with Sync on Green comes in on R,G and B. RGB with C-Sync uses R,G and B plus c-sync on h-sync line, component puts Y, Pb, and Pr on R,G and B. (Not sure if the order is right but you get the idea)
16:14 Mmmm delicious silicon. Also Sony VX my beloved "The machine you game on because Dad brought it home when they threw it out." for me was those awful early and mid 00s clamshell Dell Dimensions. I mentioned in a comment on a previous episode of Little Guys that my dad sells 911 systems by trade and would bring home tons of stuff to do unpaid and unappreciated after hours IT work. Some of the things he'd bring home were the dispatch computers, and being a small county in a small state, they were the cheapest bulk buy future e-waste you could buy. I played a LOT of Assault cube on those machines between school and home.
My mom brought me an IBM XT from her government job back in the day, when my friends had 486s. Then, when I took out the CMOS battery, I was never able to boot from the hard disk again.
I for one love the long videos on these little guys, and also as someone who lives in a hot, old, chicago apartment do I ever understand the hatred of the indoor summer heat 😅
Matrox has always knocked it out of the part in sheer software and hardware quality. I'd expect nothing less, they go the extra mile to make sure everything is polished and guaranteed to work.
Another reason you might not want color video on a system like this is if you're using a camera that doesn't use visible light - I tangentially worked on a system like this that used x-rays to scan for melted globs in freshly spun fiberglass insulation wool. Our system used the linear scan style of cameras; as the fiberglass rolled by it would composite the lines into a big rolling buffer that would then get fed into some off-the-shelf object detection code.
This dark/flat/gain discussion is surprising to me. That is literally my job. I work on super fancy astronomical sensors, and that is like 40% of my day-to-day worries.
14:10 the isolated I/O from this thing most likely connected up to a 24VDC input card on a PLC, and not directly to any control relays. And if they were extra fancy, maybe even over the local PLC Ethernet network via an I/O bridge from WonderWare or SoftwareToolbox -- both companies produce popular "software drivers" for Modbus Ethernet, Ethernet/IP, and various other protocols that run on Windows and VxWorks. Industrial and computer vision machines are fun.
I thought about that after I said it and I was gonna change the wording, but then I checked the deets on the SSRs, and the datasheet actually says the optoisolation is intended to resist back EMF, so I figured I'd keep it in. I can totally believe that you generally wouldn't, but it's neat that one could.
I love your "little guys" series. Making underpowered computers do silly things is my jam. By the way, I think the power plug on the mobo is not for a cdrom but for the floppy drive. Note that the parallel port does double service as a floppy connector, right? How many pins is the connector for that on the mobo? Looks like it might be 34 to me. If so, it might take a standard floppy cable in place of the parallel port cable and then you could have an internal floppy if you jad a different bezel. Why you would want to do that baffles me, but perhaps that's it.
I enjoy the little guys videos as I don't get to see this type of stuff as often anymore and I like the variety of what is out there. Seems to be getting harder and harder to find online examples of old industrial hardware too, so this is helpful. I really enjoyed this particular one for some reason, maybe because I always knew Matrox stayed around doing industrial things for a bit but I never got the opportunity to see what. Looks like they kept their QC up as well. I always enjoy quality built things even if they are not the best available.
This explains why I remember there being the occasional slightly burnt chip in my bag of Lay's when I was a kid, and then at some point that stopped happening. I miss that actually. Slightly burnt chips have a unique flavor that I enjoyed.
The Matrox Millenium was praised for its great 2D performance though (which was still a thing back then). Combined with a Monster 3D, you had a great gaming system on your hand!
It was a great 2D performer… in Windows. For Windows 3.1 or 95 or similar eras of NT, the Millenium produces a great picture at high resolution and implements all the 2D acceleration for things like smoothly dragging windows around and such. Unfortunately, not a great choice for people who like DOS gaming. There's other options with better compatibility.
love this series as a way to passively learn about pc hardware..... slowly going from fun videos for background watching that go over my head to understanding the things that are being talked about
I have many years of machine vision. Primarily focused on metrology (measuring parts) which has specific challenges. Datalogic made ipcs for generic poe 1.5 mega pixel image sensors. They produced image software as well and it used various techniques to process images for various measurements. We were measuring reliably down to microns for what it's worth using Keyence optical micrometer which are just fancy cameras and image processors.
This brings back some memories. I used to work with little guys like these all the time for industrial vision systems. These days, most of the smarts live aboard the cameras themselves. You can still get little guys for running setups that need synchronous imaging with a half dozen or more cameras, but most of the one- and two-camera solutions on the market now are computerless.
7:20 before i start, im no expert but i have worked on factory hardware and software. im *pretty sure* the difference between a frame grabber and a capture card is how the video is recorded and handled, some capture cards will do stuff like compression and interlacing, making it difficult to deal with small details, meanwhile frame grabbers always pick out a full image in its raw form, no compression or interlacing, making it easier on the computer vision. im sure there are capture cards out there that will record in perfect raw quality, but most factories cant rely on that, so they have dedicated cards that will always give them exactly the output they want. im not an expert and i could be wrong, but im pretty sure that's the difference.
1:11:03 A lot of raspberry Pi addons do that actually. I have the TV hat, and that has a connector like that. it actually came with a header extender, where the extender plugs into the Pi's pin header, and it has these REALLY long pins on it, so not only does it raise the TV hat a little, but then the pins stick through to allow you to plug another hat on top of the TV hat.
I actually had one of these years and years ago. My dad’s work bought one for some vehicle testing they were doing, and when they threw it away, he brought it home for me. Mine didn’t have the digital IO. I can’t remember what was there or not. The one I had ran NT4. I had a separate 5 amp or so 12v linear power supply I used to power it. My dad told me it had advanced video processing stuff, but he didn’t know enough about it to explain exactly how it was different. This is crazy, never thought I’d see one of these again.
This is giving me major nostalgia feels. I must have worked on 100s of those over the years. From the original 4sight through to the 4sightGP and EV. I’m only half way through your video, but to answer your question about the 8MB memory reservation - the main reason is to guarantee the availability of a contiguous block of ram. So the framegrabber can DMA straight to it. And so any processing functions can just blast through a buffer from beginning to end without having to worry about any gaps. That leads to much better performance. It’s not really hard-realtime once you leave the grabber. That is locked in sync with the video, but once you get to processing on the PC things are no longer deterministic. But with good design you can get close to guaranteeing a maximum processing time.
The Fire Tower app may have just been a basic version of Computer Vision (CV) to monitor a site's flare stack for a flame-out. This can happen when the pilot light is blown out, which would cause a dangerous situation if the site had a blowdown event and the flare was not lit to burn off the gas. The serial ports could've been used to talk to any of the control systems or SCADA side to generate a process alarm in case someone wasn't watching the camera full time.
Funny thing is that Matrox Montreal HQ is a few minutes away from where I live and a few of my friends worked there and only retired a few year ago so it's likely they worked on that system.
Oh boy, I miss my Matrox graphics card from the 90s. It had S-Video out (which connected to SCART via adapter), I was able to record the Star_Trek Voyager episodes I downloaded in English (Austrian here) onto VHS and then watch them with my friend at his place. Or record decoded Sat TV shows on tape. (you could just barely record SD TV shows onto hard disk, but even with DivX you ran out of space, or transporting that data was tiresome). I remember playing the bundled RayMan game with one of them.
Matrox & Zebra makes sense because they're both in Toronto, pull from the same pool of embedded HW/SW engineers, and make ruggedized computer stuff. [half way through edit: makes even more sense. Zebra had a lot of ruggedized and a little machine vision, and it seems Matrox had a lot of machine vision and a little ruggedized. Also they're both used in factories.]
Awesome video!, Little guys like these are a marvel to computing. Have you ever looked at National Instruments PXI controller PCs? They will surely fit the little guys series with all their quirks.
I'm glad you enjoyed! I don't think I'd looked at the NI PXI yet, but I'm very excited because I looked it up and immediately found a CompactPCI module! I just recently got a CompactPCI chassis and was champing at the bit to find other things to put in it, so I might end up buying one of these. Thank you so much!
WAIT, you’re telling me that hot dog/not hot dog is not only real, but has existed for years?? Listen, we may not have flying cars but we certainly are living the future
Gravis, I like these little guys episodes. Please remain at the bench, don't panic, and keep on keeping on! Cheers. Also, I found the three firewire inputs a bit strange as well (as you were downplaying this little guy's speciality in the intro). I also own such an orange ONLOGIC box ;) They are indeed nothing special, just ruggedized computers for industrial use.
Definitely Zinc chromate plating, the yellow stuff is hexavalent chrome. Zinc chromate is still very common, it's just all trivalent chrome now, because it isn't carcinogenic.
The firewire ports are likely split into two chips because one (the transceiver) is a mixed-mode circuit that needs to handle the analog annoyances of sending a signal over actual wires in the real-world; filters, termination, amplifiers, all kinds of stuff like that. The host controller will be a purely digital device that operates on the cleaned-up (and possibly demultiplexed) signals from the transceivers. Each of these jobs is optimized for different integrated circuit fabrication lines, so each chip is probably made on a different manufacturing process that works better for implementing either digital logic or analog components on silicon (probably different feature sizes too). Nowadays if you had this kind of constraint you'd normally just co-package two dies into a single part, but those kind of more advanced packaging techniques were not common or cheap at the time.
29:00 The eye icon that's used for both "Sure Pack" and "BDA Fire Tower" is one of standard icons bundled with an early version of either Visual Basic or Delphi. I don't remember which, but it's definitely familiar.
For PC/104 power, you can use DC/DC boards. They will take 5-48 volts and will provide the usual PC voltages to the PC/104 connectors and usually also a row of screw terminals. They get listed on the usual sources as Vehicle Power Supply, commonly. Happy hunting!
The light field (flat field) calibration image isn't taken at a long exposure to saturate the sensor. It's taken with the camera pointing into something like an integrating sphere that presents a uniform white illumination so the camera can compensate for some pixels being brighter or darker than others. Usually this is used for canceling out light falloff/vignetting toward the outside edge of the lens, but will also take out differences due to sensitivity differences between individual pixels.
Intellicam was used in two ways. As a testing tool - is there video on this input pin and what does it look like. And as a config tool for DCF files - these allowed the frame grabber to be used with non standard sources. Basic framegrabbers like the Meteor2 and Orion would have limited options just for CCIR/RS170/PAL/NTSC sources, such as exposure timings or clock sources. More sophisticated grabbers (Meteor2/DIG, Pulsar, Genesis) would have much more configurable inputs where you could change the timing, clock frequency, sync duration. You could do multi-tap cameras, linescan, asynchronous reset. All sorts. This kind of configuration was necessary until (fairly) recently when digital interfaces based on usb , Ethernet or CoaXpress started supporting GenICam. Which basically uses an XML file to tell the framegrabber which options the camera supports
1:04:30 That zinc coating is cool, but was used heavily in electronics chassis for vacuum tube tech, like radios, test equipment, and tv's before semiconductors became a thing. The downside is when the coating ages, if it's not stored in good conditions, the surface will get a yellow-ish green dust like layer on its surface that you can breathe in if it's disturbed. It's fine if it's just sitting there or inside a case or chassis, but yeah. Not so great for future owners and their lungs. It's not asbestos insulation levels of danger, but like you said, it's toxic.
![Little Guys Ep 11 - Where No PC Has Gone Before [Stryker SDC]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/5xL0ynJgzFM/mqdefault.jpg)
![Twenty One Pilots - “The Line” (from Arcane Season 2) [Official Music Video]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/E2Rj2gQAyPA/mqdefault.jpg)
I missed that the fan is an exhaust, not an intake, a mistake I make constantly and intend to continue making. Just drives my point home: The chances of those pin sinks seeing _any_ airflow are miniscule, they need all the help they can get.
Matrox intellicam App started working because you replaced the ram. It was accessing a bad address before. Seems the most likely cause there.
practically you could use that as a security system alert thing for the office or other related automation tasks... that said the power consumption would likely make it not worth it in the long run.
if you want a few more I can send you some more send me your address
Your replacement RAM is PERFECT!
The original stick looks like it had 16 chips with 16MB capacity total of 256MB 👀
(Samsung K4S28 128Mbit SDRAM, 8M x 4Bit x 4 banks synchronous DRAM LVTTL)
@@davidpower6332 nope, it was still failing long after I replaced the RAM; that segment was from the previous take a day earlier
GOD I LOVE ILL-ADVISED GAMING
I love how big and small of a world RUclips can be, I guess we all exist in little niche content islands where Bringus and CRD happen watch each others videos
You two are my most watched RUclipsrs.
@@lkv0315 it's not just Bringus, f4mi and LGR watch his videos too.
So happy to see you on a CRD video
BRINGLE LOCATED
This reminds me of one of my favorite stories about quality control.
There was a factory that made consumer toiletries. The product would ship in a typical paperboard box for display on retail shelves. But sometimes, something would happen and the product would not be inserted into the box properly. The box would be sealed, travel down the assembly line, packed in a larger box, shipped to a retail store, and arrive at its final destination ... empty.
This, of course, raised complaints from retail outlets, so the company set to work troubleshooting the problem. Unfortunately, nobody could determine what was causing the machinery to produce empty product boxes, so they took a different approach -- try to eliminate the empty boxes, so at least the shipped product was complete.
Since the individual product boxes were not heavy, the first step was to develop a precision scale that could quickly measure each box in-flight to determine whether it had anything in it. This turned out to be difficult and expensive, as the box alone weighed hardly anything, so there were tons of false-positives where the machine detected an empty box when in fact there was nothing on the scale. And likewise, it sometimes did not detect an empty box, which then passed right through and made it its way to the customer.
In order to work around the issue, the thresholds were tweaked to err on the side of false detection, but this threw off the handling of empty boxes, so the fix was to ring an alarm and have a person evaluate whether there was indeed an empty box, or just a ghost in the machine. Meanwhile, the company began working with high-tech computer-vision vendors to begin developing a system to automate the process. More money was spent.
But... mysteriously, after only a couple of days, the number of empty boxes detected dropped to zero. Nobody had made any changes to the production machinery, so this came as a surprise. What had changed? Did we still need the expensive automation software? They went to the assembly line to find out.
They asked the line operator, "hey, we noticed the defective unit count has dropped to nothing -- do you know anything about this?" The operator nodded, "oh, yeah, that alarm kept going off, which was annoying, and stopped production for a moment to take the empty box off the line, so we fixed it." This puzzled management... "Fixed it how?" The operator led them to the line. "I put a box fan after the product chute. It just blows the empty boxes into that cart so they don't get to the part where they set off the alarm."
When I started to read the story I Immediately thought ohh god they are gonna over engineer it even though just a weak jet of air is just enough to fix this and apparently I was correct
Cool story still
Y'know, I've heard this story all over the internet, applied to all sorts of products.
A quick google finds it going back at least as far back as 2008, and it seems to be pretty uniformly about toothpaste boxes at that time, but the earliest examples going around in 2008 all mention copying it from emails they were sent. I can't find any records of emails.
I doubt the story as written is about a real factory/real occurrence, but I wonder where the story came from and how old it is?
@@madgaming69420 Haha... yep. Well, you know, gotta have a solution that is suitably enterprise-y.
To be perfectly honest, I actually don't know if this really ever happened. I heard this from a presenter once in a "work smarter not harder" thing. I choose to believe it's legit, but regardless, why let that get in the way of a good story.
the simple solution is ALWAYS the best!
Awesome story!
@@nickwallette6201 Yep, it's one of those classics we kinda learn from heart in engineering, and never seen something _exactly_ like that, but been through several similar situations at work. KISS methodology is quite underappreciated often enough.
What sucks is when the method is just TOO simple and doesn't solve it, but to fully solve it you need to go through hell.
There is definitley something satisfying about watching you play Quake on a machine that used to pack Quaker Oats.
The only more fitting (If slightly ironic) game to play on this would be Chex Quest.
Quake(r) is good for you
finally, someone made that joke , for real. my life is complete, I've seen it all.
"The machine you game on because Dad brought it home when they threw it out." Ah yes, the reason why I've had more experience gaming on Quadro video cards than usual ones.
This was me except the job was the city government and the video card was nonexistent, hence why we had to purchase a Riva TNT2 from a neighbor
Brings fond memories of playing with my dad's hernia inducing 486 laptop with colour screen. He would always hang around nervously while we played with dos games and windows 3.1 as I expect it was not a cheap machine. It had a trackball and 4 pcmcia slots. I'm sure it was a Compaq but can't remember the model. Good old days 🙂
Same, except my dad was self-employed, so I got to mooch off the scraps of his PC repair business after it shuttered.
"Lovely" memories of playing games at sub-20fps framerates, not to mention having a bad stick of RAM that caused random crashes.
Good times!
@@hyperturbotechnomike Having an ATM machine computer sounds way cooler than it must ultimately be. I'm excited at the thought.
Same here. My first computer was a re-purposed and re-painted cash register PC with a Pentium 3
"Let's make like bringus studios and do some ill-advised gaming" love when all the tech nerds on youtube reference each other
Bau can it run SteamOS?😅
"who's doing monochrome in 2021?" I was doing gigapixel monochrome images up until last month!
omg it's foone
Oh hey it's foone! Hope your doing well, I loved your twitter back when you were on that!
@@TheBaristaGamershe's still doing very similar posts on Mastodon! Would highly recommend.
who's doing monochrome in 2021?
ASTROPHOTOGRAPHERS! NEARLY ALL OF US!
micro fish :)
I remember when YOU... weren't. And I'm so glad that you're able to be you on videos these days because you are what we tune in for. You'd never used to do those off script monologues, jokes and quips - and they're great. Thanks for another little guy!!
About half an hour in, and I'm here for the journey, and any destinations we tangent to along the way :)
I was only disappointed by the lack of "two of them" when discussing the internals tbh
Aah. The art of analyzing ancient software since your client has this thing they bought in 2003 that they have a long expired aupport contract on, or the company no longer exists. They expect me to figure out how to make it work since they're loosing thousands of dollars and I'm the IT guy. This is a computer... Right? Welcome to my world.
Haven't got through the video yet but repurposing VGA as TV out is actually really common on pro video gear. The typical pinout is that HSync becomes CSync, G becomes CVBS/Y, and R becomes C. You can almost be guaranteed that G will become Y or CVBS on any multi-format equipment because sync-on-green is fairly common, and YPbPr also uses G for Y. I'm sure there is equipment out there that puts C on B, but that equipment is wrong ... if you have a matrix switch with a bunch of BNCs, it would be more work for you if they put C on B because it's cramped and the further down you get the harder it is to get a connector hooked up.
A plus side of keeping this arrangement is that multi-format VGA monitors tend to share jungle ICs with multi-format professional video monitors, so such a monitor will happily display RGBS at 15kHz just like it will display RGBHV (VGA) at 31kHz. The only change it effectively requires is that its sync input has to tolerate HSync being CSync and VSync being missing (though not all equipment that does this will actually leave out VSync - so you have CSync and VSync and since CSync is a superset of HSync, as long as the monitor can sync up to the line rate, those monitors will work perfectly fine without even caring that it's getting effectively RGBS)
Wow, that's fascinating, I don't think I've ever encountered this and that seems kind of surprising, I'd think I would have. I'll have to keep it in mind, thank you so much for the details!
Was going to say this. RGB on VGA is trivial, since you just reuse the R, G, and B analog outs from VGA, and either combine H and V sync on the HSync pin, or add it to G. :-)
It's relatively common. Some CRT monitors support, essentially, 480p video this way. Most projectors do as well.
"A sad day for Cardassia" is a wonderfully weird exclamation to use when faced with mild disappointment.
yeah it came to mind for no reason i can ascertain so i just said it
@@CathodeRayDude Don't you have to be a tailor to say that?
The multiple USB keyboard registries is usually how keyboard manufacturers emulate N-key rollover. The USB spec itself only allows for up to 6 standard keys to be pressed simultaneously.
Ahhh, that's probably it.
They also use it sometimes to pack in the HID Consumer Control device for the media keys (play/pause, volume, browser hotkeys).
ben eater made a video where he analyzed what an nkro usb keyboard was doing, and the way it works is completely different from that ruclips.net/video/2lPzTU-3ONI/видео.html
maybe some manufacturers do it that way, but not all of them
@@iykuryAlmost all *did* do that, but later on they came up with a better solution. Some still do so, and it is more common for it to be only for the likes of RGB and media keys now, with the actual keyboard keys all on one device. Some cheaper keyboards still do the multiple devices trick though
As soon as you said "machine vision" and after i heard it again and my brain started functioning, I immediately pictured those how its made episodes before you mentioned them. I particularly think of the ones for like potatoes and tomatoes that have little hydraulic fingers that flick the bad vegetables (or fruit) into the trash. That stuff has always fascinated me, being able to recognize some parameters to an image and almost instantly actuate a finger with enough force to completely redirect something before it can get any further
I studied machine vision for a bit in school. The industry was indeed thrilled when CUDA came out.
Lol "The computer you game on because dad brought it home from work" were macs for me, since my dad owned a graphic design studio. They were most definitely not gaming machines, though I did play Halo CE and Spore on ours so y'know, I was happy.
its wild to think that one of the most ambitious simulators ever (even if it under-delivered), and the second most important shooter ever, were both available on a platform infamous for not supporting games.
shit, iirc Halo was even a Mac EXCLUSIVE during early development.
Halo, then Spore... Then Apple decided games were for non-creatives so then nothing 😂
Spore must have been made for those alien machines, its a very strangely made game, very unusual for PCs
5:00 Go tiny bug go
5:24 OMG NO
5:25 Oh phew
5:27 RIP Tiny Bug
5:46 HE LIVES
Tiny Bug lives a thrilling life
On mobile I can't witness tiny bug! 😭
tiny bug reappears at 19:34 !
never apologize for little guys. they are always a joy.
As you said, Matrox was really popular in the multi-headed business machine market. Their "DVI-V" was found on cards that could output 2-4 heads on a single DVI connector, breaking them out to DVI-I - it was especially common on their low-profile cards.
Their standard cards were also super flexible for adding multiple displays; they had jumpers or switches to disable the VGA bios, letting them behave well with others at boot. At some time around 1999/2000 I had a Matrix, a Millennium l, and a Millennium II shoved into my computer running four monitors just to see if I could.
The cards that could output multiple displays on a single connector had a "DMS-59" connector, not a DVI port. It was kinda similar, but had a lot more pins and didn't have the funky separated analog section. DMS-59 was used on quite a few Matrox cards, and also some ATI/AMD and Nvidia cards. Most often seen in low profile cards for small form factor desktop workstations.
@@kepstin The Millennium G450 low profile cards we had at work had a "DVI-V" which could connect to a single head output as any DVI-I but Matrox also provided a DVI-V to 2x VGA cable for multi-headed use. It definitely wasn't DMS-59 like the iMacs around the same time, because I'm pretty sure that only appeared later when they were doing digital instead of VGA. I just searched and you can still buy the accessory cables, which I'm not too surprised about given Matrox were also good with after sales support. You can still find second hand low profile multi-head Millenium G450s with this DVI port configuration on eBay and Amazon.
58:47 Windows still has "it's now safe to turn off your computer" turns out there's a group policy setting called "Do not turn off system power after a Windows system shutdown has occurred" that brings this up. probably the same setting matrox has enabled if ACPI does exist.
I recently saw a Windows 10 BSOD that ended with "You can restart" and it had me confused but if there's a group policy setting then that makes a lot more sense than modern hardware lacking ACPI.
But... why?
@@renakunisaki perhaps to stop it being shut down unintentionally, since the watchdog will presumably reboot it from that state if power isn't removed within a few seconds.
At the start you lament doing a lot of the little guys videos, but don't be sad on our behalf, I'm loving it 😄❤️
The one custom thing in the BIOS that I immediately clocked is the "AUX IO Interrupt Number" option. It seems you can trigger a system interrupt via a I/O pin.
eagle eyes! Sensible feature, too.
28:12 isn't "Mtx4s2" just an abbreviated version of the machine's name? MaTroX 4Sight 2...
Yes, I grew up parsing license plates as longer text, why do you ask?! 😅
Zebra buying a machine vision department actually does make sense. I work at the Orange Hardware Store and we recently switched to Zebra phones, and use them to take pictures of the shelves, I can absolutely see Zebra offering a all in one computer vision solution to use said pictures to see if products are actually where they're supposed to be.
My only experience is with zebra QR readers, and I was pleasantly surprised to find out they have (very basic) OCR. It would make sense that their newer products would be much more advanced
Love how enthused you were about every tiny new discovery on this one! Well done again dude!
A great change of pace after the let down of the last one
When you described a line scanner, all I had in mind is the photo finish cameras like they have at the 100m track races. Damn Olympics are still on my mind.
1:06:10 nope, Intel tried to force RDRAM onto late Pentium III machines too! It ended up severely biting them in the ass in not one, but two ways. The i820 chipset was going to be their next generation mid-range consumer chipset after the 440 series. Too bad that they screwed up the design on it, and it was unstable with more than two RDIMMs attached. Then to deal with the cost problem, they made the Memory Translator Hub (MTH) chip to let the i820 talk to SDRAM. The overhead was so high that the resulting systems were slower than an older i440BX machine, and also unstable! This ended up causing a mass recall. :)
28:08 Also "Mtx4s2" driver is almost certainly just the name of the device -- Matrox 4Sight 2 (II). Makes sense that the watchdog routine would be in a special driver.
Oh God I forgot about those p3s. I handled a handful of them at my job. What misery.
Everyone I know who was building a new PC at that time looked at the price performance of RDRAM and decided to buy motherboards with VIA chipsets to use SDRAM, I know I did.
There were also a handful of late Socket 370 boards with DDR support, such as the MSI Pro266 series.
God I fucking love a feature length RUclips video about a computer so forgettable it looks like it’s been kicked for 10 years straight
too hot to record content other than obscure small computers trying their best?
I see this as an absolute win!
Perfect long-form content to listen to while I repair my client's cameras
0:33 "It's the 4sight II. You know, the sequel to the original 4sight" Wow, I wish I had the foresight to realise that 🤦♀
That orange one looks amazing for an early 2000s Stero Setup in an escalade or something it would match the Amplifiers and custom fiberglass sub enclosures.
hahaha you're absolutely right
OnLogic started out (under the name Logic Supply) making car computers in that same kind of orange and aluminum passively cooled case and I guess they kept the aesthetic.
I just watch these on repeat until the next one comes out so every time I get a new Little Guys it feels like Christmas if my family loved me
I have never been this hyped for oatmeal in my entire life.
16:18 lmao makes sense you went to the store to grab a drink and some chips
Why he needs it, run what on it ?
The fact that this series is not completely filled with OnLogic devices is amazing. well done
YOOOO THE ONE WITH THE LCD!!!! I bet you could do all sorts of fun homelab-y type stuff with that!!
Thank You, just got covid for first time and being in the 60's with soso health needed something to distract me
I hope I can bring you some comfort, hang in there!
Finally got me in June. So much for my theory of being one of the Chosen Ones who were naturally immune or whatever. haha ;-)
Oh, I hope you're doing okay. I just went through my second time... still coughing and feeling like shit after 3 weeks. Still, better than the first time, when I spent some time in the ICU. Miserable bug like no other.
I was literally thinking "I could watch some CRD rn" and you popped up in my notifs
RS-422 is a bizarre format to put video over. It's essentially RS-232 (aka serial) but with differential signals to give it range and robustness.
Right??? It threw me for a (current) loop
@@CathodeRayDude Also talking of current loops, those relays that click in your power supply probably aren't (just) for current limiting either. They switch between different voltage taps on the transformer to make the linear regulator more efficient as you (or it, automatically) changes the output voltage. When it starts current limiting due to something like a short circuit, the output voltage will be very low, so it has to switch to a low voltage tap to stop it wasting many watts of power in the linear reg. (The efficiency of a linear regulator btw is just Vout/Vin)
@@henryokeeffe5835 Ah, I'd never thought about that. It seemed like they kick in any time the LEDs go from CV to CC so I assumed it was actually switching between two supplies, but given that any time it switches to CC it's almost always dropping below a voltage threshold, that scans
its also "RS485 but full duplex". Like to use it you just take two RS485 transceivers and fix one in tx mode and one in rx. I ran into it at work and its obscure enough nobody knew where to find devices to test it with
Zebra buying them actually makes sense; they make scanners and now potentially a platform for a hopefully not shitty PoS system.
Yeah. Their stuff always shows up in library and archive applications too and there’s a lot of use for this sort of thing in the automatic lending/sorting systems they use
"Went out for snacks, Gatorade and a stick of RAM" - My favorite lunch break snack!
Protogens :3
@@ProtoV33MK1 their favourite food :3
Wasn't Gatorade part of Quaker Oats before they sold it to Pepsi?
Edit: Technically it still is owned By Quaker Oats, but Pepsi bought them, lock stock and barrel in 2000. I'm technically correct, which as we know, is the best kind of correct.
@@ProtoV33MK1 lol I'm pretty sure garvis's fursona is a protogen so that checks out
@@KILOPOWER I'm aware :3
Hey CRD, this was an interesting clash of information I never knew existed. I work with PC104 on a daily basis, but in the development of CubeSats, and never stopped to think where the PC came from. It’s great for our work as the PC104 board size is very similar to a single rack width for cube sats, so they’re great for modular design. I figured you might find this interesting! Great video
If there's enough interesting specimens, an ARM based little guy series or one off sounds quite fun!
The trouble is that they're basically impenetrable unless you're a high level embedded systems expert. 99% of the devices I've looked at contained nothing but a single SoC, a black box containing all functionality, so there's no real circuitry to analyze, and the software is always completely monolithic. There's rarely a distinct 'operating system' like there is on a PC, or if there is, you can't get to it or it has no UI, so beyond the single task it's supposed to do, there's no way to dig in and see anything 'underneath'.
It's not like a PC where (assuming the vendor even bothered to lock down the OS) you can just boot off an external drive and jailbreak it, or put your own software on it. If you don't like what's on an ARM device, changing the software involves spending weeks or months messing with JTAG and/or a logic analyzer, figuring out uboot (or some worse bootloader), working out where memory mapped devices are or some nonsense like that. It's just lightyears over my head.
@@CathodeRayDude yeah that makes a lot of sense now that I think of it, thanks for the thorough explanation :>
Thank you for showing us another little guy! They're always an interesting time, so I'm just fine with them accompanying us over this hot summer.
The Floppy-over-LPT thing could be found on some older subcompact laptops. I don't know how "standard" it was but it was probably borrowed from that.
And speaking of "standards" there's a more-or-less way standard way to route standard video signals over a DE-15. Each uses a subset of the RGBHV lines that VGA uses. You find it in Extron gear (sometimes they call it a universal analog input) and pretty much everyone follows the same convention.
IIRC Composite comes in on green. SVideo uses Green and Red, RGB with Sync on Green comes in on R,G and B. RGB with C-Sync uses R,G and B plus c-sync on h-sync line, component puts Y, Pb, and Pr on R,G and B. (Not sure if the order is right but you get the idea)
Microprocessors sit around the CPU cooler telling CRD stories to their grandchips.
Best tech story teller on RUclips!
Hey! Its not just another episode of little guys!! This is a fantastic series and i look forward to each episode
16:14 Mmmm delicious silicon.
Also Sony VX my beloved
"The machine you game on because Dad brought it home when they threw it out." for me was those awful early and mid 00s clamshell Dell Dimensions. I mentioned in a comment on a previous episode of Little Guys that my dad sells 911 systems by trade and would bring home tons of stuff to do unpaid and unappreciated after hours IT work. Some of the things he'd bring home were the dispatch computers, and being a small county in a small state, they were the cheapest bulk buy future e-waste you could buy. I played a LOT of Assault cube on those machines between school and home.
My mom brought me an IBM XT from her government job back in the day, when my friends had 486s. Then, when I took out the CMOS battery, I was never able to boot from the hard disk again.
I for one love the long videos on these little guys, and also as someone who lives in a hot, old, chicago apartment do I ever understand the hatred of the indoor summer heat 😅
You know it's gonna be good when the episode is over an hour long
I love Matrox, assuming you could get your hands on the equipment they alone have produced enough little guys to keep this series going on infinitum.
Matrox has always knocked it out of the part in sheer software and hardware quality. I'd expect nothing less, they go the extra mile to make sure everything is polished and guaranteed to work.
Another great Little Guys episode!! Thanks Gravis - that filled some time where I should've been working :D
1:01:16 - "There's two of 'em" - I WANT MY CAT PICTURES!!!
Another reason you might not want color video on a system like this is if you're using a camera that doesn't use visible light - I tangentially worked on a system like this that used x-rays to scan for melted globs in freshly spun fiberglass insulation wool. Our system used the linear scan style of cameras; as the fiberglass rolled by it would composite the lines into a big rolling buffer that would then get fed into some off-the-shelf object detection code.
I've never been so excited over a photo of an oatmeal box. Bravo sir
I can't count how many things I learn from you in these videos. It's like hanging with the tech expert friend I never had and always wanted
This episode was extraordinary. So many interesting things! Thank you! 😊
Thanks for an amazing video! Really enjoying the series. Your reaction to the bios was amazing btw ;)
This dark/flat/gain discussion is surprising to me. That is literally my job. I work on super fancy astronomical sensors, and that is like 40% of my day-to-day worries.
14:10 the isolated I/O from this thing most likely connected up to a 24VDC input card on a PLC, and not directly to any control relays. And if they were extra fancy, maybe even over the local PLC Ethernet network via an I/O bridge from WonderWare or SoftwareToolbox -- both companies produce popular "software drivers" for Modbus Ethernet, Ethernet/IP, and various other protocols that run on Windows and VxWorks. Industrial and computer vision machines are fun.
I thought about that after I said it and I was gonna change the wording, but then I checked the deets on the SSRs, and the datasheet actually says the optoisolation is intended to resist back EMF, so I figured I'd keep it in. I can totally believe that you generally wouldn't, but it's neat that one could.
Ah yes, my favourite YT series. Can't wait to finish work and chill out with a cold beer and watch little guys. Sweet work CRD
I love your "little guys" series. Making underpowered computers do silly things is my jam. By the way, I think the power plug on the mobo is not for a cdrom but for the floppy drive. Note that the parallel port does double service as a floppy connector, right? How many pins is the connector for that on the mobo? Looks like it might be 34 to me. If so, it might take a standard floppy cable in place of the parallel port cable and then you could have an internal floppy if you jad a different bezel. Why you would want to do that baffles me, but perhaps that's it.
You really seemed to be enjoying yourself with this one! Glad to see it, it was fun to explore together!
I love these kind of videos where you try out all sorts of things to get an idea of what it was for!
I enjoy the little guys videos as I don't get to see this type of stuff as often anymore and I like the variety of what is out there. Seems to be getting harder and harder to find online examples of old industrial hardware too, so this is helpful. I really enjoyed this particular one for some reason, maybe because I always knew Matrox stayed around doing industrial things for a bit but I never got the opportunity to see what. Looks like they kept their QC up as well. I always enjoy quality built things even if they are not the best available.
This explains why I remember there being the occasional slightly burnt chip in my bag of Lay's when I was a kid, and then at some point that stopped happening. I miss that actually. Slightly burnt chips have a unique flavor that I enjoyed.
The Matrox Millenium was praised for its great 2D performance though (which was still a thing back then). Combined with a Monster 3D, you had a great gaming system on your hand!
It was a great 2D performer… in Windows. For Windows 3.1 or 95 or similar eras of NT, the Millenium produces a great picture at high resolution and implements all the 2D acceleration for things like smoothly dragging windows around and such. Unfortunately, not a great choice for people who like DOS gaming. There's other options with better compatibility.
love this series as a way to passively learn about pc hardware..... slowly going from fun videos for background watching that go over my head to understanding the things that are being talked about
I have many years of machine vision. Primarily focused on metrology (measuring parts) which has specific challenges. Datalogic made ipcs for generic poe 1.5 mega pixel image sensors. They produced image software as well and it used various techniques to process images for various measurements. We were measuring reliably down to microns for what it's worth using Keyence optical micrometer which are just fancy cameras and image processors.
This brings back some memories. I used to work with little guys like these all the time for industrial vision systems. These days, most of the smarts live aboard the cameras themselves. You can still get little guys for running setups that need synchronous imaging with a half dozen or more cameras, but most of the one- and two-camera solutions on the market now are computerless.
You were completely full of beans for this one and I enjoyed it immensely.
7:20 before i start, im no expert but i have worked on factory hardware and software. im *pretty sure* the difference between a frame grabber and a capture card is how the video is recorded and handled, some capture cards will do stuff like compression and interlacing, making it difficult to deal with small details, meanwhile frame grabbers always pick out a full image in its raw form, no compression or interlacing, making it easier on the computer vision. im sure there are capture cards out there that will record in perfect raw quality, but most factories cant rely on that, so they have dedicated cards that will always give them exactly the output they want.
im not an expert and i could be wrong, but im pretty sure that's the difference.
Why he needs it, running what on it ?
21:30 That Max Boot Failure [Enabled] bit is a perfect reaction image for every time a specific WaPo columnist posts anything
i fuggin love this little guys series! cant get enough
1:11:03 A lot of raspberry Pi addons do that actually. I have the TV hat, and that has a connector like that.
it actually came with a header extender, where the extender plugs into the Pi's pin header, and it has these REALLY long pins on it, so not only does it raise the TV hat a little, but then the pins stick through to allow you to plug another hat on top of the TV hat.
I actually had one of these years and years ago. My dad’s work bought one for some vehicle testing they were doing, and when they threw it away, he brought it home for me. Mine didn’t have the digital IO. I can’t remember what was there or not. The one I had ran NT4. I had a separate 5 amp or so 12v linear power supply I used to power it. My dad told me it had advanced video processing stuff, but he didn’t know enough about it to explain exactly how it was different.
This is crazy, never thought I’d see one of these again.
This is giving me major nostalgia feels. I must have worked on 100s of those over the years. From the original 4sight through to the 4sightGP and EV.
I’m only half way through your video, but to answer your question about the 8MB memory reservation - the main reason is to guarantee the availability of a contiguous block of ram. So the framegrabber can DMA straight to it. And so any processing functions can just blast through a buffer from beginning to end without having to worry about any gaps. That leads to much better performance. It’s not really hard-realtime once you leave the grabber. That is locked in sync with the video, but once you get to processing on the PC things are no longer deterministic. But with good design you can get close to guaranteeing a maximum processing time.
The Fire Tower app may have just been a basic version of Computer Vision (CV) to monitor a site's flare stack for a flame-out. This can happen when the pilot light is blown out, which would cause a dangerous situation if the site had a blowdown event and the flare was not lit to burn off the gas. The serial ports could've been used to talk to any of the control systems or SCADA side to generate a process alarm in case someone wasn't watching the camera full time.
Funny thing is that Matrox Montreal HQ is a few minutes away from where I live and a few of my friends worked there and only retired a few year ago so it's likely they worked on that system.
Another absolutely excellent episode!
Oh boy, I miss my Matrox graphics card from the 90s. It had S-Video out (which connected to SCART via adapter), I was able to record the Star_Trek Voyager episodes I downloaded in English (Austrian here) onto VHS and then watch them with my friend at his place. Or record decoded Sat TV shows on tape. (you could just barely record SD TV shows onto hard disk, but even with DivX you ran out of space, or transporting that data was tiresome). I remember playing the bundled RayMan game with one of them.
Matrox & Zebra makes sense because they're both in Toronto, pull from the same pool of embedded HW/SW engineers, and make ruggedized computer stuff. [half way through edit: makes even more sense. Zebra had a lot of ruggedized and a little machine vision, and it seems Matrox had a lot of machine vision and a little ruggedized. Also they're both used in factories.]
51:35 oh this one will do. Proceeds to grab a working vx1000
as i was doing it i thought "this is absolutely the most pretentious thing i could do. perfect"
Awesome video!, Little guys like these are a marvel to computing. Have you ever looked at National Instruments PXI controller PCs? They will surely fit the little guys series with all their quirks.
I'm glad you enjoyed! I don't think I'd looked at the NI PXI yet, but I'm very excited because I looked it up and immediately found a CompactPCI module! I just recently got a CompactPCI chassis and was champing at the bit to find other things to put in it, so I might end up buying one of these. Thank you so much!
WAIT, you’re telling me that hot dog/not hot dog is not only real, but has existed for years?? Listen, we may not have flying cars but we certainly are living the future
Gravis, I like these little guys episodes. Please remain at the bench, don't panic, and keep on keeping on! Cheers.
Also, I found the three firewire inputs a bit strange as well (as you were downplaying this little guy's speciality in the intro). I also own such an orange ONLOGIC box ;) They are indeed nothing special, just ruggedized computers for industrial use.
Definitely Zinc chromate plating, the yellow stuff is hexavalent chrome. Zinc chromate is still very common, it's just all trivalent chrome now, because it isn't carcinogenic.
Brings back memories! A more recent one of these was my work comptuter when I did an internship at Matrox in 2015
The firewire ports are likely split into two chips because one (the transceiver) is a mixed-mode circuit that needs to handle the analog annoyances of sending a signal over actual wires in the real-world; filters, termination, amplifiers, all kinds of stuff like that. The host controller will be a purely digital device that operates on the cleaned-up (and possibly demultiplexed) signals from the transceivers.
Each of these jobs is optimized for different integrated circuit fabrication lines, so each chip is probably made on a different manufacturing process that works better for implementing either digital logic or analog components on silicon (probably different feature sizes too).
Nowadays if you had this kind of constraint you'd normally just co-package two dies into a single part, but those kind of more advanced packaging techniques were not common or cheap at the time.
29:00 The eye icon that's used for both "Sure Pack" and "BDA Fire Tower" is one of standard icons bundled with an early version of either Visual Basic or Delphi. I don't remember which, but it's definitely familiar.
For PC/104 power, you can use DC/DC boards. They will take 5-48 volts and will provide the usual PC voltages to the PC/104 connectors and usually also a row of screw terminals. They get listed on the usual sources as Vehicle Power Supply, commonly. Happy hunting!
hell yea i was just running out of things to watch in my primordial boredom WOO LITTLE GUYS
This was over an hour of pure joy nerdiness😂❤ thanks man that's why i subbed
I used to design packaging like this in a past life and stuff like this definitely still gets my attention!
The light field (flat field) calibration image isn't taken at a long exposure to saturate the sensor. It's taken with the camera pointing into something like an integrating sphere that presents a uniform white illumination so the camera can compensate for some pixels being brighter or darker than others. Usually this is used for canceling out light falloff/vignetting toward the outside edge of the lens, but will also take out differences due to sensitivity differences between individual pixels.
Hey, it's a little oatmeal guy! Neat!
My first thought when you opened it up was "WOW, that is _so_ clean inside!".
I had to rewind (yes, rewind) to watch for “two of them”. It’s my favorite recurring gag.
Intellicam was used in two ways. As a testing tool - is there video on this input pin and what does it look like. And as a config tool for DCF files - these allowed the frame grabber to be used with non standard sources. Basic framegrabbers like the Meteor2 and Orion would have limited options just for CCIR/RS170/PAL/NTSC sources, such as exposure timings or clock sources. More sophisticated grabbers (Meteor2/DIG, Pulsar, Genesis) would have much more configurable inputs where you could change the timing, clock frequency, sync duration. You could do multi-tap cameras, linescan, asynchronous reset. All sorts.
This kind of configuration was necessary until (fairly) recently when digital interfaces based on usb , Ethernet or CoaXpress started supporting GenICam. Which basically uses an XML file to tell the framegrabber which options the camera supports
1:04:30 That zinc coating is cool, but was used heavily in electronics chassis for vacuum tube tech, like radios, test equipment, and tv's before semiconductors became a thing. The downside is when the coating ages, if it's not stored in good conditions, the surface will get a yellow-ish green dust like layer on its surface that you can breathe in if it's disturbed. It's fine if it's just sitting there or inside a case or chassis, but yeah. Not so great for future owners and their lungs. It's not asbestos insulation levels of danger, but like you said, it's toxic.
31:00 Bed goes On. Bed goes Off.
this is my favourite video of urs so far and i giv extra engagement yay