I am using guvcview to see the output of a usb microscope mounted onto a simple manual pick-and-place machine. It would be really helpful if it was possible to have an adjustable cross-hair as part of the display window foreground.
The spacial relation to where a component will be placed and the view from the microscope (the guvcview display window) is fixed for a specific session. This may change if the microscope was removed between sessions. But even if everything is accurately aligned and placement is exactly at the middle of the display, it is still difficult to estimate where even the middle of the display is. A solution would be to test the current setup, see where within the display a component is being placed, and set a marker (the cross-hair) at that display position. From then on all subsequent components will be placed at the cross-hair position.
In general, the cross-hair should be part of the window foreground and not of the image data. One should be able to enable or disable it. One should be able to specify its X,Y coordinates. It should be thin (dashed,transparent) as not to obscure to much of the image. Apart from my need described above, there may be other uses.
Thanks - Bertie.
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cross-hair is centred and in green colour, it's not yet possible to change colour or set transparency level, eventually I can set this is the config file, but probably not in the GUI.
Regards,
Paulo
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Thanks Paulo.
I am running Manjaro with guvcview 2.0.1-1. I might try to get the daily build working, or else just wait patiently for the upgrade to come through.
Bertie.
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My patience worked. I saw that version 2.02 was released and although it has not hit the Manjaro / Arch repos yet, I managed to compile and install it from source.
The cross-hair, as implemented, is fine and will help me a lot.
Thanks - Bertie.
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Just some comments since my previous post (2015-08-18):
Updates either to the linux kernel or glibc are giving me (and some others apparently) problems with some programs including guvcview, which now core dumps 99% of the time (it does work ever so seldom). It dumps just before opening the gui. To try and trace the problem I found that when run through valgrind, guvcview works every time, but valgrind slows it down. This lead me to believe that it is some timing problem. My solution was to insert a sleep(1) in line 346 of guvcview.c, just before the call to gui_attach(). Now it works every time. I know it is a hack but it might help someone with the same problem.
After some practical use, I found the green cross-hair difficult to see agains the green background of printed circuit boards, PCBs, onto which I pick and place my components. I changed the cross-hair to red in render_osd_crosshair.c by changing to color.y = 81; color.u = 90; color.v = 240; I have not gone into detail of guvcview code and how fully the parameter osd_mask in the config file is used, but even two bits could give a selection of four standard colours, say black, green, red, blue without having to recompile for a different cross-hair colour.
Thanks - Bertie.
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
I am using guvcview to see the output of a usb microscope mounted onto a simple manual pick-and-place machine. It would be really helpful if it was possible to have an adjustable cross-hair as part of the display window foreground.
The spacial relation to where a component will be placed and the view from the microscope (the guvcview display window) is fixed for a specific session. This may change if the microscope was removed between sessions. But even if everything is accurately aligned and placement is exactly at the middle of the display, it is still difficult to estimate where even the middle of the display is. A solution would be to test the current setup, see where within the display a component is being placed, and set a marker (the cross-hair) at that display position. From then on all subsequent components will be placed at the cross-hair position.
In general, the cross-hair should be part of the window foreground and not of the image data. One should be able to enable or disable it. One should be able to specify its X,Y coordinates. It should be thin (dashed,transparent) as not to obscure to much of the image. Apart from my need described above, there may be other uses.
Thanks - Bertie.
Hi,
This is now implemented in git master.
If you are using the latest ubuntu you can use the daily builds on my testing ppa:
https://launchpad.net/~pj-assis/+archive/ubuntu/testing
cross-hair is centred and in green colour, it's not yet possible to change colour or set transparency level, eventually I can set this is the config file, but probably not in the GUI.
Regards,
Paulo
Thanks Paulo.
I am running Manjaro with guvcview 2.0.1-1. I might try to get the daily build working, or else just wait patiently for the upgrade to come through.
Bertie.
My patience worked. I saw that version 2.02 was released and although it has not hit the Manjaro / Arch repos yet, I managed to compile and install it from source.
The cross-hair, as implemented, is fine and will help me a lot.
Thanks - Bertie.
Just some comments since my previous post (2015-08-18):
Updates either to the linux kernel or glibc are giving me (and some others apparently) problems with some programs including guvcview, which now core dumps 99% of the time (it does work ever so seldom). It dumps just before opening the gui. To try and trace the problem I found that when run through valgrind, guvcview works every time, but valgrind slows it down. This lead me to believe that it is some timing problem. My solution was to insert a sleep(1) in line 346 of guvcview.c, just before the call to gui_attach(). Now it works every time. I know it is a hack but it might help someone with the same problem.
After some practical use, I found the green cross-hair difficult to see agains the green background of printed circuit boards, PCBs, onto which I pick and place my components. I changed the cross-hair to red in render_osd_crosshair.c by changing to color.y = 81; color.u = 90; color.v = 240; I have not gone into detail of guvcview code and how fully the parameter osd_mask in the config file is used, but even two bits could give a selection of four standard colours, say black, green, red, blue without having to recompile for a different cross-hair colour.
Thanks - Bertie.
I got hold of a 2.0.3 version, guvcview-qt5-git, that addresses all above .
Thanks - Bertie.