jAER / News: Recent posts

After moving all our code to GitHub, it became necessary to find a good replacement for the SourceForge discussion forums. To also support easy e-mail announcements, as well as a good mailing-list and web-interface integration, we decided to use Google Groups.
The following new groups are available:

https://groups.google.com/d/forum/jaer-users (for jAER support)
https://groups.google.com/d/forum/caer-users (for cAER and libcaer support)
https://groups.google.com/d/forum/davis-users (for DAVIS, DVS and eDVS support)
https://groups.google.com/d/forum/dynapse-users (for Dynap-SE support)... read more

The jAER SVN repository has been switched to read-only and will continue to exist only for historical reasons.
Please use the new GitHub Git repositories, which can be found at:
- jAER/trunk/ is now https://github.com/SensorsINI/jaer
- scripts/ is now https://github.com/SensorsINI/processAEDAT
- devices/ has been split up, iniLabs supported devices can be now fond at https://github.com/inilabs/devices-bin and Sensors group devices at https://github.com/SensorsINI/devices
- utils/jaerfx2 is now https://github.com/inilabs/jfxaer
Please use these locations to report bugs too, using the GitHub Issues system.
If you want to send us code changes, either attach diffs to tickets or directly send us pull requests!... read more

The libcaer, cAER and Flashy repositories have been migrated from SourceForge.net Subversion to Git, under GitHub. The repositories can now be found at the following URLs:
libcaer - https://github.com/inilabs/libcaer
cAER - https://github.com/inilabs/caer
Flashy - https://github.com/inilabs/flashy
Please use these locations to report bugs too, using the GitHub Issues system.
If you want to send us code changes, either attach diffs to tickets or directly send us pull requests!
The rest of the jAER repository may be moved in the future, though there are no definitive plans yet.

As of 27.01.2016, the davisconfig_rewrite/ branch of jAER 1.5 was merged back into trunk.
The purpose of this branch was to simplify and unify the configuration backend for all new DAVIS devices and other derivatives, so that all device configuration options could be exposed to the user (like it is done in cAER). This affects only the "Hardware Configuration" tab/window for DAVIS chips, reorganizing the options therein and adding new ones, such as the "External Input" tab or new APS related options.
The change required a migration of all hardware bias configuration files for the affected chips (for customers, this currently means DAVIS240 only), which was done for all files included in the biasgenSettings/ sub-folder. It is possible not all settings have been migrated correctly or jAER might not pick them up until you reload the bias file. If you have your own bias files, just try to load them and then check each option (especially the current biases) manually, re-set anything that looks wrong and save the file again.

libcaer 1.0.2 was released on 08.01.2016. It contains various bug-fixes and is required for the newest cAER versions that can be found in our Subversion repository. For more information, please read the ChangeLog file incuded in the archives.

libcaer 1.0.0 has been released and can be found in our Subversion repository under libcaer/trunk/.
libcaer is a simple and minimal C library that enables low-level access to our DVS128 and DAVIS devices and provides definitions for an efficient in-memory event and event packet format.
It was created out of the recognized wish from many of our customers to be able to access the devices in C or C++, without having to rely on the full cAER framework, and instead use their own software systems to process the incoming data.
cAER itself will be modified to use libcaer for low-level device access. The new in-memory event format that libcaer introduces is incompatible with the cAER one, as it improves various aspects of it. The cAER format was never final and will change accordingly with the migration to libcaer.
Documentation can be found for now in the form of examples in the examples/ directory and the README files.

This will be of interest to many people who actively work with jAER: a new prize has just been launched to recognise outstanding reasearch in Neuromorphic Engineering. The deadline for submissions is the end of the year and the prize is 3000 USD: www.mahowaldprize.org

To clean-up old projects and address the situation of multiple projects (jAER, cAER, Flashy) calling the main jAER Subversion repository home, a significant restructuring of said repository has taken place.
Mostly only users of jAER will be affected by the move.
jAER 1.5 is now located at https://svn.code.sf.net/p/jaer/code/jAER/trunk/ and both biasgen and filter settings are now part of its directory structure, so that biases and settings are always directly available.
If you have a full jAER SVN checkout (recommended, URL https://svn.code.sf.net/p/jaer/code/), then just updating fully and re-adding the jAER project from its new location should be enough. If you have a separate checkout of jAER only, please check it out again from the above location.

Wiki

The jAER web resources were fully migrated from Trac to the new SourceForge Allura platform. This mainly affects the wiki.
The old Trac wiki doesn't exist any more, please use the new one at:
https://sourceforge.net/p/jaer/wiki/
Links to the old system, such as jaer.sf.net or jaer.wiki.sourceforge.net, automatically redirect you to the new address.

Mailing Lists

The jaer-general mailing list was deleted, it was decided to only use the already present discussion forums on SourceForge for helping users (Help forum) and giving developers the possibility to openly discuss changes (Developers forum).... read more

jAER has its own domain names now. These point to the jAER wiki and should be used for citations, e.g. "jAER project. (2007) Available: http://jaerproject.net"

jAER has been upgraded to the new Allura sourceforge platform.

The biggest implication is that the old svn repository is read-only now and developers need to relocate their working copy to the new URL which is now
https://svn.code.sf.net/p/jaer/code

"Relocating" your working copy means that the URL is changed, but nothing else changes. See http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.7/svn.ref.svn.c.relocate.html for background on relocating. In TortoiseSVN there is a menu item for relocating.... read more

The new DVS128 firmware version 11 improves the synchronization, especially under heavy USB load.

With this new firmware, it has to be set in software whether a device is master or slave. Go to 'menu->DVS128->Timestamp master / enable sync event output' to select master / slave.
If you are just using a single DVS, use timestamp master mode. If you use slave mode, the timestamps will not advance and will be thus stuck at zero.... read more

A bug in the signing script was fixed so that Windows drivers should now install, asking if you trust our signature "inilabs GmbH", for which we paid real money and answered a real paper letter to get, which took us altogether over a month.

Version 10 of the DVS128 camera firmware should fix occasional non-monotonic timestamps that could previously have occurred.

This revision also reduces the early packet timer from 4ms to 1ms, so packets of data will be sent to the host at maximum interval of 1ms if there are any events. This change reduces the maximum latency by a factor of 4. If the data rate is higher than 128 events/ms, then packets will be sent at a higher rate. A USB2.0 host can service these packets at 125us intervals.... read more

The Windows device drivers for the DVS128 silicon retina are now signed (by "iniLabs Gmbh") and should install and run on Win 7 / 64. Update you working copy and install from \drivers\windows\driverDVS_USBAERmini2.

Update DVS128 Firmware to Rev 9 for this fix to multi-camera synchronization.

The default user interface for the DVS128 camera has been changed to show a new "Bias tweaker" interface that abstracts away the underlying bias currents to show controls for "Bandwidth", "Threshold", "Maximum firing rate" and "On/Off balance. This change should make it much easier for novices to adjust the chip operating biases.

The UDP classes AEUnicastInput and AEUnicastOutput now make use of Channels instead of constantly reallocating DatagramPacket's. They are faster now and result in much less garbage collection.

jAER and be built and run under mac OS using Eclipse; see the wiki page http://jaer.wiki.sourceforge.net/Developer+setup+Mac+OS+X.
Thanks to Mert Yentur for this.

A major rework of the AEChip 2d histogram rendering was done over Christmas. Now spikes are accumulated straight to a pixbuf array which is passed to OpenGL for scaled pixel rendering. This has sped up rendering and reduced processor loads significantly.

We are doing a major refactoring of jAER. Please commit all modified code so that it can be merged into the new branch. When this branch (in branches/netsfjaer) looks stable, we will make it the trunk.

New feature: The newest USBAERmini2 firmware now lets you update the CPLD firmware. Open the CypressFX2EEPROM utility, download the firmware to the device, replug it and download the latest CPLD code.
CAUTION: Some of the boards built in Sevilla use the FX2 instead of the FX2LP. Unfortunately, the FX2 does not have enough RAM to run the new firmware. Check if your board has a FX2LP befor downloading the new firmware: the device number of the FX2LP is CY7C68013A or 014A, the one of the FX2 is without A.

All JNI and 3rd party jars have been unified under the host/java/jars folder to simplify classpath and java.library.path use. (It also seems to be a requirement that JNI needs to be in the same folder as the linux usb jar.)

jAER now has alpha support for running the DVS128 retina under linux, thanks to Martin Ebner. See the package ch.unizh.ini.caviar.hardwareinterface.usb.linux

A new method Srring EventFilter.getDescription() has been added. Override this method in your EventFilter if you want a general filter description to be shown in the FilterPanel tooltip. See BackgroundActivityFilter for an example.