I am interested in the FireFly MV from Point Grey. Does anyone have any experience with them? It seems as if you have to buy 5 cameras plus a development kit, so I may try to organize a group buy if there is enough interest.
I could be mistaking, but i think white ordered one with a kit for the company he’s working fore and he paid like 300 dollars or so, i believe that was the firefly MV from point grey
I’m using the Firefly MV. We bought a 5-pack with no dev kit (just told them that one of the people in our group already got a single one with a devkit, which is true, but they didn’t question much).
I haven’t used it with touchlib yet (in fact, i haven’t really used touchlib yet) but for our own source code, it works great, really great - VERY fast, great IR pickup, etc. I’m working on getting it working under OS X, and have been using the (also very nice) point grey SDK to make it work under windows.
Has anybody used it under OS X? I could really use some pointers. I’ll post what I figure out....
I figured that since it is a Firewire camera OS X would pick it up like I believe it does with many cameras. I looked on Point Grey’s web site just now and it seems it will work but for maximum compatibility you need to use libdc1394 or IOXperts’s drivers.
You don’t have to buy 5. You can get 1 cam + a dev kit for the price gravano said. It’s an excellent cam and I would recommend it to anyone who has the money. It worked straight away with touchlib using the Videowrapper capture filter configured for the pointgrey cam.
It seems that this is a CMOS camera—is this a problem? I’ve heard that CCD is better at IR than CMOS. I’m also interested in the OS X compatibility—has anyone used this successfully with OS X? Additionally, has anyone used the Philips SPC900NC successfully @ 60FPS on OS X? I know that it works with the MACCAM drivers, but wondering about fps.... Thanks.
I was under the same impression as you are about CCD being better with IR than CMOS, but I believe WhiteNoiz has used it personally, and said it worked great. I think it will work fine in OS X because it is a FireWire cam. If it doesn’t, I know IOXperts has drivers for Point Grey cams.
I am also wanting to use OS X for my multitouch experiments, but I haven’t figured out how to compile TouchLib completely. If you have/can figure it out, please let me know how you did it. It would be a huge help.
I am not sure about the SPC900NC, I bought one but haven’t opened it yet for hopes of being able to afford the FireFly MV. But at the moment it looks like I’ll have to stick to the Philips. Anyway, I think the IOXperts drivers are the best bet for compatibilty with OS X, as their supported camera table shows the SPC900NC to work with them. I also feel your pain with the Macam drivers, I have tried an Intel cam I’ve had for years and that I know can do 15-30 FPS, and Macam leaves it stuck at 5 FPS.
I just finished compiling OpenCV with IPP (Intel’s Ingegrated performance primitives) support on an Intel Macbook Pro running OS X Tiger. I’ll give Touchlib compilation a shot within the next couple days. I also just compiled reactivision 1.4 which, apparently, has fiducial(less) finger touch sensing now. I’m testing that tonight. Previously one was required to use tiny target-like finger stickers. As far as cameras go, I’ve had a lot of experience with the Unibrain Fire-I (which is a bit noisy, but otherwise tolerable) and I’m currently just using an Sony SSC-M183 analog cam, wide-angle lens, Kodak IR filter and capturing with the DFG/1394-1e, which does uncompressed (quite fast) firewire 640x480 @ 30fps. More on that later.
Ah, okay. I bet Intel’s IPP is a lot easier than compiling by hand. I see that it runs on Intel Macs only though. Are the applications it creates Intel only or are they Universal apps? There’s a MacBook Pro in my family, so I might have to try it on that. Please tell me how Touchlib goes. I’ve been waiting a while for Reactivision 1.4, how much longer do you think it will be before it is officially released?
On the subject of cams, I have looked at the Unibrain Fire-i and was thinking about buying it but then heard I it did 30 FPS only at 320x240. Is that true or not? That security cam looks pretty nice, but unfortunately I don’t have a capture card or the like.
Any new developments on the OS X Firefly MV front? I talked with their Linux tech fellow today and he encouraged the pursuit of the libdc1394 option on OS X. Has anybody played with this?
I don’t guess so. I assumed OS X would pick the cam up on its own like it does most Firewire cams. I wish I could afford the FireFly MV in my initial budget, but it looks like I won’t be able to.
Any new developments on the OS X Firefly MV front? I talked with their Linux tech fellow today and he encouraged the pursuit of the libdc1394 option on OS X. Has anybody played with this?
It takes a bit on tinkering, but libdc1394 works a treat on the Mac.
