Author Topic: EEVblog #585 - Lab Bench ESD Matting Upgrade + Tagarno HD Microscope  (Read 61682 times)

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Offline EEVblogTopic starter

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Re: EEVblog #585 - Lab Bench ESD Matting Upgrade + Tagarno HD Microscope
« Reply #75 on: March 06, 2014, 08:08:07 am »
Tagarno say it's my video card at fault, it's not powerful enough. It's GTX650. And my upgraded laptop didn't have a chance in hell. They recommend a Radeon HD785 at a minimum.
This means I need to buy an entirely new i7 desktop for the lab, that's gonna cost $$$.
They also claim the BlackMagic HDMI encoding box doesn't cut the mustard either.
Strangely they claim a laptop with a GeForce GT 740M works a treat.
http://www.tagarno.com/sites/default/files/files/recommended_minimum_system_requirement_software_magnus_fhd_zip.pdf
 

Offline linux-works

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Re: EEVblog #585 - Lab Bench ESD Matting Upgrade + Tagarno HD Microscope
« Reply #76 on: March 06, 2014, 08:16:25 am »
any 'camera' that needs an i7 is not one that I would spend money on.

I never heard of such a thing!  HD video never needs an i7.  the video card does all the heavy lifting.  what the hell?!  this isn't 10 years ago.   even a fanless cheap video card can do HD video without breaking a sweat.

something does not make sense to me, here.

Offline moemoe

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Re: EEVblog #585 - Lab Bench ESD Matting Upgrade + Tagarno HD Microscope
« Reply #77 on: March 06, 2014, 08:35:32 am »
It's strange that they give an 'Graphics integrated: Intel® HD Graphics 4000' as sufficient, but as soon as using an external card, they want something much more powerful. And with USB3 supporting DMA CPU speed shouldn't be such a big issue.

Any ideads what video codec they are using? As every compression adds lag, I could imagine they use MJPEG or some other codec without any interframe compression.
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Offline hans

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Re: EEVblog #585 - Lab Bench ESD Matting Upgrade + Tagarno HD Microscope
« Reply #78 on: March 06, 2014, 08:42:50 am »
What do they specify those ratings for? For recording video?

I can sort of see why they specify a mid-end gaming graphics card for this, as video encoding is something different to video decoding (which any GPU can do). If you would want to do on-the-fly video compressing I could see how things get very slow. Compare the rendering time of a Full HD video to the video length, if that ratio is greater than 1, your render takes long than the footage, and is not able to keep up. Especially at 60Hz, which means you need double the power.

However, streaming video data is something about the USB3.0 support/capability and writing it to a harddrive. That has nothing to do with GPU or even CPU, much more with support and how the software handles it.
I have recorded triple-screen (3840x1024, 30fps, audio, raw) footage whilst running a game (which loads the GPU up completely), and I could only stream that footage to a memdisk. Luckily my machine has 16GB of RAM, so I reserved 12GB as a streamdisk. I could record very very short segments (2 minutes top), but it did work.
I am not sure how fast that stream was, but probably in the order of 100MB/s. My mechanical drives top out at around 100MB/s, but soon dropoff to 60 MB/s. A modern SSD, with huge write speeds, should be able to handle that.
(note: not any SSD though, my 3 year old OCZ Vertex 2 has a sequential write speed of 60MB/s maximum - a bit more if the data is very compressible).

IMHO if their camera requires you to get a i7 and gaming GPU, they better be paying for that machine as well. Because it's out of this world you need such a machine for what is in essence a USB3.0 Full HD webcam.

Maybe hacking a HDMI Ethernet Extender instead is an option: http://hackaday.com/2014/01/25/reverse-engineering-an-hdmi-extender/
That box encodes frames to JPEG and multicasts them over UDP on the network. You can easily join as a PC (if you reverse engineer the ethernet stream to ofcourse..) on that UDP multicast group and sniff the image data. Then it's probably a little tweaking to stream the images together to a videostream and overlay a (good) audio source.
« Last Edit: March 06, 2014, 08:49:04 am by hans »
 

Offline EEVblogTopic starter

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Re: EEVblog #585 - Lab Bench ESD Matting Upgrade + Tagarno HD Microscope
« Reply #79 on: March 06, 2014, 09:31:52 am »
It's strange that they give an 'Graphics integrated: Intel® HD Graphics 4000' as sufficient

That minimum figure is not for recording. My desktop works fine when just viewing the video (when it's not locking up), but when you hit record it just crawls or simply doesn't work. So it's not a USB 3.0 nor an actual video display issue.

Quote
Any ideads what video codec they are using? As every compression adds lag, I could imagine they use MJPEG or some other codec without any interframe compression.

It's just a generic webcam driver interface I believe.
 

Offline EEVblogTopic starter

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Re: EEVblog #585 - Lab Bench ESD Matting Upgrade + Tagarno HD Microscope
« Reply #80 on: March 06, 2014, 09:36:24 am »
I can sort of see why they specify a mid-end gaming graphics card for this, as video encoding is something different to video decoding (which any GPU can do). If you would want to do on-the-fly video compressing I could see how things get very slow. Compare the rendering time of a Full HD video to the video length, if that ratio is greater than 1, your render takes long than the footage, and is not able to keep up. Especially at 60Hz, which means you need double the power.

Yep, that's clearly what's happening here.

Quote
However, streaming video data is something about the USB3.0 support/capability and writing it to a harddrive. That has nothing to do with GPU or even CPU, much more with support and how the software handles it.

I wonder if there is a way to just stream the USB 3.0 video straight to disk without having to display it?

Quote
IMHO if their camera requires you to get a i7 and gaming GPU, they better be paying for that machine as well. Because it's out of this world you need such a machine for what is in essence a USB3.0 Full HD webcam.

That's essentially what it is. Just a full HD webcam and appears as such to any capture program. There is not even an option to lower the resolution, I'd be happy with 1280x720x25fps.
It's essentially the 30x optics I'm after here and the big working distance.

 

Offline BravoV

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Re: EEVblog #585 - Lab Bench ESD Matting Upgrade + Tagarno HD Microscope
« Reply #81 on: March 06, 2014, 09:37:21 am »
Just fyi the Microsoft Life Cam studio specification that is used in the other cheap China microscope  :

720p HD recording ( Sensor Resolution: 1920 X 1080 )
• Intel Dual-Core 3.0 GHz or higher 
• 2 GB of RAM
• 1.5 GB hard drive space
• Display adapter capable of 16-bit color depth or higher
• 2 MB or higher video memory
• Windows-compatible speakers or headphones
• USB 2.0

Offline rollatorwieltje

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Re: EEVblog #585 - Lab Bench ESD Matting Upgrade + Tagarno HD Microscope
« Reply #82 on: March 06, 2014, 09:49:20 am »
Can't you specify the codec for the recording? Tools like Fraps (desktop recording, used often for games) record in some "almost raw" format. It takes massive amounts of disk space and a dedicated fast drive, but in general the performance hit on the PC is tolerable. I have everything installed on a SSD and use my old WD Black disks in raid 0 as recording destination.
 

Offline moemoe

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Re: EEVblog #585 - Lab Bench ESD Matting Upgrade + Tagarno HD Microscope
« Reply #83 on: March 06, 2014, 04:31:25 pm »
I wonder if there is a way to just stream the USB 3.0 video straight to disk without having to display it?

That's what I thought there software would do and therefore was wondering about these system requirements. Just recieving bits via DMA and writing them onto disk via DMA shouldn't need too many resources, as the CPU or GPU is nearly not involved in any part of this process.

I'd try VirtualDub (http://www.virtualdub.org/), as it can capture from any VFW compliant device, and seems to be able to save the raw data.

Start the program, Video->Direct Stream Copy, Audio->Direct Stream Copy, File->Capture AVI, "F2" Select capture device, "P" Toggle Video Preview, "F2" Set capture file, Set Framerate in bottom Toolbar, "C" No recompression, "F5" Start Capture.
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Offline linux-works

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Re: EEVblog #585 - Lab Bench ESD Matting Upgrade + Tagarno HD Microscope
« Reply #84 on: March 06, 2014, 04:57:08 pm »
It's essentially the 30x optics I'm after here and the big working distance.

digital slr cameras are cheap, kits lenses are cheap and you can get any zoom you want.  modern slr's have video out, mostly for setting up the shot and playback, but there's no reason you could not use an slr or bridge camera and just use its optics and sensor to send video to your pc.  and you'd get top notch optics, that way.  if you ruin the lens, a kit lens with zoom is $100 or less so its not a huge deal.  they take filters (so you can protect your front element) and even add achromats for some serious close-up macro work.

there are heavy duty tripods (that are not large) and can take horizontal beams instead of vertical posts and that way you could have the tripod mounted far back toward the end of the bench and be able to move the camera, pointing down, with lots of degrees of freedom.


Online Monkeh

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Re: EEVblog #585 - Lab Bench ESD Matting Upgrade + Tagarno HD Microscope
« Reply #85 on: March 06, 2014, 06:01:30 pm »
See if ShadowPlay can record the displayed video.
 

Offline AmmoJammo

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Re: EEVblog #585 - Lab Bench ESD Matting Upgrade + Tagarno HD Microscope
« Reply #86 on: March 06, 2014, 08:47:57 pm »
Australian voltage is 240 ;)

It's 230V officially. Still 240V in many areas like my lab and home.

This makes me sad :(

I did some searching, and apparently it was 240volts before 1980 :P

eh, it'll always be 240volt to me!
 

Offline Rasz

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Re: EEVblog #585 - Lab Bench ESD Matting Upgrade + Tagarno HD Microscope
« Reply #87 on: March 06, 2014, 10:02:16 pm »
Tagarno say it's my video card at fault, it's not powerful enough. It's GTX650. And my upgraded laptop didn't have a chance in hell. They recommend a Radeon HD785 at a minimum.
.....
but when you hit record it just crawls or simply doesn't work.

GTX650 does indeed support hardware h.264 encoding. Most likely their software doesnt pick it up.

They also claim the BlackMagic HDMI encoding box doesn't cut the mustard either.

Does not compute, or do they mean their HDMI output is non standard?

I wonder if there is a way to just stream the USB 3.0 video straight to disk without having to display it?

https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/DirectShow

"-vcodec copy"

and no, you dont need to be a penguin to use it :)
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Offline dr.diesel

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Re: EEVblog #585 - Lab Bench ESD Matting Upgrade + Tagarno HD Microscope
« Reply #88 on: March 06, 2014, 10:14:48 pm »
eh, it'll always be 240volt to me!

Reminds me of:



Ha ha,  :-DD

Offline GiskardReventlov

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Re: EEVblog #585 - Lab Bench ESD Matting Upgrade + Tagarno HD Microscope
« Reply #89 on: March 06, 2014, 10:24:14 pm »
This means I need to buy an entirely new i7 desktop for the lab, that's gonna cost $$$.

I hate when I have to buy a new something because my other new something depends on it.
Okay not always, sometimes it can be a good excuse, er, I mean, reason, to upgrade.

This does sound wrong. But I don't keep up on graphic card specs and I'm sure Tagarno do.


Quote
They also claim the BlackMagic HDMI encoding box doesn't cut the mustard either.
You have this device? I would contact them, they might have some advice.
 

Offline EEVblogTopic starter

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Re: EEVblog #585 - Lab Bench ESD Matting Upgrade + Tagarno HD Microscope
« Reply #90 on: March 06, 2014, 10:28:19 pm »
They also claim the BlackMagic HDMI encoding box doesn't cut the mustard either.
Does not compute, or do they mean their HDMI output is non standard?

I presume that it couldn't support the full 60P output rate.
 

Offline nanofrog

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Re: EEVblog #585 - Lab Bench ESD Matting Upgrade + Tagarno HD Microscope
« Reply #91 on: March 07, 2014, 06:30:33 am »
any suggestions on where to get good quality (yet still affordable) mats here in the US?

I looked at amazon but can't be sure if this is junk or good stuff, there.  mostly I see vinyl junk.  I'm looking for the solder-resistant blue top surface and rubber backing.  I'll probably need 6' by 30" (size of a typical folding table that you find at office supply stores).
Couple of places ATM.

There's a seller based in Canada on eBay I've bought from before. Good quality mat (heavy @  .080"), and options (smooth v. textured, 2 layer or 3 layer, ...). Here's the current listings for 30"x72" mats. Lots of other sizes should you need them, and he'll also do custom sizes.

All-Spec has a 30"x72" @ 0.080" thick 2 layer kit (light blue in pic, color is stated as blue) mat for $68.70 including residential shipping ticking in my ZIP. Only 2 in stock, so get it quick. Slightly less expensive than the eBay seller, but at regular prices, the eBay seller is usually the way to go IMHO. Actually have a slightly smaller one (bit thinner too @ 0.060") tomorrow for a second bench table I'm building this weekend.

Hope these help. :)

 

Offline linux-works

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Re: EEVblog #585 - Lab Bench ESD Matting Upgrade + Tagarno HD Microscope
« Reply #92 on: March 07, 2014, 03:34:42 pm »
I ordered a 30x72 blue mat from 'canada' (niagara falls!  slowly, I turned...)

fedex ground says it should be here tomorrow.  that's just about a week in the mail.  sounds good to me.  for about $70 or so, shipped (roughly).

Offline nanofrog

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Re: EEVblog #585 - Lab Bench ESD Matting Upgrade + Tagarno HD Microscope
« Reply #93 on: March 07, 2014, 05:39:01 pm »
I ordered a 30x72 blue mat from 'canada' (niagara falls!  slowly, I turned...)

fedex ground says it should be here tomorrow.  that's just about a week in the mail.  sounds good to me.  for about $70 or so, shipped (roughly).
Mine came in quick from that seller as well. Been very happy with mine, so I don't expect you'll be disappointed.  :)

Enjoy.  8)
 

Offline AmmoJammo

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Re: EEVblog #585 - Lab Bench ESD Matting Upgrade + Tagarno HD Microscope
« Reply #94 on: March 07, 2014, 09:01:26 pm »
I did some searching, and apparently it was 240volts before 1980 :P

eh, it'll always be 240volt to me!

It's 251 for me!

That's getting pretty close to out of spec... should be 230v, +10%, -6% from what I read...

This makes me wonder how the power meters work now... the one in the fuse box...
 

Offline EEVblogTopic starter

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Re: EEVblog #585 - Lab Bench ESD Matting Upgrade + Tagarno HD Microscope
« Reply #95 on: March 13, 2014, 08:09:12 am »
I'll order a new desktop PC tomorrow dedicated for this, no other choice really, going to cost about $850 or so.
i7 7440 with HD4600 graphics
8GB DDR3
Thermaltake Versa H22 case with silent fan PSU
Coolermaster 412 slim CPU cooler
Gigabyte GA-B85M0-HD3 MB with USB 3.0
I have a HD7850 graphics card as backup is the HD4600 integrated graphics with quicksync doesn't work.
Should be pretty quiet which is essential when it's mounted right under the bench while shooting video.
And it meets their specification:
http://www.tagarno.com/sites/default/files/files/recommended_minimum_system_requirement_software_magnus_fhd_zip.pdf
If it doesn't work I'm going to be a bit pissed...
 

Offline EEVblogTopic starter

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Re: EEVblog #585 - Lab Bench ESD Matting Upgrade + Tagarno HD Microscope
« Reply #96 on: March 13, 2014, 08:50:30 am »
Hold the presses, someone on Twitter pointed out the Intel NUC:
http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/nuc/nuc-kit-d54250wykh.html

Has the even more powerful HD5000 graphics with quicksync, optimised for video encoding.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/7072/intel-hd-5000-vs-hd-4000-vs-hd-4400
This looks like an ideal box to mate with the Tagarno microscope
The HD4000 graphics on my i3770 home desktop work, if a little buggy, so this HD5000 should certainly do the business? No option for a graphics card if it doesn't though, but it's compact and presumably pretty silent.
Comments?
 

Offline EEVblogTopic starter

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Re: EEVblog #585 - Lab Bench ESD Matting Upgrade + Tagarno HD Microscope
« Reply #97 on: March 13, 2014, 09:56:05 am »
The Gigabyte Brix Pro looks even better:
http://www.anandtech.com/print/7648/gigabyte-brix-pro
 

Offline hans

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Re: EEVblog #585 - Lab Bench ESD Matting Upgrade + Tagarno HD Microscope
« Reply #98 on: March 13, 2014, 11:17:49 am »
I guess the HD5000 will do the same trick as the HD4000 can. It doesn't really depend if you get an i3 or i7 , the GPU/QuickSync HW does the encoding, so it should.
But as I read you also got yourself a HD7850 and that one didn't work neither.. I'm guessing it will all be part of the review ?  :box:

I can think of a few up & down sides for small PC's. Upside: compact, light, energy efficient HW so probably also cool (& quiet ? unless they use 40mm fans, ofcourse).
Downside: no upgradable CPU, no option for dedicated GPU, most of them can't handle 2.5" drives (You need one of those mSATA SSD's, Crucial & Samsung make versions of their mainstream SSD's) and limited amount of ports.

I do think a Intel i5 or i7 with the U-suffix (Ultrabook?) is sufficient for most workbench work. I can imagine aside from video capture , you would probably do stuff like looking up datasheets, viewing CAD work (always nice to know what to probe) and running some firmware debugger tools.
However keep in mind the other i7 (desktop model) has way more raw horsepower, but it can also be gross overkill if the only thing you do is internet & programming.
 

Offline lewis

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Re: EEVblog #585 - Lab Bench ESD Matting Upgrade + Tagarno HD Microscope
« Reply #99 on: March 13, 2014, 12:15:26 pm »
Or there's one of these: http://www.fit-pc.com/web/products/ipc2/

Absolutely tiny, silent, and awesome. Reassuringly expensive too.
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