Yankee Robotics, LLC was founded in 1996 to offer consulting services to firms focused on embedded development and financial trading.
The company had recently launched its first product the 'Trifid Astronomical Camera', a USB 2.0 device that supports high-speed (480 Mbps) and full-speed (12 Mbps) bulk transfers.
Astronomical photography can be extremely difficult and frustrating due to number of sensitive factors that have to be controlled in order to take a great photo. An astronomical image is usually produced by multiple exposures, some lasting up to 30 minutes. When the shutter is open for that long, many things can go wrong, and the earth rotates a long way in 30 minutes, which means tracking must be very accurate.
The Trifid Astronomical Camera is a low light-level, long exposure digital camera using one of four different Kodak full-frame enhanced-blue CCD imaging chips.
The camera can be used both by professional astronomers and by amateurs that take astronomical photos as a hobby.
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| Trifid Astronomical Camera
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Trifid is an electronically cooled camera with liquid assist. Electronic coolers provide the first stage of cooling to the imaging chip. Liquid that runs through the camera jacket at room temperature or colder provides the second stage of cooling. The cooling of the camera is essential because whenever the imaging chip temperature is lowered in 5-7 degrees Celsius, the noise is cut in half again.
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| Trifid Graphical User Interface
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WinDriver Usage in the Trifid Camera
The driver development using WinDriver was straightforward. The WinDriver Wizard was used to build a test executable. The developers used this code, debugged and recoded it until they were satisfied and moved on to the next feature. After they decided how all of the features were to be laid out, they coded up the interface and re-ran the DriverWizard. Using the test executable it created they were able to debug all of the features before they went into the Trifid DLL.
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| Architecture Diagram of the Trifid Camera, that Includes Jungo's WinDriver
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"I had experience writing device drivers for Windows 95/98 and Solaris, but I was looking for a better way that would take less time and present fewer problems. And I wanted to support our camera on all of the Windows platforms and Linux without having to write and support two or more code bases." Said Daniel Wisehart, Software Engineer at Yankee Robotics. "WinDriver gave me a way to do that. What I did not expect was how much easier the process would be. We found a few bugs along the way, but Jungo was always quick to respond to any problem we had."
The current drivers are for Windows 98 SE, Windows ME, Windows 2000 and Windows XP (Linux and Apple drivers will follow in time). Trifid comes with the software to operate the camera. The software is provided as an executable and as source code. The interface to the driver for Trifid is a published, supported interface which means the end user can use the software provided to take photographs or to create his own camera control software, using Yankee Robotics' source code as an example. Thanks to WinDriver Yankee Robotics were able to allow this without exposing anything having to do with USB; its interface is all about the camera.
WinDriver and the Trifid Performance Requirements
Trifid is built around a Cypress FX2 USB chip. Talking to the camera is a two-step process. In the first step, power is applied to the camera which reports to the USB bus that it is a "Trifid Camera before re-numeration", which means without any code. WinDriver was used to download the code the camera will execute. When the camera receives this code, it momentarily disconnects from the USB bus and when it reconnects (a process called renumeration), it identifies itself as a Trifid Camera that is ready to run. At this point WinDriver was used to load a second driver which is the interface to the camera. All control of the camera and transfers from the camera go through WinDriver.
About Yankee Robotics
Headquartered in Redmond, Washington, Yankee Robotics, LLC was founded to offer consulting services to firms focused on embedded development and financial trading. Companies served include Hewlett-Packard Instrument Division in Lake Stevens, Washington; Hewlett-Packard Labs in Palo Alto, California; Citadel Investment Group in Chicago, Illinois.
Not satisfied to simply help others build high performance software and hardware products, Yankee Robotics is now releasing its own products, of which the Trifid Camera is the first.
For more information, please visit Yankee Robotics' website at: http://www.YankeeRobotics.com/
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