Introduction

Features

System Requirements

Plug-ins

Documentation

Download

Plug-ins

FAQ

Aknowledgements & Terms of Use

Contact & Support Info

Software

• Operating system:  Windows 2000 or XP Pro.  Glimpse has not been tested on any other operating systems.
• Drivers:  All versions of Glimpse also require the NI-IMAQ video driver, which is a free download (registration may be required) from the National Instruments web site.
• LabVIEW:  The executable version of Glimpse uses the free LabView Run-Time Engine.  This will automatically be installed by the Glimpse installer.  The source version of Glimpse requires the LabView Full Development System (or higher) and IMAQ Vison (which is part of the NI Vision Development Module).  (See software versions table)
• Matlab:  A very small number of Glimpse features (those that are intended for exchanging data with The MathWorks' Matlab software) will not operate unless Matlab is installed on the computer that is running Glimpse. (See software versions table) The features that require Matlab are: 1) Stacked TIFF input/output, and 2) MAT-file format video header information input/output.

Hardware

• Frame grabbers - analog:  We've had good results using Glimpse with a number of different National Instruments monochrome video fram grabbers, such as the PCI-1407.  The current version of Glimpse supports only 8-bit acquisition with these cards.
• Digital cameras:  Particular CCD cameras are supported through plug-ins.
• Disk system:  Slow acquisition to disk (< 1 Mb/sec) probably will work with a generic Windows system.  To maximize the rate at which data can be streamed to disk (10 Mb/sec or more), we use computers with high-throughput RAID controllers. We have had good results with both AMD- and Intel-based systems configured as follows: the acquisition drive should consist of at least two physical drives (4 is better) each plugged into an independent hardware channel on a hardware RAID controller.  (Be careful about the selection of your controller; some software-based RAID controllers are reported to give RAID 0 performance that is not better than a single disk drive!)  We use 7,200  rpm ATA or SATA drives and an Escalade controller plugged into a 64-bit PCI bus.    The controller is configured for RAID 0 striping.  A separate, conventional disk controller with an additional drive has the boot record, OS, paging file, application software, etc. We attempt to minimize the need for system processes to access the RAID drive by setting it up so that it 1) does not have a paging file, 2) is not shared, 3) is  not indexed, 4) is not compressed, and 5) is not backed up --we reserve the RAID drive for temporary storage (only) of data acquisition files.  On motherboards with multiple PCI busses, we plug the RAID and frame grabber/camera hardware  into different busses so that they don't compete for bus bandwidth.