Third Party Components

The following third party components are included with the BFT4Lin package.

Gen<i>Cam

Gen<i>Cam is a standard interface for camera control and acquisition. Most often, BitFlow customers wish to use Gen<i>Cam because it provides a standard method for configuring and controling CoaXPress cameras, although powerful applications can be written without the use of Gen<i>Cam, and acquisition using the native BitFlow SDK will always provide higher performance. Before seeking to use Gen<i>Cam, it is highly recommended that prospective users familiarize themselves with the standard itself by consulting the reference material provided by the European Machine Vision Association (EMVA), which may be retrieved from their website, Gen<i>Cam Introduction.

For convenience, runtime and SDK files for version 3.3.0 of the Gen<i>Cam GenApi reference implementation are bundled with BFT4Lin, along with version 1.5 of the GenTL header file. A thorough catalog of current and older Gen<i>Cam standard documents and build files is provided free of charge on the EMVA website.

To run any Gen<i>Cam application, the GenTL path environment variable must be set to include the directory path of the BitFlow GenTL (BFGTL) producer CTI file. Multiple GenTL producer paths may be listed, colon separated. It is also recommeneded to set the Gen<i>Cam root and cache variables. The cache may be any user writable local path, ideally one dedicated to this purpose.

For 32-bit producers:

$ export GENICAM_GENTL32_PATH=/path/to/bfgtl/[;other-paths]

For 64-bit producers:

$ export GENICAM_GENTL64_PATH=/path/to/bfgtl/[;other-paths]
$ export GENICAM_ROOT_V3_3=/path/to/genapi
$ export GENICAM_CACHE_V3_3=/user/writable/directory/path

For a standard BFT4Lin installation, the following will be valid:

$ export GENICAM_GENTL32_PATH=/usr/local/lib/BitFlow
$ export GENICAM_GENTL64_PATH=/usr/local/lib/BitFlow
$ export GENICAM_ROOT_V3_3=/usr/local/lib/BitFlow/GenICam

Modern boards including the Cyton and Claxon support Gen<i>Cam camera control directly in the BFML camera file, by utilizing the device_commands feature. If this feature is to be used, then Gen<i>Cam must be configured as described above, in order for any application to successfully apply the camera file