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Hardware requirements

You need a SparcStation with a Sun HSI card. The SparcStation should be running SunOS 4.1.1 or SunOS 4.1.3. Presumably it will work with 4.1.2, but this hasn't been tested. You do not want to have the standard Sun HSI driver installed - the software uses the UCL dynamically loaded HSI device driver developed specifically for this purpose, and this will not work with Sun's device driver installed.

The achievable data rates depend on the model of SparcStation:

It is almost certainly possible to improve on these rates with further development. These rates refer to V3.0b (19/9/93). A large proportion of the CPU requirements are in calculating a cyclic redundancy check over all the video data to be fed into the codec.

The HSI card should be connected by interface ``Serial 0" to the RS449 interface of the codec by an RS449 null-modem cable. The 9 pin D codec port labeled ``Serial RS232C Control and Diagnostic" (or just ``Control and Diagnostic" on a BT VC2300) should be connected to the RS232 port on the SparcStation. The software defaults to assuming Port A (/dev/ttya), though this can be configured from the interface. The camera should be connected to composite video input 1, and the monitor to composite output. (On BT VC2300 codecs there are two composite outputs - the one not associated with the RGB outputs is the default). The software does not use the codecs audio, so no audio connections are required.



Previous: What the bits do
Up: Using the UCL H261 Codec Controller
Next: Codec Setup
Previous Page: What the bits do
Next Page: Codec Setup

mhandley@cs.ucl.ac.uk
Thu Dec 30 15:40:00 GMT 1993