Flowstone for holograms!?

[Justin W]

Hello everyone!

This is my initial post to this forum and I will open with a brief description of my upcoming project. As my topic title alludes to, I plan to use the Flowstone software to aid in the creation of holograms.

It's likely that anyone familiar with holography might get a chuckle from this bold statement; Software has nothing to do with laser optics. Holography in its purest form doesn't even involve computers. It's a matter of an array of rigid, stable optical elements mounted on an optics table, all shaping and steering several beams of laser light to the surface of special film, where a very fine and delicate interference pattern is exposed into the photosensitive material, to be later frozen there during development. Exposures must be timed very carefully. Very powerful and expensive pulsed lasers can make these exposures in a matter of femtoseconds. Those of us without the resources to purchase and maintain a pulsed laser system do CW (continuous wave) holography.

CW holography has certain limitations. Exposure times generally range from 20 seconds up to a full minute. It is a requirement of holography that all optical elements and the object being imaged must remain absolutely still for the duration of the exposure. Even movement of a few nanometers will result in a botched hologram.

This unavoidable stability requirements rules out the possibility of imaging any living matter. Even a houseplant, placed carefully on an isolated optics table and free of air currents will be in motion on a molecular level, making it impossible to record as a hologram. This need for stability also rules out any other live organic material, such as people or animals.

I aim to hologram friends and family.

How do I do this then? I could sell all my organs and perhaps my soul in order to afford a pulsed laser,
or
Or I could create holographic stereograms! These wonders are generated by compiling a minimum of eight photographs into one hologram. As each photograph shows the subject from a slightly different perspective, the final hologram incorporates all the different viewpoints and gives the viewer the illusion of depth and parallax.

This is where computers finally enter the game. I am designing a robotic camera mount that will translate a high-definition camera laterally about 3 feet while panning to keep the subject centered in frame. The series of photographs captured across this span will be the "source images" for the stereograms I will later create.

Flowstone to the rescue!

I'll be honest here - learning to write code is the last thing I need right now. I've already got a head full of laser details - exposure times, energy densities, coherence lengths, beam ratios, diffraction efficiencies, optical densities, etc - and now I've had to pack all that into over-stuffed drawers in my brain to make room for physical engineering nuances. I'm packed to the rafters with drive ratios, step angles and belt lengths, and sure as heck don't have the time, energy or wherewithal to teach myself programming language.

So I was just delighted to encounter Flowstone on a Phidgets page I was visiting. The program looks to be exactly what I need. Being a very visual learner, a graphical language sounds like a pill I can actually swallow, and the option to create a GUI with a few mouse clicks sounds like exactly what I need. The software's image processing capabilities round out what appears to be a perfect match for my needs.

My planned scenario is this: Flowstone will coordinate two unipolar stepper motors while capturing HD photographs from a USB camera at a rate of two photos per second, for a total of 32 sequential photos spanning 32 inches laterally. The Phidgets 1602 stepper board will manage the stepper control and I'm hoping the image processing will sort itself out in the program I will design.

With this basic outline in mind I'm left with just a few starter questions:

Will I still need to install Phidgets drivers or will Flowstone manage this?

What about Com ports? Will I find myself needing to do more than just plug the stepper board and camera into a USB hub then plug the hub into my PC?

And very importantly: Does Flowstone work with high-definition images? Will image quality be degraded at all while being processed through this software?

Thanks to anyone who is willing to help me with this daunting and involved project! I'll certainly be back with more questions along the way, and I look forward to getting some dialog going with folks who have experience with programming and robotics.

~Justin

[Justin W]

Hello

I am back with a quick design update. It has now become clear to me that using bipolar stepper motors is the better choice. This will be slightly more expensive as far as motors and controllers go, and also means I'll definitely need two controller boards now (I'm not even certain that the Phidgets unipolar stepper would give me simultaneous individual control of multiple motors anyhow), and also I'll need to purchase the Flowstone full version in a few months so I can control multiple stepper boards. I'm sure DSP is OK with that

[Embedded]

Will I still need to install Phidgets drivers or will Flowstone manage this?

What about Com ports? Will I find myself needing to do more than just plug the stepper board and camera into a USB hub then plug the hub into my PC?

And very importantly: Does Flowstone work with high-definition images? Will image quality be degraded at all while being processed through this software?

All you need is the Phidgets dll on your system, the installer can be found here:
http://www.dsprobotics.com/support/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=17

If you use the Phidgets boards you don't need to use any Com ports.

The FlowStone image processing works at what ever resolution the USB or IP camera is! So if it is hi-def then FlowStone will work at hi-def

[Justin W]

Thank you for your reply. I'm not terribly computer-savvy and it is a relief to learn that I'm not going to need to get fancy with COM ports.
The news regarding Flowstone's image processing capabilities is also good. I've managed to create a module already that finds my source images on my hard drive and sorts them into the proper order for their role in the slideshow imaging. Fun stuff, once you're past the initial learning bump.