2.6 Feature - Camera Controller

inspectAR 2.6.0 is shipping with an easy way for you to find focus on your board. Our new camera controller window gives you the ability to manually focus an image bringing your board into view.  

If you are working on a 2+ board system this can be a life saver, especially if they are connected in a ‘hat’ configuration. In this case one board can easily trick our focusing algorithms into thinking that the bottom board is the focal plane instead of the top board, or vice-versa.  

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You can also use this manual focus control to override your camera’s built-in auto focus and bring the board perfectly into view. We have our own manual focus algorithm that sometimes does this for you, but if after trying manual focus mode you still notice some blurriness, adjust the focus slider to get things perfect.  

Some camera’s auto focus is not able to bring a board into focus. This is a firmware bug or feature depending how you look at it. Manually adjusting focus will bring the board fully into view.  Here's a list of compatible cameras.

You can also zoom, pan, or tilt from this menu to navigate the board easily. If you need a graphical representation of how much camera digital zoom you have left, this is a great resource. Zoom into the board too much and you might lose tracking, because too much of the board is not in view. If you move the Zoom slider too far and notice overlays disappear plus our tracking indicator change to ‘searching’ then you can easily recover by zooming out and changing to stretch zoom.  

Panning and tilting are the technical terms given to x and y scrolling by a software developing. You need to have already applied some zoom for these scrollers to become activated. Another Pro tip of the camera control menu is that you must be in manual focus mode for the Focus scroller to be active.  

You may also notice that you have no control over these scrollers at all. Or that you can only zoom, and do not have control of the focus slider. This is likely firmware limitation of your USB web camera. For a list of every camera we have tested, check out our website here. You need a fully UVC compliant web camera in order to access all these controls. In some cases, parameters like focus are available, but must be manually triggered by you the user. A common example of this would be a microscope camera which has a thumbwheel to adjust focus. The IPVEVO4K is a solid camera that integrates a stand but does not have UVC controls. There is a manual focus button integrated into the camera itself however, so all-in-all it is a good camera to try with if you happen to have one already.

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