Matrox Design Assistant 4.
0 Early Access Version 1
Upgrading projects from DA 3.x to DA 4
Platforms
The biggest change you will notice when moving from DA 3.x to DA 4.0 is that many hardware-related
settings and configurations are now all grouped under one Platform Configuration dialog. The buttons
that used to be labeled Initial Camera Settings and Configure I/O now take you to the platform dialog.
You can also access this dialog from the Project menu, Configure platform item or the Camera Images
pane Configure Image Sets toolbar button.
Upgrading Projects
As with all previous versions of Matrox Design Assistant, opening a project from an earlier version will
pop a message warning you that the upgraded project will not be usable with the earlier version. It is
good practice to keep a backup copy of the original. All changes that involve renaming of features and
values are translated for you automatically. Nonetheless they are describe below and in the readme
document.
A 3.x project upgraded to 4.0 while connected to a Matrox Iris GT should need no manual intervention
except for porting any Custom Steps to VS2010 project structure and rebuilding.
A 3.X project that is upgraded to 4.0 while connected to a PC or 4Sight platform may need some changes
to the hardware platform components. I/O will need re-assigning as described below. For the Early
Access version, Profinet is not available on the PC platform and any UserLED steps must be disabled.
In Emulation mode, make sure that in the Platform configuration dialogs you have chosen to emulate
the type of platform to which you intend to deploy the project so that the correct resources will be
available.
Preliminary – Subject to Change
Matrox Design Assistant 4.0 Early Access Version 2
IOReader/IOWriter
Upgrading
Upgrading a project containing IOReader or IOWriter steps while connected to a PC (localhost or
remote)- will result in a number of errors since most PC platforms do not have any IO capability.
Solution:
Upgrade while connected to an Iris camera
Upgrade in Emulation mode – select Iris GT as the mode to emulate
Limitations
NOTE: in the Early Access version “Pulse” and “Delay relative to” are not supported.
You can no longer “read” the outputs with the IO reader step (was a particular Iris behaviour).
Digital I/O configuration
Additional settings have been added to accommodate more platforms (e.g. GigE cameras with IO
capability). You can specify a System component for your I/O. This is only needed if you have multiple
supported sets of IO (which only occurs with a Matrox 4Sight system with a GigEvision camera that has
its own I/O capability)
Other names have been changed in DA 4.0 to more closely resemble the MIL terminology – a new
Format descript lists OpenDrain (even though in fact on an IrisGT it is technically Open collector ) to
emphasize that it is an inverting output that requires a pull-up to source voltage.
For outputs, Source has changed name from “User” to “IOWriter” to emphasize that the IOWriter step
controls the value written.
For Outputs there is an additional setting called Output mode- it is initialized to a default value that is
best suited to the selected platform. Matrox platforms implement IO through various combinations of
software and hardware/FPGA that may differ between different systems. It is possible to set the Output
mode of any system to “Software” but in general there is little reason to change from the default mode
that is shown with a dot beside its name.
Camera grab control
General changes
Default values
Preliminary – Subject to Change
Matrox Design Assistant 4.0 Early Access Version 3
Many values have a dark dot on the left side. The dots indicate that the value shown is the current value
of the Default. In earlier versions of DA the word Default was shown, but it was not possible to know
what actual value was the default value.
Trigger
The hardware trigger signal name has changed from Port0 to AUX IO 8 to match the current MIL
documentation.
Queue
There is a single setting for queue size (combines the two settings from previous versions).
Grab size
You can grab an area smaller than the camera’s nominal resolution using the Partial scan parameters. In
some situations, grabbing a smaller number of lines allows the project to run faster with less data to
copy and process.
File Paths
ImageSets, ImageWriter,TextReader, TextWriter
Existing projects – if you deploy to a PC a project originally designed for an Iris GT which uses paths on
UserDisk or RAMFiles , it will assume these are folders are on C:\
To provide a way to specify file paths that is valid both on Iris cameras and PC systems, DesignAssistant
proposes using the PATH function which automatically maps DA Documents to different places on
camera /UserDisk/DesignAssistant and on PC My Documents\Matrox Design Assistant
The following predefined paths use used:
{PATH("DA Documents")}\\SavedImages
{PATH("DA Documents")}\\Images
{PATH("DA Documents")}\\SavedTextFiles
Example projects use the following paths.
Preliminary – Subject to Change
Matrox Design Assistant 4.0 Early Access Version 4
Copy Images to platform:
- the button “Copy images to Platform” on a PC platform will copy them to {PATH("DA
Documents")}\\Images which evaluates to Documents\Matrox Design Assistant\Images
Custom steps
VS 2010 (not 2012)
Custom steps use .NET 4.0 when building for the PC and .NET CF 3.5 for IrisGT with Windows CE
This is not a standard VS 2010 configuration, and therefor it is important to create Custom step solutions
using the Wizard we provide.
Also, to upgrade your existing 3.0 Custom Steps it is necessary to
1) Create a new project using the wizard
2) Copy the contents of the .cs files of your original project into the corresponding .cs files of the
new project.
Note that previous versions of the Wizard named all the files CustomStep.*, which could lead to
conflicts when importing multiple custom steps into DA. The new wizard will name the files according to
the name you provide.
If you are upgrading custom steps that were developed in DA 2.4 it is important to incorporate the
fundamental changes in search regions, fixturing and annotations that were introduced between 2.4 and
3.0. They are described in the CustomStep documents.
Preliminary – Subject to Change
