I'm moving a project from D7 to D2010 (and from XP to Win 7). I use a freeware video component to bring in video from a webcam (Video for Windows) and take a snapshot. Before I look to port this to 2010, I was wondering if anyone knew of a cheap video component that is 2010 compatible?
You may be looking for the component sets from mitov.com there are three component sets that might be interesting for you: BasicVideo, VideoLab and VisionLab. Which is the right for you (if any) I will leave up to you to judge. I have to admit though that I've never tried any of them, nor any of the other components from mitov. But it is the components that I could find matching your requirements the most.
Edit: One thing I forgot to mention, the components are free for none commercial use:
VisionLab is fully functional and free for non commercial purposes! This means that you can use it for your personal non commercial needs, for fun, hobby, or evaluation purposes. You can also use it free for study and even teaching. If you are teacher currently you also will not need a commercial license. In the future however a special low cost tutor license will be introduced. For students the product is absolutely free!
All though the quote is from the vision lab page, it says the same about the other components I mentioned.
DSPack (wich is freeware) has already been ported to D2009/10 ( http://www.songbeamer.com/delphi/ )
Although a nice framework, the mitov products are a bit of an overkill if one just wants to take snapshots from webcams ..
I would go for DSPack
Related
I've been searching for some information regarding microcontroller programming but the info I find is either way over my head or doesn't appear to exist. I'm looking for something easier to digest! I'm relatively new to programming and come from an SQL DBA background and decided that it would be quicker for me to learn some programming fundamentals and then teach myself Delphi than it would to get some changes implemented through my company's insane design change note system!
After a couple of years of Delphi programming I can cope with writing database applications without too much bother and I want to be able to move on a level.
We use PIC microcontrollers on our PCBs; mainly the PIC18F family. The software on the PICS is written in C but there are parameters values that are written to by a Delphi application that interface with the PIC using an ActiveX control.
Basically, SQL Database holds parameter info, Delphi client app retrieves those values, passes them to the ActiveX controll which does all the low level stuff on the PIC. For example the internal EEPROM will have a map and within any particular address a value will be stored to switch something on or off or hold an integer value etc.
I've gotten hold of an MPLAB kit which has an ICD2 device that can read and write values to the internal EEPROM and I understand how to change these hexadecimal values using MPLAB software.
My hope isn't to learn embedded microcontroller programming; rather that I can write a Delphi app that will do something similar to MPLAB software. E.g read and write values to certain memory addresses within the EEPROM.
I'd be very gratefull if anyone can point me in the right direction of any libraries or components that may already exist for bridging this gap between simple Delphi form application and writing low level PIC EEPROM. I doubt such any easy interface exists but I thought I'd ask. To summarise I want to be able to have a simple form app, with some edit boxes that the user types in or selects from dropdown boxes, parameter values, to click on a button and to assign those parameter values to specific EEPROM memory addresses. Thank you for reading and any comments would be gratefully received.
Regards
KD
I'm a big fan of MikroElectronika and have used their Pascal tools for pic16 series MCU with great success (touch screen interfaces, ZigBee, ...).
http://www.mikroe.com/
Updated 2015 Answer:
Why not a Raspberry Pi with FreePascal and Lazarus? The boards cost from $5 to $25 US, as of this date, and the development tools are free.
Original 2012 Answer:
If you like to use Pascal, you might find Free Pascal useful on small embedded systems, but the minimum I believe you will find it can compile on is a Linux-based ARM embedded system. The fact that you use pascal on both sides is very unlikely to help you accomplish anything major.
If you want to go all the way down the the smallest PIC microcontrollers, you'll find that it's almost always a variant of C that you'll be using. Frankly, at that level, the differences aren't that much. If you can write Pascal, you can learn enough C in a day, to use with microcontrollers.
Don't be scared to use the native language that most microcontrollers support. My personal favorites are the Rabbit microcontrollers, formerly from Z-World, now from digi -- I think I paid about $100 US for the first board and development toolkit.
Interfacing such an application with delphi is pretty easy, usually these days, I would interface using TCP/IP over either wired Ethernet, or wireless (Wifi). But if you really want to you could use RS-232 or RS-485 serial links. (RS-485 has the advantage that you can wire it up to 5 miles long.) If I was using a serial link, I'd probably implement something like Modbus on both sides, if I just wanted to send some numeric data back and forth, and if I was doing something text-oriented, I think I'd write a mini HTTP web server on the embedded controller, and most boards these days come with enough HTTP server demos to make that drop-dead easy.
Delphi outputs Win32 and Win64 native applications you can write software that can interact with certain devices if the PCB has serial comunication or I2C you can write software that in Delphi that it will interact with the physical device.
But if you want to programm the devices yourself , write software that will run on this devices you can't do it in Delphi. I suggest you buy an Arduino it's an excellent envoirment for beginners in microcontroller programming.
If you have the source code of your pic microcontroller then you can implement the code in C to read from Serial, USB or some other interface available in your hardware and write it to the eeprom. This way its easy to write the app in any high level language like delphi, c++, etc.
Or you can write your PIC application using the mikropascal compiler from mikroeletronika that its very good and I've been using for a long time, but as you can see you will have to implement some mecanism to read from the interface and write to your eeprom as I've mentioned before.
This compiler comes with a lote of librarys to work with many devices. You should take a look on it, its not free but the price is low and in their site you can find samples and sample boards to test it.
One option, if you want a simple interface to write to the PIC EEPROM, is to use the ICD command line utility. Unfortunately it is not available for the ICD2, but the PICkit 2 and 3 (which are cheap), ICD3, and RealICE have command line utilities that give you the ability to write to the EEPROM (google pk2cmd). In Delphi, you could just wrap a very simple set of command line calls to pk2cmd.
What is a good Delphi library for samplerate conversion of audio data? I don't mind paying for something.
I need to upsample and download sample audio in realtime. I understand the theory but don't want to write my own routines.
EDIT: Bonus points for something with Mac support.
You can check the unit "DAV_DspUpDownsampling.pas" in the Delphi Asio Vst Project. Although I've never used it I'm sure it would fill your needs.
Use SoX - the Swiss Army knife of sound processing. Very easy to use.
It is a command line tool not a Delphi library so to use from Delphi you need to execute a shell command and get the result with in your code. I have used it with PHP.
SoX is a cross-platform (Windows, Linux, MacOS X, etc.) command line utility that can convert various formats of computer audio files in to other formats. It can also apply various effects to these sound files, and, as an added bonus, SoX can play and record audio files on most platforms.
SoX is very mature project! Here is the link:
http://sox.sourceforge.net/
Dew Research's DSP Master could be an option for you.
Maybe Mitov software has components you can use
I use newAc in quite a few projects. It can do sample rate conversion.
The best news: It is free (also for commercial use)
Yes, you can use AudioLab from Mitov Software for that. It appears that nobody actually posted the link ;-), so here it is - http://www.mitov.com/products/audiolab.
Enjoy!
I use Bass Audio Library.
You can use Bass_Encode and a Bass_Mixer to samplerate conversion.
http://www.un4seen.com/bass.html
The Mitov components do this easily. I've made a short screen recording that shows the steps.
http://tinyurl.com/mitovaudio
The Mitov video and other components are equally powerful. We've used the Mitov libraries on major real-time video and audio processing projects with excellent results. Their support is excellent.
AFAIK, the components are free to evaluate and for non-commercial projects.
PS I believe he's a FireMonkey guy, so I'd guess that we can expect Mac support now or in the future.
You may want to take a look at Secret Rabbit Code (aka libsamplerate); it's a C library, but it should be quite easy to create a wrapper. The API is simple, and supports a wide range of operating systems and platforms (even embedded!).
It has a mature and very good quality code base, and it's extremely efficient. Support is also awesome, Erik is very responsive. Plus it has a huge user base.
Another option is libsoxr (which seems to produce better output, but is not so popular...).
I would like to have a go at making some simple games for personal/learning purposes. By simple games I mean games like platform, maze, arcade games for example. I would also one day like to create a platform game with a simple editor to allow others to edit and design their own game levels.
I am not sure if Delphi is the way to go though, I don't see or hear many people writing games in Delphi, but Delphi is the only language I understand on an intermediate level.
If Delphi is acceptable to create simple games as I mentioned, am I right in thinking that I would require some libraries that would help me do this, maybe Direct X for example?
I am using Delphi XE, I wish I had waited and upgraded to Delphi XE2 instead as it seems that includes some built in Drawing libraries.
I look forward to hearing your responses on this.
Thanks.
Check out Asphyre
And to encourage you; Soldat, C-evo and many more quality games were built with Delphi, Game Maker too.
There are to many options ...
If you are really new to this take a look at this site and get some good examples from children that try to make games Pascal programming for schools ...
If you are one level up here some library's that give you the a great start for small and big games... this is for new and very advance pascal programming...
GLScene just get the svn version... (Windows,MacOsX,Linux and hear for android and iphone ;) ) -- 2D,3D,isometric........
CastII Great engine (Windows,MacOsX,Linux) -- Mostly 3D....
Asphyre Sphinx 2 One of my favorite i allready start a big big game with that library... NOW (Windows32-64,MacOsX,Linux,and IOS) with DelphiXE2
ZenGL Fantastic and quite easy to use (Windows,Linux,MacOsX and i hear android too) --Mostly 2D but i hear 3D is in way out...
Castle Great library for me not to easy... (Windows,Linux,MacOsX) compine great with freepascal and lazarus...
Andorra 2d This is going to be the best but suddenly stops ... 2d programming at its best...
there are many other libraries and i here a few of them come out before the new year...
But if you go deeper you can try the hard way... the headers so ...
for opengl use the header from here delphigl
for SDL use the Jedi-SDL header (great by the way)...
for directX use the clootie and good luck...
But the most important thing in the game programming is the paper...
Every think write in the paper is the most value object in object programming...
Hope that helps...
Delphi is great for games! Here is a very good resource to get you started: http://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com/
It has a friendly forum where you can ask questions.
I have personally used Delphi for graphics programming for many years and written a free open source game engine in Delphi called ZGameEditor.
azrael11
GLScene doesn't support Android(work in progress as I know)
Cast II works only on Windows
Asphyre Sphinx 2 doesn't support Linux
ZenGL supports also iOS. Android - work in progress. 3D - I'm not interested in it currently, so only fast 2D is main goal.
I was working on updating a D6 media library to XE over the weekend. I got it working with a surprisingly low number of Unicode-related errors, but there are a few things I'd like to try to improve.
Unfortunately, the core of the player is cbDSMixer, which isn't all that flexible, and the author has stated that "Now with a family of wife and 2 kids I can't find the needed time to play around doing extra development so all those components are pretty old by now and mostly deprecated." So I wonder if there are any alternatives.
So does anyone know of an alternate media player library that will work properly under XE, and support the same or most of the same mixing and effects functionality as cbDSMixer?
You could try the Audio Component Suite from Andrei Borovsky. Not sure how much this lib is maintained, but it looks very promising (cross platform apparently, which may become even more important in the future)
The idea is that one would have a conference using a headset and I have to record conversation entirely(what BOTH sides are saying) at a reasonable quality, the restrictions for components/units are:
must be compatible(or at least nearly) with Delphi 2010
if any components involved must be shipped with Delphi 2010 or to be open source
I was thinking about using Direct X but I haven't found a example.
Note: that recording desktop + sound(mic and speakers) would be even better.
If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask.
Thank you all for your time.
You can record the "Stereo Mix" just like a Microphone, so any Delphi recording answer will suffice.
Edit:
This thread on the Microsoft forums talks about a virtual audio driver that might do the trick on Windows XP.
--jeroen
You might try the audio library at: http://www.un4seen.com/
The "BASS" DLLs work fine with Windows Xp. They are free for non-commercial use though not open source but mentioned as it still might fulfill your requirements. There are issues that preclude its use for recording functions on some PCs where the recording function is disabled. You have to establish whether the dlls work with Delphi 2010. It works very well with Delphi 2007.