iMS Studio
iMS Studio is a Graphical IDE built upon the iMSNET .Net wrapper and linking to the ims_hw_server application for access to iMS hardware. It serves as a fully featured application for creating Images, Compensation Tables and Tone Buffers, for managing ImageProjects and ImageGroups, for testing iMS Systems and as a learning tool for understanding how the iMS System is designed.
Example iMS Studio Window
iMS Studio is built around a Docking Manager style GUI. The centre of the screen is the document pane where the user can place Images, ImageSequences, CompensationTables and ToneBuffers. Around the edge of the window the user can place tabs that perform a variety of different functions. These tabs can be pinned into place using the drawing pin icon at the top right of the tab, removed with the little cross icon, auto-hidden to the side of the window, or floated away from the main window completely. The application starts with a default layout, but do play around with the tabs to arrange them in a style that suits your way of working.
In the default layout, the following tabs are visible:
- Project Explorer. This displays all of the ImageGroups, Free Images, Compensation Functions and Tone Buffers in an ImageProject and allows you to add and remove them. You can also drag Images between ImageGroups to move or copy them.
- Hardware Console. The app launches the hardware server in the background and displays console output in this window. If another server is found to be running on the system, the application will connect to that instead and display a message in this window indicating the Process to which it is attached.
- Compensation. This tab plots a graph of the Compensation Table that will be programmed into an iMS System. The Compensation Table can be imported and exported to a file on the disk. Where a 4 channel synthesiser is used for 2 channel pairs in a beam steered X/Y configuration, the 2 pairs can be synchronised from here.
- Signal Path. Allows the user to control the power setting of the RF signal outputs, as well as enabling / disabling a connected amplifier and setting the Synchronous Data routing.
- Calibration. This is used to enable the single tone mode used for AOD calibration. All 4 channels output the same signal and no look-up compensation is applied.
- Player Configuration. For playback of single Images, this tab controls the various options that are used during the playback setup, for instance clock and trigger source, number of Image Repeats and whether Compensation should be active or bypassed.
- Note
- At the release date of SDK v1.3.0, ImageSequence playback has not yet been completed and has been disabled. Also Compensation Tables can only be downloaded by importing from a disk Compensation file as Compensation Table generation from a Compensation Function has not yet been completed.