Scripted Mount Demo #1

Summary

The focus of this demo is to show the user how to use the "scriptable" mount feature in DIRSIG. This is one of two dynamic mounts in DIRSIG that are driven by the user (the second is the "tabulated" (data-driven) mount). The user supplies a script that is executed during the DIRSIG simulation that computes the mount pointing as a function of time.

Inputs

Scene

The scene is the simple scene containing the North and East arrows with the shadow pole.

Platform

The platform contains a single camera with a small 128 x 128 array. The platform itself is stationary, but the mount changes the platform relative pointing of the camera as a function of time.

The script for the mount is stored in the demo.platform file. A new script can be imported into the platform file by right-clicking in the script editor in the GUI and selecting the Import item. A copy of the script is included below:

// whisk scan parameters
startAngle =  5.0 * (Math.PI / 180.0);
stopAngle  = -5.0 * (Math.PI / 180.0);
spinFactor = 6;

// compute the current fraction of a full scan
fraction = 0.5 -
    Math.cos( this.currentScanFraction * spinFactor * 2.0 * Math.PI ) / 2.0;

// compute the current scan angle for this fraction
scanAngle = startAngle + fraction * ( stopAngle - startAngle );

// compute the current spin angle for this fraction
spinAngle = this.currentScanFraction * 2.0 * Math.PI;

// compute the rotation transform
transformResult =
    this.matrixMultiply( this.makeZRotationMatrix( spinAngle ),
                this.makeXRotationMatrix( scanAngle ) );

The script makes a "rosette" pattern. This is accomplished by creating a sinusoidal oscillation that is rotated about the Z axis. The key input parameter provided by DIRSIG at run-time is this.currentScanFraction, which is the current unitless fraction of the scan that must be computed. This allows the scan rate to be handled external to the script (enabling things like master and slave clocking, etc.). The user must set the transformResult variable to contain an 4x4 affine transform for the current scan fraction.

Simulation

The scan rate for the mount is 1 Hz and the collection task lasts 1 second. This allows the mount to complete one full scan. The camera is capturing at 100 Hz, so 100 frames will be generated during the simulation.

Figure 1. Animation of a complete scan