A while back I had a customer who was not able to record video directly from the camera and wanted to use his MIRO airborne to record cines of specific events over a long flight. Segmenting the memory was not going to work because he needed more than 4 segments. Since the flight was so long he wanted to record his segments to the camera’s 16GB CF card. Another problem he was running into is that he could only control the camera through the capture connector; there would be no Ethernet connection only the power and capture connections were available. To further complicate the issue, the operator also needed to know when the camera completed saving and was ready to be triggered for the next shot.

Below is the mission workflow once the aircraft is airborne

1. The camera starts recording into the camera’s circular buffer, DRAM, at power up.

2. When the event is ready to be recorded, the camera is triggered by either the operator or the pilot and the cine is recorded into the camera’s DRAM.

3. At the end of the recording, the camera automatically saves the cine to the compact flash card. While the upload to compact flash is taking place, the camera is unavailable to acquire images.

4. After the upload to the compact flash is complete, the camera immediately starts recording to the circular buffer and provides an indicator to the operator that the camera is ready for another trigger.

5. Steps 2-4 are repeated until either the mission is complete or there is no more room on the compact flash.


To configure the camera to perform the mission described, follow the steps below:

1. Connect the camera to the controller, power up the camera, and launch the Phantom application. Configure the camera for resolution, frame rate, exposure, Post Trigger, etc.

2. Go to ACQUISITION followed by CAMERA OPTIONS.

3. Change the START IN mode from WAIT PRETRIGGER to RECORD. This will put the MIRO camera in Record mode at power up without having to use the Phantom software to put the camera in capture mode as during the flight there would be no Ethernet connectivity.

4. In the END OF RECORDING ACTIONS section, check the box labeled SAVE TO FILE. Also specify the starting frame and number of frames you want to save, or if you want to save full cines, check the FULL CINE box. This will allow the camera to save the cine to the compact flash immediately after the circular buffer is filled up.

5. In the END OF RECORDING ACTIONS section, check the box labeled RESTART RECORDING. This will allow the camera to start recording a new cine after the previous cine has been saved to compact flash.

6. In the READY SIG. ENDS AT section, check the box labeled RECORDING END. If the camera is connected to an oscilloscope, the READY signal will go high when the save to compact flash is complete. The capture LED will turn red indicating that the camera is in capture mode, waiting for a trigger. In this application an operator monitored the LED and when it turned red, either the operator or the pilot could trigger the camera.

As of today, the customer has had two successful flights where all cines were recorded and had analog video backups.