To access or create a driver profile at a later date: Tap the 'Driver Profile' icon located at the top of your touchscreen. Tap 'Add New Driver,' type in the desired name and tap 'Create Profile.' Adjust your seat, mirrors, steering and more to your comfort, and select save. You can save up to 10 different driver profiles to your car. (1) The first stop is done with an average pedal force not greater than the average pedal force recorded during the shortest GVWR cold effectiveness stop. (2) The second stop is done with a pedal force not greater than 500 N (112.4 lbs). (d) Wheel lockup: No lockup of any wheel for longer than 0.1 seconds allowed at speeds greater than 15 km/h.

Since we assume that our target audience consists of neither truckers nor conveyor operators with monotonous jobs as our web site is devoted to cool and useful gadgets that prove their worth on a daily basis, we had a hard time linking the application of this anti sleep alarm to our general contents. But we really wanted to test this item. As far as we remember, Sleep Alert is the one and only neuro-technological device that registers brain activity (through EEG (Electroencephalography)), determines muscular activity and tracks blinking frequency, which is incredibly cool! Let’s go ahead!

Stay alert - Stay alive!

Frankly speaking, the idea is very cool and admirable. Of course, it is not usually needed in the course of daily life, but the item can be extremely handy to those who like road trips or to drive late at night and early in the morning.

Do you often go on road trips lasting for over five hours when your eyes begin to stick together? We do. So the first thing that came to our minds was to pull an all-nighter sitting in the darkness and working in front of the laptop until 4 a.m. making sure our eyes stick together and we are sleepy.

Here it is, Sleep Alert. The package is fine, the manual has many illustrations. It seems like everything is intuitively clear. But things were not as straightforward as they seemed.

Charging is the first step. We had to figure out what connects to what, what should be plugged where and how everything works. The first problem was with charging the band. According to the manual, it is supposed to be changed, but after fidgeting with it for a while trying to find a USB port I failed initially. It turned out that I had to slide the moving block to its side like a USB key.

First you’d better figure out how it helps to stay awake while driving, we tested it during the day when we were awake. Both the band and head sensor are charged and have blue illumination. In theory when you are awake and not tired, this anti-sleep driver alarm is supposed to be silent and show zero reaction.

The developers were in touch all along our trial and they commented all of our experiments with this stay-awake device.

False Alarm or Danger Alarm? When and Why Does Sleep Alert Signal?

I’m staring at the screen and chewing an apple. My brain is wide awake, everything is charged. The anti-sleep alert fits so tight, it hurts. The clip is fasted on my ear and my hair is brushed back off the forehead. The metal circle on the inside of the alert is pressed against my forehead; everything is according to the manual. However, every 5-7 minutes the sensor on my head turns red and beeps twice.

“When you are eating an apple, the device indicates loss of EEG signal. If the device loses said signal while operating, the indicator will beep twice and turn red. This is what happens when you bite an apple as relatively strong muscles create motion in your jaws. The amplitude of EMG (Electromyography) signal substantially exceeds that of EEG signal when you merely blink. Electromagnetic noise blurs the EEG signal from jaw muscles when the user begins to bite or chew intensely for a long period of time. Clench your teeth strong enough and the mirror will show you the anti-sleep alert signaling red.”

This is when I decided to get a mirror to see when I lose signal. The indicator becomes red and beeps every 5-7 minutes. Then, in the next two minutes, it turns blue again. During these two minutes I’m either typing on my laptop or drinking coffee.

“Such triggering is caused by two factors, namely: 1) the device alerts you of not only approaching to the critical level of fatigue, monotony accumulation and falling asleep but also warns you of losing concentration on external stimuli, i.e. when you experience a mental relaxation and are plunged deep in your own thoughts. This is essential to avoid highway hypnosis, a meditative state. 2) The system is triggered by an abrupt change in a user’s mental state. For instance, you’ve been driving in a slow pace when suddenly a situation requiring quick action arises. Our activity level escalates and high-frequency brain waves mobilize, and the signal warns us of this.”

For the sake of accuracy I’ve decided to sit with my eyes looking down without any movement. Nothing happens, the anti-sleep doesn’t alert me. Neither does it when I close my eyes. On the other hand, false alarms and loss of signal happens when I’m moving.

“Although this is a rare case, sometimes electrode contact can be fully or partially lost when moving. In some situations the band can fail for an instant because of abundance of wireless devices. In general we don’t believe such false alerts are dangerous. They can be somewhat irritating, but the fact that the system works when it should is more important. If you are sitting with your eyes closed but your brain is quite active, the alert won’t go off because it detects a sort of a trick. To make sure it works, you can put this stay-awake device before going to sleep and try to fall asleep. You are bound to fail,”

Five Rules of Using This Stay-Awake-While-Driving Device

As far as you, our dear gadget fans, have understood, this driver alert sleep warning device is not a child’s toy. You should take this indispensable device seriously especially when driving. What do you need to know before putting Sleep Alert on?

• The system tracks your brain activity (through EEG), detects muscular activity and blinking frequency. It determines when you are tired, pondering and are about to fall asleep of monotony, i.e. it helps the driver not to lose cautiousness, However, abrupt gestures or emotional showdown during driving can confuse this system.
• The charge is sufficient for six hours of operation.
• The anti-sleep alarm system will be triggered when you lose concentration and are deep in your own thoughts while driving. This is vital for avoiding being highway-hypnotized.
• When you are driving peacefully and suddenly the situation changes and requires quick action, your brain activity surges and so do high-frequency brain waves. The device will react to this change in conditions.
• This anti-sleep alarm can go off when overtaking. There are different kinds of overtakes, though, as the alarm will remain silent if you are confident in your racing skills and calm. If you feel emotional about this maneuver and it causes an adrenaline rush, the device will alert you. In this way, you might want to think about the safety of your driving if the anti-sleep alarm went off when overtaking.

As you could see for yourself, in most cases the device helped you stay alert rather than go off falsely and by mistake. The system tracks the slightest changes in your state (some of which you don’t even notice) and gives you a warning.

Most people consider to be a high price for this Sleep Alert, but this is not a mass product and not everyone really needs it. The price for this device that can prevent an accident caused by attention loss and that has no analogues is quite justified.

Our view is that this is an excellent pro-innovative device based on scientific approach and ensuring increased vigilance and, most importantly, saving driver’s life.

Competition

There are virtually zero rivals. So far there are few devices on the market that are responsible for a driver’s life. These are behind-the-ear devices or Driver Rings or special windshield cameras. Their price tags start at ~$2.

Where to Buy Sleep Alert?

UK: Check the current price

Germany:Check the current price

The LWN.net Video4Linux2API series.

The previous installment inthis series discussed how to transfer video frames with the read()and write() system calls. Such an implementation can get thebasic job done, but it is not normally the preferred method for performingvideo I/O. For the highest performance and the best information transfer,video drivers should support the V4L2 streaming I/O API.

With the read() and write() methods, each video frame iscopied between user and kernel space as part of the I/O operation. Whenstreaming I/O is being used, instead, this copying does not happen;instead, the application and the driver exchange pointers to buffers.These buffers will be mapped into the application's address space, makingit possible to perform zero-copy frame I/O. There are twodifferent types of streaming I/O buffers:

• Memory-mapped buffers (type V4L2_MEMORY_MMAP) are allocated in kernel space; the application maps them into its address space with the mmap() system call. The buffers can be large, contiguous DMA buffers, virtual buffers created with vmalloc(), or, if the hardware supports it, they can be located directly in the video device's I/O memory.
• User-space buffers (V4L2_MEMORY_USERPTR) are allocated by the application in user space. Clearly, in this situation, no mmap() call is required, but the driver may have to work harder to support efficient I/O to user-space buffers.

Note that drivers are not required to support streaming I/O, and, if theydo support streaming, they do not have to handle both buffer types. Adriver which is more flexible will support more applications; in practice,it seems that most applications are written to use memory-mapped buffers.It is not possible to use both types of buffer simultaneously.

We will now delve into the numerous grungy details involved in supportingstreaming I/O. Any Video4Linux2 driver writer will need to understand thisAPI; it is worth noting, however, that there is a higher-level API whichcan help in the writing of streaming drivers. That layer (calledvideo-buf) can make life easier when the underlying device can supportscatter/gather I/O. The video-buf API will be discussed in a futureinstallment.

Drivers which support streaming I/O should inform the application of thatfact by setting the V4L2_CAP_STREAMING flag in theirvidioc_querycap() method. Note that there is no way to describewhich buffer types are supported; that comes later.

The v4l2_buffer structure

When streaming I/O is active, frames are passed between the application andthe driver in the form of struct v4l2_buffer. This structure is acomplicated beast which will take a while to describe. A good startingpoint is to note that there are three fundamental states that a buffer canbe in:

• In the driver's incoming queue. Buffers are placed in this queue by the application in the expectation that the driver will do something useful with them. For a video capture device, buffers in the incoming queue will be empty, waiting for the driver to fill them with video data. For an output device, these buffers will have frame data to be sent to the device.
• In the driver's outgoing queue. These buffers have been processed by the driver and are waiting for the application to claim them. For capture devices, outgoing buffers will have new frame data; for output devices, these buffers are empty.
• In neither queue. In this state, the buffer is owned by user space and will not normally be touched by the driver. This is the only time that the application should do anything with the buffer. We'll call this the 'user space' state.

These states, and the operations which cause transitions between them, cometogether as shown in the diagram below:

The actual v4l2_buffer structure looks like this:

The index field is a sequence number identifying the buffer; it isonly used with memory-mapped buffers. Like other objects which can beenumerated in the V4L2 interface, memory-mapped buffers start with index 0and go up sequentially from there. The type field describes thetype of the buffer, usually V4L2_BUF_TYPE_VIDEO_CAPTURE orV4L2_BUF_TYPE_VIDEO_OUTPUT.

The size of the buffer is given by length, which is in bytes. Thesize of the image data contained within the buffer is found inbytesused; obviously bytesused <= length.For capture devices, the driver will set bytesused; for outputdevices the application must set this field.

field describes which field of an image is stored in the buffer;fields were discussed in part 5a of this series.

The timestamp field, for input devices, tells when the frame wascaptured. For output devices, the driver should not send the frame outbefore the time found in this field; a timestamp of zero means 'assoon as possible.' The driver will set timestamp to the time thatthe first byte of the frame was transferred to the device - or as close tothat time as it can get. timecode can be used to hold a timecode value,useful for video editing applications; see thistable for details on timecodes.

The driver maintains a incrementing count of frames passing through thedevice; it stores the current sequence number in sequence as eachframe is transferred. For input devices, the application can watch thisfield to detect dropped frames.

memory tells whether the buffer is memory-mapped or user-space.For memory-mapped buffers, m.offset describes where the buffer isto be found. The specification describes it as 'the offset of thebuffer from the start of the device memory,' but the truth of thematter is that it is simply a magic cookie that the application can pass tommap() to specify which buffer is being mapped. For user-spacebuffers, instead, m.userptr is the user-space address of thebuffer.

The input field can be used to quickly switch between inputs on acapture device - assuming the device supports quick switching betweenframes. The reserved field should be set to zero.

Download the latest drivers, software, firmware, and diagnostics for your HP products from the official HP Support website. Tips for better search results. Ensure correct spelling and spacing - Examples: 'paper jam' Use product model name: - Examples: laserjet pro p1102, DeskJet 2130 For HP products a product number. Examples: LG534UA For Samsung Print products, enter the M/C. Popular Hardware drivers downloads. 01 Microsoft® ODBC Driver 13.1 for SQL Server® - Windows, Linux, & macOS. The Microsoft ODBC Driver for SQL Server provides native connectivity from Windows, Linux, & macOS to Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft Azure SQL Database. 02 Surface Pro 4 Drivers. Popular Hardware drivers Downloads. 01 Microsoft® ODBC Driver 13.1 for SQL Server® - Windows, Linux, & macOS. The Microsoft ODBC Driver for SQL Server provides native connectivity from Windows, Linux, & macOS to Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft Azure SQL Database. Make sure your printer is on and connected to your PC. Open Start Settings Devices Printers & scanners.Select the name of the printer, and then choose Remove device. To reinstall the printer, select Add a printer or scanner and then select the name of the printer you want to add. If Windows doesn’t automatically find a new driver after the printer is added, look for one on the device. Hwass driver download for windows 8.1.

Finally, there are several flags defined:

• V4L2_BUF_FLAG_MAPPED indicates that the buffer has been mapped into user space. It is only applicable to memory-mapped buffers.
• V4L2_BUF_FLAG_QUEUED: the buffer is in the driver's incoming queue.
• V4L2_BUF_FLAG_DONE: the buffer is in the driver's outgoing queue.
• V4L2_BUF_FLAG_KEYFRAME: the buffer holds a key frame - useful in compressed streams.
• V4L2_BUF_FLAG_PFRAME and V4L2_BUF_FLAG_BFRAME are also used with compressed streams; they indicated predicted or difference frames.
• V4L2_BUF_FLAG_TIMECODE: the timecode field is valid.
• V4L2_BUF_FLAG_INPUT: the input field is valid.

Buffer setup

Once a streaming application has performed its basic setup, it will turn tothe task of organizing its I/O buffers. The first step is to establish aset of buffers with the VIDIOC_REQBUFSioctl(), which isturned by V4L2 into a call to the driver's vidioc_reqbufs()method:

Everything of interest will be in the v4l2_requestbuffersstructure, which looks like this:

The type field describes the type of I/O to be done; it willusually be either V4L2_BUF_TYPE_VIDEO_CAPTURE for a videoacquisition device or V4L2_BUF_TYPE_VIDEO_OUTPUT for an outputdevice. There are other types, but they are beyond the scope of thisarticle.

If the application wants to use memory-mapped buffers, it will setmemory to V4L2_MEMORY_MMAP and count to thenumber of buffers it wants to use. If the driver does not supportmemory-mapped buffers, it should return -EINVAL. Otherwise, itshould allocate the requested buffers internally and return zero. Onreturn, the application will expect the buffers to exist, so any part ofthe task which could fail (memory allocation, for example) should be doneat this stage.

Notethat the driver is not required to allocate exactly the requested number ofbuffers. In many cases there is a minimum number of buffers which makessense; if the application requests fewer than the minimum, it may actuallyget more buffers than it asked for. In your editor's experience, forexample, the mplayer application will request two buffers, whichmakes it susceptible to overruns (and thus lost frames) if things slowdown in user space. By enforcing a higher minimum buffer count (adjustable with a moduleparameter), the cafe_ccic driver is able to make the streaming I/O path alittle more robust. The count field should be setto the number of buffers actually allocated before the method returns.

Setting count to zero is a way for the application to request thatall existing buffers be released. In this case, the driver must stop anyDMA operations before freeing the buffers or terrible things could happen.It is also not possible to free buffers if they are current mapped intouser space.

If, instead, user-space buffers are to be used, the only fields whichmatter are the buffer type and a value ofV4L2_MEMORY_USERPTR in the memory field. The applicationneed not specify the number of buffers that it intends to use; since theallocation will be happening in user space, the driver need not care. Ifthe driver supports user-space buffers, it need only note that theapplication will be using this feature and return zero; otherwise the usual-EINVAL return is called for.

The VIDIOC_REQBUFS command is the only way for an application todiscover which types of streaming I/O buffer are supported by a givendriver.

Mapping buffers into user space

If user-space buffers are being used, the driver will not see any morebuffer-related calls until the application starts putting buffers on theincoming queue. Memory-mapped buffers require more setup, though. Theapplication will typically step through each allocated buffer and map itinto its address space. The first stop is the VIDIOC_QUERYBUFcommand, which becomes a call to the driver's vidioc_querybuf()method:

On entry to this method, the only fields of buf which will be setare type (which should be checked against the type specified whenthe buffers were allocated) and index, which identifies thespecific buffer. The driver should make sure that index makessense and fill in the rest of the fields in buf. Typicallydrivers store an array of v4l2_buffer structures internally, sothe core of a vidioc_querybuf() method is just a structureassignment.

The only way for an application to access memory-mapped buffers is to mapthem into their address space, so a vidioc_querybuf() call willtypically be followed by a call to the driver's mmap() method -this method, remember, is stored in the fops field of thevideo_device structure associated with this device. How thedriver handles mmap() will depend on just how the buffers are setup in the kernel. If the buffer can be mapped up front withremap_pfn_range() or remap_vmalloc_range(), that shouldbe done at this time. For buffers in kernel space, pages can also bemapped individually at page-fault time by setting up a nopage()method in the usual way. A good discussion of handling mmap() can be found in Linux Device Drivers for those who need it.

When mmap() is called, the VMA structure passed in should have theaddress of one of your buffers in the vm_pgoff field -right-shifted by PAGE_SHIFT, of course. It should, in particular,be the offset value that your driver returned in response to aVIDIOC_QUERYBUF call. Please iterate through your list of buffersand be sure that the incoming address matches one of them; video driversshould not be a means by which hostile programs can map arbitrary regionsof memory.

The offset value you provide can be almost anything,incidentally. Some drivers just return (index<<PAGE_SHIFT),meaning that the incoming vm_pgoff field should just be the bufferindex. The one thing you should not do is store the actualkernel-space address of the buffer in offset; leaking kerneladdresses into user space is never a good idea.

When user space maps a buffer, the driver should set theV4L2_BUF_FLAG_MAPPED flag in the associated v4l2_bufferstructure. It must also set up open() and close() VMAoperations so that it can track the number of processes which have thebuffer mapped. As long as this buffer remains mapped somewhere, it cannotbe released back to the kernel. If the mapping count of one or morebuffers drops to zero, the driver should also stop any in-progress I/O, asthere will be no process which can make use of it.

Streaming I/O

So far we have looked at a lot of setup without the transfer of a singleframe. We're getting closer, but there is one more step which must happenfirst. When the application obtains buffers with VIDIOC_REQBUFS,those buffers are all in the user-space state; if they are user-spacebuffers, they do not really even exist yet. Before the application canstart streaming I/O, it must put at least one buffer into the driver'sincoming queue; for an output device, of course, those buffers should alsobe filled with valid frame data.

To enqueue a buffer, the application will issue a VIDIOC_QBUFioctl(), which the V4L2 maps into a call to the driver'svidioc_qbuf() method:

For memory-mapped buffers, once again, only the type andindex fields of buf are valid. Denso port devices driver download windows 10. The driver can justperform the obvious checks (type and index make sense,the buffer is not already on one of the driver's queues, the buffer ismapped, etc.), put the buffer on its incoming queue (setting theV4L2_BUF_FLAG_QUEUED flag), and return.

First Stop Safety Port Devices Driver License

User-space buffers can be more complicated at this point, because thedriver will have never seen this buffer before. When using this method,applications are allowed to pass a different address every time they enqueuea buffer, so the driver can do no setup ahead of time. If your driver isbouncing frames through a kernel-space buffer, it need only make a note ofthe user-space address provided by the application. If you are trying toDMA the data directly into user-space, however, life is significantly morechallenging.

To ship data directly into user space, the driver must first fault in allof the pages of the buffer and lock them into place;get_user_pages() is the tool to use for this job. Note that thisfunction can perform significant amounts of memory allocation and disk I/O- it could block for a long time. You will need to take care to ensurethat important driver functions do not stall whileget_user_pages(), which can block for long enough for many videoframes to go by, does its thing.

First Stop Safety Port Devices Driver Download

Then there is the matter of telling the device to transfer image data to(or from) the user-space buffer. This buffer will not be contiguous inphysical memory - it will, instead, be broken up into a large number ofseparate 4096-byte pages (on most architectures). Clearly, the device willhave to be able to do scatter/gather DMA operations. If the device transfers full video framesat once, it will need to accept a scatterlist which holds a great manypages; a VGA-resolution image in a 16-bit format requires 150 pages. Asthe image size grows, so will the size of the scatterlist. The V4L2specification says:

Your editor, however, is unwilling to recommend that driver writers attemptthis kind of deep virtual memory trickery. A more promising approach couldbe to require user-space buffers to be located in hugetlb pages, but nodrivers do that now.

If your device transfers images in smaller pieces (a USB camera, forexample), direct DMA to user space may be easier to set up. In any case,when faced with the challenges of supporting direct I/O to user-spacebuffers, the driver writer should (1) be sure that it is worth thetrouble, given that applications tend to expect to use memory-mappedbuffers anyway, and (2) make use of the video-buf layer, which canhandle some of the pain for you.

First Stop Safety Port Devices Drivers

Once streaming I/O starts, the driver will grab buffers from its incomingqueue, have the device perform the requested transfer, then move the bufferto the outgoing queue. The buffer flags should be adjusted accordinglywhen this transition happens; fields like the sequence number and time stampshould alsobe filled in at this time. Eventually the application will want to claimbuffers in the outgoing queue, returning them to the user-space state.That is the job of VIDIOC_DQBUF, which becomes a call to:

Here, the driver will remove the first buffer from the outgoing queue,storing the relevant information in *buf. Normally, if theoutgoing queue is empty, this call should block until a buffer becomesavailable. V4L2 drivers are expected to handle non-blocking I/O, though, so if thevideo device has been opened with O_NONBLOCK, the driver shouldreturn -EAGAIN in the empty-queue case. Needless to say, thisrequirement also implies that the driver must support poll() forstreaming I/O.

The only remaining step is to actually tell the device to start performingstreaming I/O. The Video4Linux2 driver methods for this task are:

The call to vidioc_streamon() should start the device afterchecking that type makes sense. The driver can, if need be,require that a certain number of buffers be in the incoming queue beforestreaming can be started.

When the application is done it should generate a call tovidioc_streamoff(), which must stop the device. The driver should also remove all buffers from both the incoming and outgoing queues, leavingthem all in the user-space state. Of course, the driver must be preparedfor the application to simply close the device without stopping streamingfirst.

First Stop Safety Port Devices Drivers License

Index entries for this article
Kernel	Device drivers/Video4Linux2
Kernel	Video4Linux2

(Log in to post comments)