The window
The window shows the camera image with the markers, the latest angles at the lower left and a toolbar along the top. The title shows the rig’s label, its source and its ZMQ port, so you can tell several windows apart.
Toolbar
| Control | What it does |
|---|---|
| Save BG | Saves the next frame as the background image. Capture an empty scene first |
| H A L R | Turns tracking of the head, abdomen, left and right wing on or off |
| Asymmetric | Edits each wing on its own instead of mirroring |
| Subtract | Tracks the difference from the saved background |
| Invert | For a bright insect on a dark background; the preview is inverted too |
| Threshold L / R | 0 reports the strongest edge, however faint. Raise it to reject noise. Applies live |
| Ignore legs | The robust wing detector, on by default (why) |
| Record | Starts and stops video recording (formats) |
| New window | Opens another Rekkefly window for the next rig, with its own camera and ports |
| Settings | Detector, precise geometry, camera, outputs, recording and sampling |
Editing markers
Drag the dots; see Placing the markers. The wings mirror each other until Asymmetric is on. Edits apply to the very next frame.
Settings
The Settings window has a part selector (Left, Right, Head, Abdomen), the selected part’s detector and geometry, and five sections:
| Section | Contents |
|---|---|
| Selected part | Detector (robust, classic, centroid), Ignore features narrower than and Contrast cap for the robust detector, Primary edge, Threshold, hinge X/Y, start and span, inner and outer radius, Max edges. Below them, Show signal diagnostics and the live peak and selected edge strengths |
| Background | Whether a background is loaded, Load saved background, and the background file’s path |
| Camera / input | The source: a camera (with a list of cameras), a video file, a network stream or the simulated fly. Back to saved source and Save as this config’s source for a video opened for one run |
| Instance / output | The instance label, the ZMQ publisher and its bind address, the UDP output’s sending and receiving addresses, and the JSONL file |
| Video / saved state | Automatically save configuration, the recording folder, format, MJPEG quality, write queue and file size |
| Sampling | Angular bins, radial samples and the preview frame rate |
At the bottom: Restart acquisition applies source, label and output changes, and Reload config discards unsaved edits by reading the file again. Greyed fields are set for this run by the command line or the rig launcher, and cannot be changed here.
Debug traces
Tick Settings → Show signal diagnostics, or start with --show plots. Two
panels appear below the image:
- Wing angles · last 8 s: left (red), right (green) and L − R (white), from −90° to +90°. Spikes in L − R that the insect did not make are a sign of misplaced sectors or something in the sector that is not wing.
- Angular profile of the selected wing across its sector: thin is the raw intensity; bold is what the robust detector ranks edges on, with legs and antennae removed. Vertical lines mark the edges found; the labelled one is reported, with its angle.
Saving
Edits are written 300 ms after you stop dragging, and when you close the window. Writes are atomic (a new file replaces the old one in a single step), so a crash cannot leave a half-written config, and the file’s comments are kept. Turn Automatically save configuration off to experiment without saving; edits then last until the window closes.
Only one window may use a config file at a time. A second window started without
--config takes the next rig’s config instead (camera-b.toml, then
camera-c.toml, which it creates).
When something is wrong
Problems that stop tracking are shown in the window instead of closing it:
| Banner | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Amber: the example is playing | No camera could be opened; the banner says why. Click Retry camera |
| Outputs off: Bind output port … | Another program or rig uses that port. Tracking continues in the window; choose another port in Instance / output |
| Recording stopped | The disk could not keep up, or is full. Tracking continues |
Headless runs and rigs started from a manifest stop with an error instead, so an experiment never runs silently without its outputs.