Abstract

Here we briefly summarize our long period experience of constructing and operating wide-field monitoring cameras with sub-second temporal resolution to look for optical components of GRBs, fast-moving satellites and meteors. General requirements for hardware for such systems are discussed along with algorithms of real-time detection and classification of various kinds of short optical transients. We also give a status report on the next generation, multi-objective and transforming monitoring system, the MegaTORTORA, whose 6-channel prototype (MiniMega-TORTORA) is at a final stages of commissioning now at SAO RAS. This system combines a wide field of view with sub-second temporal resolution in monitoring regime, and is able to reconfigure itself, in a fractions of second, to follow-up mode which has better sensitivity and provides us with multi-color and polarimetric information on detected transients simultaneously. Hardware and software solutions used for the prototype (including a ways to rapidly re-point separate channels, process non-poissonian data from image intensifier+CCD combination, etc), as well as perspectives of its operation, are also discussed.